ABSTRACT
The lived experiences of so-called “non-native” English speaking teachers (NNESTs) and students continue to be shaped by unequal Englishes, where their English and teaching skills are often evaluated as “less than”. Scholarly endeavors that explicitly explore and discuss the methods to investigate this phenomenon remain wanting. In this chapter, we explore unequal Englishes emerging from multimodal data found on the Internet through a critical discourse analytic lens. Based on the findings and analysis that reveal the ways in which Filipino English teachers are constructed as more affordable or good enough but not the best model for Japanese learners, we hope to demonstrate and challenge the persistence of unequal Englishes. We also contend that CDA is an effective lens through which to visibilize the unequal power relations that play out in the online English teaching industry in Japan. The chapter ends by arguing that multimodal discourse performs social and ideological work, reifying unequal power relations that exigently need undoing.
