Does the ownership rest with us? Global English and the native speaker ideal among Japanese high school students

This paper reports on an empirical study that examined the native speaker ideal among Japanese high school students by measuring their language attitudes in this respect. The paper provides two key findings. First, Japanese high school students give by far the most positive evaluations to native than to non-native varieties of English while, at the same time, they most devalue their own Japanese performance variety. Secondly, they opt for learning English for its intra-Anglosphere currency and utility, rather than for its broader functionality in the global arena. The results together pose a challenge to the current scholarly conceptualisations of global English and the corresponding pedagogy. Thus, the study makes an empirical contribution to the ongoing theoretical debate about the language globalisation process and language pedagogy in the EFL context.