Sessions

Critical Corpus Analysis of ALTs’ Online Discourse

This presentation will describe corpus assisted critical analysis of online discourse about assistant language teachers (ALTs) in Japan. This discourse can build awareness of employment issues affecting ALTs, but it may also contribute to ALTs’ perceptions of disempowerment by promoting ideas that ALTs are fundamentally unprofessional and their exploitation is unavoidable. To counter this, it is hoped users of online communities will approach them with a sense of solidarity, not only competitiveness or frustration.