Chapter summary

This chapter looked at themes that were repeated in the teachers’ stories. Though the themes were divided into distinct sub-headings, there was overlap between them, showing the integrated way in which stories are constructed. Thus, for example, the teachers talked about the problems they had with administration at work – yet these stories often merged into stories of the teachers’ flexibility in adapting to the challenge of designing and implementing courses on short notice, while also revealing the impact of cultural differences on teacher identity. The teachers had learnt to be more adaptable as they became more experienced – and had also developed confidence in their own decision-making. Teachers’ stories of teaching focused either on being true to themselves or on becoming better people through teaching. When it came to living abroad for long periods of time, relationships with locals were often a motivating factor in deciding to stay or to leave the country. The teachers in Japan, three of whom were married to Japanese partners, were more invested in staying in the country and in being accepted into Japanese culture and more critical of their home countries. The teachers in Korea were more invested in staying true to their national identity. Language learning proficiency was related to the degree of investment teachers felt towards the country, with teachers in Japan more motivated to improve their use of the Japanese language. The teachers in Korea offered a range of reasons to explain why they had not learnt Korean to any great degree of fluency: from having Korean partners who could handle any required interactions in Korean, to not needing the language when they left the country, to having to focus on raising their family, to not needing to use Korean to any great degree of proficiency. The teachers focused on facilitating their own lives when talking about the reasons to learn the local language. The themes in this chapter and

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in Chapter 4 appear in Chapter 6 as the findings of this study, linked to the research questions.

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Reflection R5: People just like me

When I designed the study, I planned to interview people just like me: long-term native English-speaking English-as-a-foreign language (NES EFL) teachers who had worked in at least two countries and taught English for at least ten years. In this reflection, I talk about discovering that there was one very important way in which I differed from the other teachers – in ethnicity – and how this discovery affected who I thought I was, caused me to question my own identity, and question the themes I should be researching. This reflection, like Reflection R1, talks about the effect of the Other on a person’s identity.

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The interviewees and I shared a lot. We were all native English speakers. We had all completed a Bachelor’s degree in some field, and a Master’s degree in English language teaching. We had all taught English in two or more countries, and had all been teaching English for at least ten years. We worked in either South Korea or Japan at the time of the interviews. We were all active in local professional development organisations – KOTESOL in Korea, and JALT in Japan. We were roughly the same age – with the majority of us in our 40s. We all came from inner circle, English-speaking countries.

A central question, in both the questionnaire and the interview, was that of the teachers’ ethnic background. I included the question because I have had past experience of having my words ignored, in favour of the ‘evidence’ provided by my skin colour – an “everyday racism,” that “insists on attributing fixed sets of meanings to non-white bodies” (Weedon, 2004, p. 15), and I did not want to inflict this same racism on the teachers. Yet, in the moment of asking the question, I began to realize that a defining moment in my life, one that is constantly under challenge, didn’t exist in theirs, when the majority of the teachers had problems describing their ethnicity. Thus, for example, Lackey, trying to answer the question in the interview:

Oh, ethnic background. (pause) what does that mean? I don’t know - I’m British that’s the answer I guess, I think. I’m British.

Only two of the eight teachers offered the same ethnicity in both the questionnaire and the interview (Table R5.1): Zahava described herself through religious affiliation as Jewish. Beth clarified that she puts herself down as ‘White’ on censuses in the

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USA, because of the problematic nature of explaining her racial and ethnic descent, but went on to talk about the Irish and Russian / Jewish background of her parents. The other teachers offered different answers in the questionnaire, reflecting their confusion with having to define their identity, a confusion that might stem from seeing Whiteness as universal and unmarked (Perry, 2007; Weedon, 2004). Table R5.1 gives the teachers’ nationalities, their ethnicity, as self-defined in the questionnaire, and their ethnicity as self-defined in the interview. The last column contains references they made as to how they were perceived by others (predominantly students or locals in the country where they lived) as being from other countries than their own.

Table R5.1: Teachers’ nationalities and ethnicities. From Ethnicity (self-

defined in the questionnaire) Ethnicity (self- defined in the interview) Ethnicity (as perceived by others) Arielle Britain White British Western

European

Australian, American Beth The USA White American

(Irish and Russian/Jewish descent) White (census), (explains parents’ background)

Western, the ugly American

Gabriel The USA White White American, Irish-Italian- German James The USA mostly caucasian

north american (wasp) influences from Irish British Scots kind of history coloured by generations in the United States

Canadian

John The USA Caucasian Northern

European

Lackey Britain White British

Simon Canada Scots / Irish Canadian east coast Canadian, (redacted reference to specific part of

177 From Ethnicity (self-

defined in the questionnaire) Ethnicity (self- defined in the interview) Ethnicity (as perceived by others) Canada)47

Zahava Canada Jewish Jewish

Maria Australia Australian of Indian descent

Australian Indian

I talked, in Reflection R1, about being seen as “Indian” where I see myself as Australian, occasionally by teaching colleagues, but more frequently by locals in the places I have lived, and of the problems this has caused me. Thinking about the problems six of the teachers had defining their ethnicity made me question why I had not realized I was brown-skinned. I began to review the literature on teachers of colour in the English language teaching field (Javier, 2010, 2016; Lin et al., 2004), on ethnicity and identity (S. Hall, 1991; Spencer, 2006) and native speakerism (A. Holliday, 2006; Phillipson, 1997) with a view to finding resonances in what was written with my personal experiences. After meeting Eljee Javier, who had been researching the experiences of visible ethnic minority NES EFL teachers (Javier, 2010, 2016) and assumed that I was doing the same, I began to wonder whether I was mistaken in who people just like me were. Should I have been interviewing and writing about other non-white NES EFL teachers? I questioned my inclusion in my own study, because I complicated what had been, to me, an unproblematic look at NES EFL teacher identities by bringing in narratives of belonging and (not) fitting in. Yet the teachers’ stories are narratives of finding a place to belong. So, in choosing to write about people living, and trying to fit in, in other cultures, I truly was writing about people just like me.

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