Interviews

For this project, a total of ten interviewees were selected; two program managers, four 'native speaker' instructors, and four 'non-native speaker' instructors. As Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) note, "when studying a large organisation, one may not have the time and resources to interview all the occupants of a particular role, and may therefore try to select a sample of them that is representative" (p106). As there were many possible interviewees that could have been chosen for this project, I chose informants based on their closeness to the course (the program managers interviewed were the first three employed on the course), their particular sensitivity to the issues of native-speakerism that were under investigation, and their length of experience in the course. I also attempted to find candidates who represented a level of national and professional diversity, in order to minimise the possibility that the findings of the study would apply only to a subset of the ELT professional community who shared these traits. I will describe each group in turn and explain why

121 I felt their contributions would be particularly important and valuable for this project. I will then explain how the interviews were conducted. As a former colleague, it was not a difficult matter to contact any of these interviewees, and all of them readily agreed to take part in the project on the usual condition of anonymity. I was also able, through my personal contacts, to select interviewees that I felt would be most useful for the project. I was at no point restrained in my selection of these informants. For each interviewee I will provide a small amount of backround information which may inform their perspective or contextualize their beliefs and principles.

Program managers

The two program managers that were interviewed were chosen for a few different reasons. Primarily, they were selected as suitable interview participants because they were in charge of the course and were therefore likely to be particularly knowledgeable about the running of the program, the hiring of teachers, and the design of the teaching approach. More specifically, the two program managers were chosen because they were what Dean, et al (1967) call, in their typology of informants, 'outs'; that is they were former managers who were involved in setting up the program from the very beginning and who had since moved on to other work. I felt that this would make them more likely to talk about their experiences in setting up and running the course, and would also likely make their statements more candid, as they would be less likely to fear professional retribution for any information they gave. This was important, as the professors running the program itself, and the program managers in charge at the time this research was conducted, were very nervous about research being conducted into the program. In fact, final consent to carry out the research was given with the disclaimer that "everything you are collecting is either public or voluntary. We can't stop you." Therefore, having informants who were both involved closely in the creation and running of the program, and who were also free to talk about their experiences, was

122 enormously valuable. Additionally, the program managers who were interviewed were chosen due to their varied backgrounds, and their deep level of involvement in English language teaching. One informant was Scottish, and the second from New Zealand. A third Japanese program manager initially agreed to take part in the project, but after leaving the DACP just prior to data collection, stopped responding to emails. I interpreted this as a desire to no longer be involved in the project, and ceased communication. Both interviewees had extensive experience working both in ELT and in Japanese higher education, and one was undertaking doctoral studies. My initial choice to interview program managers from a variety of national backgrounds, with similar professional experience, was made in order to help highlight any emergent discourses that were a property of the ELT profession, rather than a property of a shared cultural chauvinism or set of assumptions. Unfortunately, necessity dictated that both would come from similar cultural backgrounds. However, as I will highlight, they were well-aware of critical issues in ELT, and did not display many overt cultural biases. The two interviewed program managers were also the two with the longest experience, and who had the larger hand in the design and administration of the program. The two participants were (all given names are pseudonyms):

Richard: An EFL teacher originally from Scotland who has lived in Japan for many years and was the first person recruited both as a teacher and as a program manager on the DACP at Akarenga University.

John: An English teacher from New Zealand who lived in Japan and worked at several institutions before being recruited to the DACP. Hired originally as a teacher, he was soon promoted to program manager.

123 'Non-native speaker' teachers

For the next group of interviewees I selected four teachers who would be called 'non-native speakers' under the ideology of native-speakerism. These four were chosen because they had experience of two or more years in the program and would therefore have a good sense of it, were equally qualified, and came from range of national and professional backgrounds. I also chose these four instructors because they did not have any personal ties to those who were in higher professional positions in the course, as was the case with some other possible candidates. The varied backgrounds of the four was important because, as with the program managers, I felt it would highlight industry-wide discourses and assumptions that emerged from their answers, rather than pointing towards more localised discourses that may have resulted from more homogenous backgrounds. I have decided to include some autobiographical information on these instructors, as their previous experiences as ‘non-native speaker’ teachers in Japan provides important context for certain of their statements and beliefs quoted in this thesis, particularly in sections 6.2 and 6.3. These four instructors were:

Keiji: A Japanese English teacher who grew up partly in Canada and partly in Japan. Keiji is an almost fully bilingual teacher who notes that he finds his English limited only occasionally in terms of vocabulary. He taught at schools in Japan as an assistant language teacher and as a freelance conversation instructor before starting work on the DACP at Akarenga University. He noted once in a casual conversation that he often is considered ineligible for jobs simply because he "has the wrong colour passport".

Wen: Wen is a Chinese English teacher who completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in the United States. After graduating from his master's degree, his first job was in the

124 DACP, and he is currently considering whether to stay in the country or return to the US to seek employment or further postgraduate study.

Heng: A Singaporean teacher who has lived in Japan for a number of years. He considers himself a native speaker of Singaporean standard English, and has worked, like Keiji, as an ALT in high schools in Japan. He completed his postgraduate studies through distance learning at a university in the UK, and found the job at DACP after finishing his master's degree.

Keiko: A Japanese teacher who spent several years completing postgraduate study in the US, and also teaching part-time at the university level before returning to Japan. She was instrumental in setting up some of the professional development groups which will be discussed later on, and so was considered a good source for information on these groups, especially as they took on more significance in the project.

'Native-speaker' teachers

For this project I also interviewed four 'native-speaker' teachers, again from a variety of national and professional backgrounds. As with the previous groups of interviewees, these teachers were chosen on the basis that they had extensive experience in the DACP, and did not represent a homogenous background with the possibility of homogenous assumptions or beliefs which that could entail. I felt that while these teachers may not be as sensitive to issues of native-speakerism as their 'non-native speaker' colleagues, their voices would be important in helping to highlight assumptions of discourses that underlay the structure and organisation of the course. The teachers were:

125 Mark: An American English language teacher, who completed his ELT postgraduate training in The US, and spent much of his professional life teaching in university level ESP and EAP courses before coming to Japan. The DACP at Akarenga University is the first job he had overseas.

Josie: A South African EFL teacher, who first came to Japan on the JET program and joined the DACP a few years later. Josie took a very political view on her teaching and on the course, which is reflected in some of her statements in the thesis.

Joseph: An American teacher who worked in India for the Peace Corps before coming to Japan. Joseph has two master’s degrees in education-related fields.

Peter: A British language teacher who has lived in Japan for fifteen years, teaching first at conversation schools, before moving up to the university level. Pete has a masters degree from a UK university, and Akarenga was his first job teaching at the tertiary level.

The ten informants chosen here, I believe, have the most appropriate background to be able to give valuable and important insights into the program, both in terms of its professional culture and orientation, and also in terms of their own personal experiences of working on this course. This data on its own will not, of course, be sufficient to base findings upon, and so will be supplemented not only with my own field notes, but also with artifacts collected from the setting and detailed descriptions of the work environment; the setting in which the professional discourses of the program play out.

126 participants were given the choice of where and how they would like the interviews to be conducted, with some opting for relative privacy and some opting for more public areas. I believe these choices were down more to convenience than anything else, and were not particularly significant to the study. The interviews were first intended to be semi-structured, but soon took on a more 'conversational' tone (Burgess-Limerick & Burgess-Limerick, 1998), and I entered each of them with a list of topics, rather than questions. Interview sessions began in a very open ended way, with a question such as "Can you tell me a little about your professional background and how you came to work at Akarenga University?" I then made notes about important points brought up by the interviewees during their responses, and asked more targeted questions in order to pursue topics that I felt were important and relevant to this study. The interviews were approached in this way consciously, as I wanted the data to be as rich as possible. During the first interview the list of questions was quite static, and the questions were more direct. This yielded rather thin data which confirmed some of my expectations, however it was during a more conversational break in the interview that something unexpected and important emerged, revealing an aspect of the topic that I had not considered up to that point. In order to try and capture as much of the complexity of the situation as possible then, I opted for a more open-ended approach to questioning, with the option of pursuing topics of interest or asking more direct questions if I felt a topic was being avoided or ignored. Burgess-Limerick and Burgess-Limerick (1998) argue that semi-structured interviews are overly restrictive and researcher-directed, and advocate a more conversational approach. This approach was very fruitful as it produced new avenues of inquiry which changed the orientation of the investigation quite dramatically over the course of the project.

During the course of my data analysis questions began to arise which had not been covered in the interviews. In order to gather this data, I spoke to DACP members who were not part of my initial research sample. Some information was gathered through emails to the current program managers

127 (at the time of writing), which were answered in a short, matter-of-fact way. One particularly important set of data about the reading circle and the reflective practice group (discussed in chapter 8) was gathered through an email interview with a DACP teacher referred to as “Eddie”, who played a part in setting up both groups.