GUIDED LANGUAGE LEARNING AND THE MYTH OF ‘NATIVE SPEAKER’ Abdurrahman Gülbeyaz Osaka University (JAPAN) Abstract At the highest level, my paper deals with the conceptual / structural obstacles to guided language teaching. In other words it tries to explore and put on record the impediments to structured language learning caused by the teaching side of the confrontation between learners of a language and teaching professionals thereof, the latter including not only language teachers and trainers but also the entire lot of natural or judicial participants of the teaching process. At a more concrete level and in the light of the above, I concentrate my deliberations on a particular one of these obstacles: the concept of so-called ‘native speaker’. With reference to the – generally known or at least diffusely intuited – fact that science and scientific production are – in connection with the lives of humans and the totality of organic and inorganic existence in the Universe – literally a deadly serious concern, I lay bare on the one hand how (i.e., on the basis of or in accompaniment with what socio-historical and economical mechanisms and processes) the concept of ‘native speaker’ and related network of conceptual gadgets came into being and general use within the modern linguistic theory and practice and on the other hand how it affects not only the whole process of language learning and teaching but also other significant layers and spheres of social and socio-political life. I argue that the resulting effects are disastrously detrimental to both the process of language learning and other concerned areas of social life, demonstrating and exemplifying my reasoning with empirical evidence from private language teaching market and public foreign language education in Japan. Keywords: Philosophy of language, language acquisition, language teaching. 1 NATIVE LANGUAGE & MOTHER LANGUAGE: FROM A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Eric Hobsbawm begins the first one of his trilogy of histories with the following words: “WORDS are witnesses which often speak louder than documents.” 1 He states and demonstrates that ‘the Age of Revolution’, the period of sixty years between 1789 and 1848, which he declares to be the ‘greatest transformation’ since the onset of technological, economic and social advancements which are subsumed under the label ‘Neolithic’ 2 is best understood and described in the light of resp. by means of a limited set of words 3 all of which were coined in the said period. I too am a proponent and practitioner of a similar – if not a bit more radical – procedure of reading or inferring socio-economic changes, goings-on etc. in the first place from the events and transformations of the related semiotic systems. Elsewhere I proclaim that “in each socio-historical formation, in each community, every significant event, change or transformation in the social structure corresponds to a change both in music and language. This happens in the form of a true reciprocity, so that every mutation in the language and music of a society is not only the result of the corresponding transformation on the global social plane, but also its cause (and vice versa).” 4 The construction ‘music and language’ was preferred there only in connection with the subject matter at hand and the related conceptual framework; and can safely be replaced with the phrase ‘every socially relevant semiotic system’. 1 Hobsbawm, Eric 1996: p. 1 2 Ibid. 3 'Industry', 'industrialist', 'factory', 'middle class', 'working class', 'capitalism', 'socialism', 'aristocracy', 'railway', 'liberal', 'conservative', 'nationality', 'scientist', 'engineer', 'proletariat', (economic) 'crisis', 'utilitarian', 'statistics', 'sociology', 'journalism', 'ideology', 'strike', 'pauperism' etc. (Ibid.) 4 Gülbeyaz, A. 2011: p. 263 Proceedings of INTED2014 Conference 10th-12th March 2014, Valencia, Spain ISBN: 978-84-616-8412-0 2886