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Methodological Groundwork

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Ideology, Agency, and Intercultural Communicative Competence

Part of the book series: Intercultural Communication and Language Education ((ICLE))

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Abstract

In the opening section of the book, I listed the following five research questions: (1) What are some of the prevalent features of EFL education in Japanese secondary schools? (2) How is ICC addressed in Japanese secondary school EFL education, and how do classroom actors engage with this aspect of EFL education? (3) What elements of Japanese secondary school EFL education can be said to enable and/or constrain the development of ICC ? (4) Assuming that nihonjinron and native-speakerism are potential impediments to learners’ development of ICC, what can be said about the presence and importance of these two ideologies in Japanese secondary school EFL education? (5) What are the challenges involved in ICC-oriented education in Japanese JHS?. In the three previous chapters, I provided background information and theoretical grounds upon which the task of answering these questions becomes possible. In this chapter, I discuss methodology-related themes and issues pertaining to the study of nihonjinron and native-speakerism in observed EFL practices in Japanese JHS conducted in Chaps. 5 and 6. Together, these methodological issues center on the question investigating the presence and importance of the two ideologies in observed EFL practices. Specifically, I survey a range of issues pertaining to the critical study of ideology in both written and spoken discourse . Since Chap. 5 looks at traces of nihonjinron and native-speakerism in recent MEXT policy discourse, I begin this chapter by developing a CDA-oriented methodology for the study of ideology in written text . I then develop an approach in line with CCDA, or as I see it the study of ideology in text primarily of a spoken nature, to ground the work in Chap. 6. As will be shown, these two perspectives on ideology research share many similarities, although some important differences will become evident as the current chapter progresses.

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  1. Hokkai Gakuen University, Sapporo, Japan

    Jeremie Bouchard

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Bouchard, J. (2017). Methodological Groundwork. In: Ideology, Agency, and Intercultural Communicative Competence. Intercultural Communication and Language Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3926-3_4

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