ideological nature of English (education), native-speakerism in ELT, qualitative research, social media discourse, self-defeating attitude towards ‘native-speakers’
To critically explore the ideological nature of English and English learning/
teaching in Japan, this study, as part of a multifaceted project, explores how
attitudes towards English (or learning/teaching English) are displayed on the
social media platform Twitter. First, I examined the results of the thematic
analysis of Twitter discourse with an analytical viewpoint of native-speakerism,
illustrating the underlying assumptions and inconsistencies in attitudes towards
English learning. Then, I applied van Dijk’ s (2004) analytical framework and
explored the recreation of the power relationship between ‘native speakers’
and ‘non-native speakers’ in the social media discourse. This study argues that
hegemonic ideology is recreated by ‘ourselves’ by unintentionally applying
inverted ‘ideological squares’ . This study focuses on Japanese society as a
case study of learning English as a foreign language, revealing a self-defeating
attitude towards ‘native-speakers’ , which potentially reinforces their own
subjugation, in turn having implications for future studies in global contexts.