Abstract
In this chapter, I examine ideological inconsistencies and contradictions I have encountered in the course of my work as an English for academic purposes teacher in a Japanese higher education institution. Beginning with a short preamble about financial derivatives, much maligned since the catastrophic fall of a well-known Wall Street giant in 2008, I will proceed to discuss my experiences of the workings of language, ideology and power relations teaching English in a Japanese institution. In the course of this discussion, I will draw parallels between my lived experience as a teacher and the workings of the financial derivative, which I will allude to as an enactment of inauthenticity, artificiality and contrivedness. It is not my intention in this discussion to be overly technical about derivatives per se, but to use them as a way of plumbing the phenomenal nature of illegitimate and inauthentic work-related practices. After a preamble on the workings of the financial derivative, I will illustrate how analogous situations can be found in: (1) practices relating to the dominance of standardized proficiency testing; (2) the latest move in Japanese institutions to deliver faculty content courses in English; and (3) practices and particularized enactments of native-speakerist ideologies in the employment and deployment of English teachers. Drawing on the work of critical literacy and critical pedagogy, I then examine two existential conditions confronting English language teachers, namely, what I call the ‘reflexive condition’ and the ‘derivative condition’, before concluding with a critical examination of why English teaching in Japan may persist with the inauthenticities and anomalies of a ‘derivative condition’.
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Toh, G. (2015). Dialogizing ‘the Known’: Experience of English Teaching in Japan through an Assay of Derivatives as a Dominant Motif. In: Rivers, D.J. (eds) Resistance to the Known. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345196_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345196_7
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