Negotiating Identities: An Interview Study and Autoethnography of Six Japanese American TESOL Professionals in Japan

Abstract

In this interview study involving the analysis of narratives collected from Japanese American professionals teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) who have lived more than ten years in Japan, I focus on how the participants negotiated their often contested identities in the TESOL context in Japan. I use the notion of identity negotiation narrowly defined as "struggles which occur when certain identity options are imposed or devalued, and others are unavailable or misunderstood" (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004, p. 20). Most Japanese Americans share similar phenotypes with the majority of Japanese nationals, creating many misconceptions about our linguistic competence in Japanese and English and ability to act appropriately within Japanese cultural norms. Educational settings are also an arena contributing to a simplistic Japanese/non-Japanese, native speaker/non-native speaker (NS/NNS) framework within which such encounters are defined. I intend to illuminate the underlying assumptions responsible for the misconceptions that continue to challenge their authenticity. This is in line with inquiry into the role of race in TESOL (Curtis & Romney, 2006; Kubota & Lin, 2006). The six participants were two men and four women, including myself. I conducted multiple interviews individually and in groups over a period of four years. I transcribed the narrative data into numbered lines and reworked selected parts into stanza form (Gee, 2005) or used block quotes to analyze the identity negotiation processes. For the autoethnography, I used intensive reflective writings done throughout the course of this project in addition to interview data in which I am the interviewer who also shares stories. Through multi-layered analyses (Sorsoli, 2007), I hope to illuminate what the individuals' narratives reflect about the contested nature of values held about language, ethnicity, race, and identity in the context of English teaching, learning, and use in Japan today. I suggest that the findings and conclusions from this study can be applied to other contexts in the world as well. It is therefore important for the TESOL professional to become an actively critical observer of how her work is affecting all the stakeholders, including her own self.