The Native Speaker Concept: Ethnographic Investigations of Native Speaker Effects

· Language, Power and Social Process [LPSP] Book 26 · Walter de Gruyter
Ebook
400
Pages

About this ebook

The "native speaker" is often thought of as an ideal language user with "a complete and possibly innate competence in the language" which is perceived as being bounded and fixed to a homogeneous speech community and linked to a nation-state. Despite recent works that challenge its empirical accuracy and theoretical utility, the notion of the "native speaker" is still prevalent today.

The Native Speaker Concept shifts the analytical focus from the second language acquisition processes and teaching practices to daily interactions situated in wider sociocultural and political contexts marked by increased global movements of people and multilingual situations. Using an ethnographic approach, the volume critically elucidates the political nature of (not) claiming the "native speaker" status in daily life and the ways the ideology of "native speaker" intersects and articulates, supports, subverts, or complicates various relations of dominance and regimes of standardization.

The book offers cases from diverse settings, including classrooms in Japan, a coffee shop in Barcelona, secondary schools in South Africa, a backyard in Rapa Nui (Easter Island), restaurant kitchens, a high school administrator's office, a college classroom in the United States, and the Internet. It also offers a genealogy of the notion of the "native speaker" from the time of the Roman Empire. Employing linguistic, anthropological and educational theories, the volume speaks not only to the analyses of language use and language policy, planning, and teaching, but also to the investigation of wider effects of language ideology on relations of dominance, and institutional and discursive practices.

About the author

Neriko Musha Doerr, Ramapo College, Mahwah, USA.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.