ABSTRACT
This chapter, looks back at a particular point in the author's early career as an English-language teacher (ELT) in South Korea. Using autoethnography as a lens, the author considers the role of ELTs and the ELT profession in globalization. For a various set of economic, social, and political reasons, English has increasingly been the language fulfilling the need for a global lingua franca. Around the time that the author was working in Korea, in the mid-1990s, the fields of applied linguistics and ELT were experiencing significant development. Having attended the University of Edinburgh, Alan Davies's book on The Native Speaker in Applied Linguistics was very influential. It also came as a surprise that the diverse group of native-speaker teachers the author knew in Korea were being portrayed as a homogenous group in the applied linguistics literature. The author's experience in Korea in the mid-1990s, while disorienting and sometimes lonely, gave the author an experience of being otherized.
