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called native and non-native English teachers is well documented throughout the TESOL industry, and though the division has little linguistic validity, it is nonetheless widespread and actively harmful to the professional opportunities of non-native speaker teachers (Holliday, 2013). The valorization of native speakers and “native English”—especially English from the United States and the United Kingdom—in Japan is well documented (e.g., see Chiba, Matsuura, & Yamamoto, 1995; Kubota, 1998; Matsuda, 2003) and is fundamentally intertwined with Japanese government policy on education and internationalization (Kubota & McKay, 2009; Hashimoto, 2013a). My interaction with my employing institutions, students, and the My Share articles to be analyzed is necessarily colored by this divide between native and non-native English and English speakers—that even though I reject this division as both unethical and harmful to students and teachers, it nonetheless plays a role in how I make interpretive decisions.
Furthermore, as discussed in section 2.3, there can be tendency among foreign western teachers who come to Japan to believe that western methods are better than those found in Japan (Bax, 2003); this is a part of what Holliday (2005) calls the division between BANA (British, Australasia, and North America) and TESEP (tertiary, secondary, and primary English language education in the rest of the world), with the former significantly privileged over the latter in professional publications, presentations, and training programs. And as I mentioned in footnote 16, I have played the role of “all-knowing foreigner” in harmful and dismissive ways;
my interpretation of the My Share articles is colored by both my desire to reject this approach to being a teacher, and my inability to completely do so.
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sections explain my interpretation of these lenses and why I have chosen them for this project.
4.4.1 Corpus-based research. From a technical perspective, one challenge that I faced when considering how to make persuasive claims about the My Share articles was the size of the corpus. With 177 articles and nearly 100,000 words, it wouldn't have been possible to analyze every aspect of the corpus by hand.
Particularly at the microlinguistic level, I needed to employ computational tools to find patterns in the data—that is, use a corpus-based approach and the tools of corpus linguistics to examine some of the aspects of the data. My approach most closely follows the recommendations of Baker (2008), who provided a set of principles and reasons for combining corpus linguistics with discourse analysis (including critical discourse analysis). According to Baker, the use of corpus-based approach to discourse analysis helps alleviates criticism that researchers have cherry-picked discursive examples based upon a preconception about what is happening in the discourse (for an example of such criticism, see Widdowson, 1996).
Using corpus analysis tools can help justify both why certain features are discussed and how common they are in the discourse being analyzed. Corpus linguistics thus helps researchers focus on how aspects of language are used in practice, rather than how the researcher may theorize that it is or could be used (McEnery & Hardie, 2012). This does not make the work more “objective,” since the researcher still makes the (interested, contingent) choices about what questions to ask and how to use the tools—as Mautner (2016) says, “The evidence that corpus software lays before us never speaks for itself. Knowledge is not generated by the mere act of data processing, but as a result of what the analyst makes of the evidence” (p. 174).45
4.4.2 Genre analysis. Genre analysis includes any type of research that seeks to understand how groups of text which share a common purpose, structure, and/or discourse community function as social practices. Per research question 1, I wanted to establish the “rules” of the My Share genre. However, as discussed above in
45 Or, as Pennycook (1990) says, speaking of researchers in general, “the knowledge we produce is always interested” (p. 25).
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relation to the first CDA principle, the goal of CDA work is not to seek out abstract, contextless linguistic “truths.” Rather, the goal is to understand how this genre is a form of social action that has value for the discourse community that produced it, and, in so doing, understand how that genre is implicated in systems of power and inequality (Fairclough, 2003; Lin, 2014; Rogers, 2011; Pennycook, 2010). That is, by understanding what rules govern the genre (how it is structured, what sorts of topics are acceptable, what arguments can be used, etc.), it is possible to better understand the community from which it came, what that community values, and what beliefs its members hold (including beliefs which are widely agreed upon as well as those which are in dispute). Some researchers—most especially, Bhatia (2002, 2012, 2015)—have described the use of a critical approach to genre studies as constituting a distinct research paradigm called Critical Genre Analysis (CGA).
Bhatia has argued that CDA and CGA have significant differences. In Bhatia (2012), they argued that CDA tends to “analyze social structures in such a way that they are viewed as invulnerable” and thus fails to provide opportunity for progressive resistance to harmful social structures, while CGA (as they construct it) is “a way of ‘demystifying’ professional practice through the medium of genres.”
(p. 23). However, I think that this is too narrow a view of CDA, given that many CD analysts argue that CDA should involve analyzing, building, and disseminating tools of resistance (Kumaravadivelu, 1999; Lin, 2014; Rogers & Schaenen, 2014). In addition, Bhatia (2015) discussed several other differences. First, they said that CGA is more focused than CDA, in that the former can only be applied to professional practices and genres, while CDA can apply to wider social contexts. In addition, they argued that CDA has a stronger focus on power and ideology, while CGA has greater analytical rigor. While this seems to me to be somewhat true, Bhatia seems to take Fairclough’s approach to CDA as the dominant if not the sole approach, whereas there are numerous different approaches of CDA—for instance, in their review article, Tenorio (2011) identified six different schools of CDA, none of which are monolithic. Third, Bhatia argued that CDA is primarily discursive, owing to an allegiance to Foucauldian theory, while CGA is primarily interdiscursive; this, however, seems to undervalue how important interdiscursivity is to some types of CDA, such as that found in Fairclough (2003). Finally, Bhatia said that CGA is focused more on analyzing social practice through the use of extra-textual work (such as
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ethnographic research), while CDA tends to focus first and foremost on discursive actions and analysis. Other researchers are split in how they treat the relationship between CDA and CGA, with Koteyko (2009) stating that CDA “includes” CGA (p. 114), while Han (2013) stated that their research “combines” CDA and CGA (p. 85), implying that they are distinct paradigms.
Given that power and ideology are two of the four main focuses of my project, that my intent is to understand social practice through analyzing discourse (using My Share to understand the social practice of teaching in Japan) rather than placing social practice first as in CGA, and that I have deliberately chosen to use an eclectic mix of methodologies rather than a single “rigorous” one, I consider the present research to fall squarely within CDA, regardless of whether CDA and CGA are distinct or overlapping.
However, this very eclecticism means that I also find it appropriate to incorporate some of the ways that Bhatia discusses genre and the CGA approach.46 In particular, I have incorporated Bhatia’s (2015) suggestion that when analysts look at genres, they do so by focusing on how that genre “is likely to be interpreted, used and exploited in specific contexts,” (p. 10). In part, this is an issue of attitude—in that, for whichever tools I’m using to interpret the My Share corpus, I make those interpretations within the context of the Japanese language education and the professional lives of the teachers writing and reading the genre. Related to the latter point, this is why I chose to include what Bhatia calls an “ethnographic” component:
the author questionnaire and editor interviews discussed in Chapter 11. However, since I am using CGA mostly in these limited ways, I am not using ideas from other CGA researchers, such as Fage-Butler (2015), who proposed adding ideas from Foucauldian discourse analysis to CGA (since Bhatia places little emphasis on the work of Foucault, even implying in Bhatia (2015) that Foucault is a more important resource for CDA than for CGA).
46Note that I have chosen to mix CGA concepts into this CDA project even knowing that they may contain fundamental differences. This follows Kaomea’s suggestion that critical work (in their case, postcolonial analysis) should be comfortable using contradictory approaches and methods, since the ultimate goal is not methodological consistency but rather the uncovering of that which has been hidden (especially that which is potentially causing harm) by dominant discourses and ideologies.
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4.4.3 Discourse analysis and text analysis. Just as “discourse” has many meanings (see section 1.1.1), so too is “discourse analysis” an ambiguous phrase. In the simplest sense it is “the study of language at use in the world, not just to say things, but also to do things” (Gee, 2014, p.1). The discourse of My Share exists within the framework of professional language teaching in Japan. If we take the genre at face value, its purpose is to share successful language lesson plans amongst teachers. However, texts can and always do things other than their expressed purpose; the whole point of this project is to determine what else this discourse is doing in terms of attempting to construct and represent the beliefs and identities of both teachers and students in the Japanese language learning context (and how this is linked up to issues of power and ideology).
While my approach to discourse analysis has been modeled after that used by a wide variety of researchers (especially including Baker, 2008; Gee, 2014;
Hashimoto, 2000, 2009; Hodge, 2012), the single largest inspiration is Fairclough’s (2003) approach which they call “textually oriented discourse analysis” (p. 2). One of the features of Fairclough’s work is that it simultaneously examines multiple levels of language use, ranging from micro-linguistic features like individual word and grammar choices up through the “orders of discourse” which includes macro-linguistic features like structure and genre, and all the way “away from” texts to social practices themselves. Fairclough often uses the term “text analysis” to refer to cases where they are specifically looking at the linguistic elements of a discourse, and the broader term “discourse analysis” when looking at how the discourse operates at the level of social practice, though they are not consistent in this distinction. For this paper, I will generally use the term “text analysis” when referring to methods, approaches, and principles linked to the examination of the linguistic aspects of My Share (other than those linguistic aspects which are analyzed via corpus-based approaches), and will generally avoid the term “discourse analysis” so as not to cause confusion with Critical Discourse Analysis, which is the framework within which this entire project and all of its components rest. Finally, to reiterate and clarify what I said above, while my overall approach resembles Fairclough’s
“textually oriented discourse analysis” in its goals and broad perspective, the actual methods I use were drawn from a wider set of sources, especially since Fairclough’s
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main techniques of linguistic analysis are drawn from Systemic Functional Linguistics, which I chose not to employ in this project.