Abstract
This chapter draws attention to some of the ways in which those involved in compulsory English education in Japan tend to be harnessed into a certain type of ideological machinery that frames their debates and shapes their notions of objectivity. Among other components, this machinery consists of the discourses of English-as-panacea and Japanese uniqueness, institutionalized standards of professional practice, and applied linguistics theory which views the acquisition of English principally as a matter of motivation and technique rather than arising from need. These disparate elements form a heterogeneous ideological orthodoxy, or ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980) which, in line with the theme of the present volume, I shall refer to as ‘the known’.
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Pigott, J. (2015). English-as-Panacea: Untangling Ideology from Experience in Compulsory English Education in Japan. In: Rivers, D.J. (eds) Resistance to the Known. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345196_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345196_10
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