With the booming trend of acquiring English speaking proficiency in East Asia, English conversation courses taught by Western White native speakers have continued to dominate the preference of actors in the English education market. However, several studies have shown that, instead of being viewed as authoritative classroom teachers like their domestic counterparts would be, many of these Western foreigners were no more than “cultural ambassadors” of their home countries who were expected to perform the “authentic foreignness” on which their Asian students previously formed opinions (Geluso, 2013; Hayes, 2013; Rivers, 2013; Stanley, 2013). Informed by the notions of linguistic commodification (Heller, 2010), linguistic instrumentalism (Kubota, 2011), and color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2014), the paper reports on a qualitative multiple-case study in which members of a Taiwanese junior high school community recount their race-related opinions and underlying rationale about ideal teachers for the school’s foreigner-taught English Conversation Program (ECP) as well as their perception and expectation about its promise. Through a thematic analysis of in-depth interview data, the presentation shows how the previous and current principals, ECP directors, foreign teachers, parents, and students consider the major benefit of ECP as cultural rather than linguistic, placing neoliberalized emphasis on the economic value of being able to deal with foreigners. This emphasis, for nearly two decades addressed by hiring and interacting with specifically selected foreign “teachers”—the prototypical White native English speakers with a North American accent, reveals that ECP is not about teaching at all. Instead, through the continuous supply and demand of non-pedagogical “commodities” such as foreign teachers’ Occidentalized Westernness, nationality, accent, and Whiteness, ECP is essentially a business-oriented approach in response to Taiwanese people’s collective anxiety toward the neoliberalized skills discourses (Urciuoli, 2008) and the economized American-dominant communication style (Cameron, 2002), both of which ubiquitous in Taiwan's English education and broader society. The paper concludes by pointing to the need to critically reflect what we teach, how, and why we teach it and suggesting how members of the English education community can engage in evidence-informed actions for meaningful language learning.
