“Mother Tongue Speakers” or “Native Speakers”?: Assumptions Surrounding the Teaching of Japanese as a Foreign Language in Japan

Abstract

In the Japanese language, the term “native speaker” takes two forms—the loanword “ネイティブスピーカー” and its Japanese equivalent “母語話者”, which literally means “mother tongue speaker”—and these words are often used in different contexts. In Japan, “native speaker” is a political construction that facilitates the use of native speakers of English within the Japanese education system. This chapter examines how the two terms for native speaker are used by Japanese government offices and compares this with Japanese language teachers’ perceptions and understanding of the terms. It reveals that, although the term “mother tongue speaker” has not been widely used by the general public, government offices tend to use the term in order to emphasise the “non-native” status of Japanese language learners and teachers, meaning that they are foreigners. It also reveals that the Japanese teachers are aware of the absurdity of native-speakerist practices while at the same time believing in the inseparable relationship between people, language and place, which is extended to the assumed qualities of native speakers of Japanese. The findings suggest that more diverse teaching experience outside Japan would help teachers to realise that whether or not the assumed qualities of native-speaker teachers make them fully functional as teachers often depend on the local context, and such a realisation would lead to post-native speakerist practices in Japanese language teaching.