White Native English Speakers Needed: The Rhetorical Construction of Privilege in Online Teacher Recruitment Spaces

Abstract

Over the past few decades, scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of native speakerism in the field of TESOL. Several recent studies have exposed instances of native speakerism in TESOL recruitment discourses published through a variety of media, but none have focused specifically on professional websites advertising programs in Southeast Asia. In this article, the authors report findings from a critical discourse analysis of textual and visual features in 59 websites recruiting for specific language schools located in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. They find that the ideal candidate is overwhelmingly depicted as a young, White, enthusiastic native speaker of English from a stable list of inner‐circle countries. Furthermore, they find that these sites place more emphasis on the opportunities to make money, travel, and experience adventure in exotic cultures that come with the TESOL jobs being advertised, rather than on the jobs themselves. The authors conclude by providing a discussion of their findings informed by work in cultural studies and critical race theory, and suggest ways in which readers can fight against the entrenchment of native speaker and White privilege in the field of TESOL.