6 - Voices of University Professors

Summary

The current chapter delves into the experiences of NNES university professors in Japan, scrutinizing noteworthy events and incidents that they came across while working in their particular settings. The chapter opens, much like Chapters 4 and 5, by offering narratives from four university professor participants. As with the previous narratives, these ones also represent the initial phase of data analysis as well as a portion of the research results. These narratives were then subjected to constructing grounded theory approaches, which led to the discovery of several notable and oft-repeated codes. These were subsequently organized to construct a conceptual framework. This chapter justifies and explains the multifaceted, yet interconnected, principal categories and their incumbent subcategories of university professor participants’ experiences involving native-speakerism and trans-speakerism: they are linguistic, cultural, and professional native-speakerism, in addition to Global Englishes, intercultural competence, and professionalism (including contextual knowledge) in relation to trans-speakerism. Pertinent excerpts and anecdotes from the interview data are used to establish and expound upon the categorizations. Finally, the chapter concludes with the conceptual framework of the university professors’ experiences and several recommendations for practice involving native-speakerism and trans-speakerism.