Rethinking Nativeness: The Discursive Invention of the Racialized (non)Native Speakered Subject

• In Event: Raciolinguistic Perspectives on Language and Schooling

Abstract

Recently, the “NNEST Movement” has made significant contributions towards understanding the privilege and marginalization conferred by the native speaker concept (Doerr, 2009), and how extralinguistic characteristics like race (e.g., Amin, 1997) affect individuals’ ability to “pass” as native. However, nativeness and nonnativeness have largely been framed as static, mutually exclusive categories that adequately describe all language users, while the reality is much more complex (Rudolph, Selvi, & Yazan, 2015).

This presentation reconceptualizes native and nonnative speakers as constructed through a historical and emergent process I term (non)native speakering. This process stems from a larger raciolinguistic project (Flores & Rosa, 2015) developed in conjunction with the formation of nation-states (Flores, 2014) and inextricably links ideologies of static monolingualism and a monolithic national and ethnolinguistic identity. (Non)native speakering also builds on performativity (Butler, 1990) to conceptualize how individuals and groups continuously position themselves and are positioned by others as native or nonnative, as well as how racialized (non)native speakered subjectivities emerge from these collective iterations.

I will then use (non)native speakering as a lens to examine the emergence of racialized (non)native speaker subjectivities in a graduate language teacher certification program. Data were collected during five months of field work in a large metropolitan university the United States, and includes field notes, policy documents, student work, interviews, and focus groups,. Using policy discourse analysis (Allan, 2008), the discussion will analyze how participants negotiate their own and others’ (non)nativeness and how these constructions intersect with race. It will also explore counterdiscourses that resist a “one language, one nation” understanding of linguistic legitimacy, and the manner in which participants reconcile power dynamics inherent to racialized (non)native speakering with their professional identities as language teachers.

Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of racialized (non)nativeness and its interaction with the identity formation of pre-service teachers. They will understand how (non)nativeness is conferred, denied, and negotiated through social interaction, and is performative, recursively constructing itself. To practitioners, this presentation provides insights into the negotiations and struggles of pre-service language teachers, especially those who may not traditionally be considered native speakers of the language they teach because of their racial positioning.

Allan, E.J. (2008). Policy Discourses, Gender, and Education. London, UK: Routledge.

Amin, N. (1997). Race and the identity of the nonnative ESL teacher. TESOL Quarterly, 31(3), 580-583.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge.

Doerr, N. M. (2009). The native speaker concept: Ethnographic investigations of native speaker effects. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.

Flores, N. (2014). Undoing truth in language teaching: Toward a paradigm of linguistic Aesthetics. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 28(2), 1-17.

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review,85(2), 149-171

Rudolph, N., Selvi, A. F., & Yazan, B. (2015). Conceptualizing and confronting inequity: Approaches within and new directions for the “NNEST Movement”. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 12(1), 27-50.

Author

• Geeta A Aneja, University of Pennsylvania