Journal
LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY
Volume 44, Issue 1, Pages 35-62Publisher
CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1017/S0047404514000736
Keywords
Student evaluations; higher education; university teaching; nonnative speakers; second language users; ethnicity; critical discourse analysis; corpus linguistics; formulaic language
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Nonnative English speakers (NNESs) who teach at English-medium institutions in the United States (US) have frequently been the subject of student complaints. Research into language ideologies concerning NNESs in the US suggests that such complaints can be understood as manifestations of a broader project of social exclusion operating, in part, through the ideological construction of the NNES as incomprehensible Other. The present study explores the extent to which such ideological presuppositions and exaggerative performances are observable in students' evaluations of 'Asian' mathematics instructors on the website RateMyProfessors.com (RMP). A mixed methodological approach combining statistical analysis of numeric RMP ratings, quantitative corpus linguistic techniques, and critical discourse analysis was employed. Findings confirm the presence of disadvantages related to 'Asian' instructors' race and language. However, RMP users' discourse is shown to be less overtly discriminatory and instead to reproduce dominant language ideology in subtle, previously undescribed ways.
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