Welcome to the final interview of 2025! We are pleased to bring you an interview with Dr. Avril Haye-Matsui, who holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Ochanomizu University, which she completed in 2022. She specializes in social justice issues in English language teaching, especially those related to intersectionality and teacher identity (Haye-Matsui, 2018, 2020). Her doctoral research discussed the identity development of women of the African diaspora (2022). Dr. Haye-Matsui’s work extends to the larger community outside of teaching and research. She is actively involved in organizing women’s empowerment groups in Japan and volunteers to give workshops hosted by Nagoya City for dealing with microaggressions in the workplace. She is currently an associate professor at Aichi Prefectural University. She was interviewed by Dr. Risa Ikeda, who has taught English in the U.S., Oman, and Japan for a total of over 18 years. She completed a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Yamaguchi University in 2023. Her research interests include language ideologies in English teaching in Japan, study abroad in Asia, and identities of teachers with multilingual and transnational backgrounds. She is currently an associate professor in the Faculty of Global and Science Studies at Yamaguchi University. So, without further ado, to the interview!
Dr. Avril Haye-Matsui gave her plenary, We Are All Diverse: Celebrating Diversity in English Language Teaching, at the JALT2024 conference. In her talk, she conveyed the message that we all need to recognize and celebrate our own diverse identities as well as those of our students and the people in our communities. As a novice advocate of diversity myself, having recently joined the JALT Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to interview Dr. Haye-Matsui.
Risa Ikeda: Thank you for agreeing to the interview! It is definitely a great honor. I will do my best to convey the positive energy and essence of the plenary to readers of the TLT. What would you say were some of the main points you wanted the audience to take away from your talk?
Avril Haye-Matsui: I wanted to expand the ideas of what diversity is. I feel that I’m still expanding mine. I’m not an expert on everything to do with diversity, but I want to learn more. It’s a little bit like what Ryuko Kubota said in her plenary (given at the same conference and covered in a previous issue of TLT) about our responsibility to foster peace, build bridges between people, and break down stereotypes. My goal was to discuss how diversity issues are not just for people who look like me, who are minorities. We are all diverse. We all have different aspects and identity factors, and we should be proud of those things. Then, we can help our students to also be proud of those things. We also need to recognize we’ve really come a long way in this organization, but native speakerism, sexism, and racism—it still exists. We’ve come this far forward, and we want to keep the impetus going. We want to keep moving forward. We don’t want to go back.
I don’t want people to think that, well, our conference theme was around diversity, we’re there, we’re finished. We’ve come a long way to celebrate that, but there’s still work to be done. So, let’s all do it together!
In the plenary, you told your story about how 25 years ago in the U.K. as a child, people would tell you to “go home, to your country” when actually you lived there and were walking home from school. Then you said, “we’ve come a long way” in these 25 years. Can you explain more about what progress we have made in your view? What changes were you referring to?
When I think about the U.K., I think that for small children walking home from school, people don’t shout “Go home!” to them anymore because the society is more multicultural. We have a lot more people of color in positions of power. However, there are still people who support the far right. There are still those racist incidents that happen. There are still microaggressions at work. In public places or in social situations, that still happens. But people are speaking up, and that’s great.
When I first started coming to JALT around 2007 or 2008, I did not see a lot of diversity, and I didn’t feel very included. I didn’t feel that there were a lot of women, let alone people of color. I felt like I was in a sea of little white males in suits. I felt condescended to, and I didn’t feel like I had a voice or a real place in the organization. I didn’t really think it was for me because I didn’t see anyone like me doing anything. I didn’t really feel part of the group. I’d be talking to a friend, maybe a male friend from work, and another male would come up and just talk to that male. That sort of thing happened a lot, and I didn’t feel like this was my place at all.
At the time, I wasn’t working at university either, so to me it seemed like there were a lot of people working at university and not really providing support for what I was doing at the time. I enjoyed some of the workshops and presentations and looking at the publishers. But I didn’t feel like I was really making connections. It wasn’t really until I joined GALE (Gender Awareness in Language Education SIG) some years later that I felt like, okay, there are some women around. I was in GILE (Global Issues in Language Education SIG), and I enjoyed their publications and some of the topics that people were researching, but I was still learning to be a researcher at that time, and I was kind of an observer. But I did feel very welcome, especially by GALE. That kind of changed after a few years, especially once I started working at university.
I feel like the conference this year is completely the opposite of where it was. I feel a lot more comfortable here now. I see more diversity around, just looking at the workshops and the presentations. It feels a lot more inclusive, and that message of belonging feels a lot stronger. I see more women taking an active role in the leadership and in planning the conferences. It just feels like a very different organization to what it was when I first started coming. I think in many organizations, the word “inclusive” is just a word that’s thrown around, but I do feel that we are more inclusive this year. Still, I’m sure there’s room for improvement! There always is.
With that background in mind, could you recap the gist of the plenary for TLT readers?
I wanted to tell the message that we are all diverse. It’s not a “them” and “us.” When I was writing the plenary and finished the first draft, I remember thinking that I spent a bit too much time talking about native speakerism. But it’s such a critical thing. I think it’s downplayed as a kind of, “Oh, it can’t be helped, it’s Japan.” Yet, it can be helped.
I really wanted to push that message that we need to take positive action towards native speakerism. Perhaps it’s some way to make up for my past when I didn’t speak up because I didn’t feel it was safe to speak up, and I traded on the privilege of my passport. I’d never felt comfortable, but at the time, I was young and didn’t know what to do. Now I’ve got more knowledge and experience. We really have to do something about native speakerism. I wanted people to realize just how much that impacts all teachers in this field.
I also wanted people to realize that students are not this homogenous mass. There are not just my Japanese students in the class. Students are also diverse. They are having amazing experiences and opportunities interacting with different people. This is not just from around the world, but also from different socioeconomic groups who have different types of families to their own. Young people need a space where they feel they can express themselves and where they’re not going to be judged. I want my class to be like that. So, I suppose the main points were that we are diverse, native speakerism is problematic, we need to support our students who are also diverse, and we can all take action.
Speaking of how we can all take action, you had some illustrative examples of how we might do this which I thought were very clear and accessible. This made your message very powerful. (In her plenary, Dr. Haye-Matsui had many anecdotes from her research informants, such as a pre-school teacher who likened flowers of different colors to the beauty of having various skin tones in families).
I think the main one within English language education is that we’re going to hear the term native speaker at some point probably every week, especially when a new position is coming up. At such times, we do have the opportunity to talk about it. We can say this is discriminatory, and these are the reasons why. In my own university, we had this three-pronged attack. We first said this is discriminatory by showing JALT’s policy for not putting jobs on their website that have native speaker as a term and posted that in our university.
Just being able to explain in casual conversations why it’s discrimination is also something because people don’t actually know why. Even if in our little academic organizations we know, in our workplaces, they don’t actually realize it’s discriminatory. To many people, it’s just considered a fact that native speakers are better English teachers than non-native speakers. They think it’s actually common sense. If we don’t speak up, we’re never going to have the opportunity to debunk that, even though it’s completely untrue.
It’s also about finding a way within your organization to talk to people in positions of power about why this term is discriminatory. About why, when you’re interviewing a teacher from America, and a teacher from the Philippines who is a much better teacher, yet they want to hire the person from America, and saying this is actually wrong. There are ways that you can do it. I’m not always successful at this, but I try to do this without alienating people. You can’t just say to people, you’re racist, and that’s it because then communication shuts down within your organization. It’s being able to approach people in multiple ways that don’t alienate them by asking them the right questions, giving them a bit more information, or offering another perspective.
This will depend on each situation, but I find that this kind of information might reach people who are more socially conscious to begin with, but not others. What can we say to convince people who will still not realize it’s a problem?
Okay, first of all, what kinds of people are they? Are they people like my fellow English people from the U.K., or is this my boss, head of my department, or an eminent Japanese professor? What I would say to those two types of people is quite different. For my boss, I would go to her office and ask if I could talk to her. I would say that I’m a little uncomfortable with this term. I might show her a research paper and explain why. I would tell her, “I know you don’t really think this is a problem, but I’m just going to ask you to think about it, and let’s try and talk about it some more another time.” I’m not going to say, “You are wrong!” and “We cannot do this!” I’d never do that. That would be disrespectful. She’s my boss, and I think she’s really lovely.
Suppose I’d like to open that dialogue with someone who was a colleague, who is from the same country as me. Again, I’m going to say that we really shouldn’t be using that term. I would ask, “Do you understand your privilege? Let’s have this discussion.”
There’re two types of people that we work with. There’re the people who will listen and the people who will not. The people who will not, just leave them, because it’s going to cause you more harm. Go to the people who will listen, who will be allies, who are open to the discussion. You go to those people. Thinking of people that I’ve worked with in the past, generally people are not bad. People are quite reasonable. They want to work in a nice, positive environment. I don’t think I’ve worked with anyone in the last ten years or so that’s been truly evil. I have in the past, but not for a very long time. The problem is, if it’s somebody I’m working with, perhaps someone who is from the same country as me or another Inner Circle country, maybe they don’t realize their privilege. And I’m going to suggest that they read things that I’m going to talk to them about. If they’re willing to listen, it means that we have become friends, and we’ll have that open dialogue.
It comes back to what May Kyaw Oo said in the DEI Committee workshop (held at the same conference, where it was discussed that discriminatory acts cause harm and must be actively challenged, not ignored). In my situation, if discrimination was taking place, I would prefer people to speak up. Again, not in a way that alienates people, especially if you have to work with them, but I’m going to speak up and say that this isn’t right, and explain why it’s not right. I find that people, if they’re nice, and if they like you, they’re open to listening. But if they’re not, then don’t waste your energy. I mean you can still try with those people who don’t want to listen. But I think your energy is better spent on the ones that do want to hear, that do value your opinion.
Have any of your research informants who come from the diaspora or who are non-native speakers hit roadblocks where they’re in a situation in which no one will try to understand them, and they were discouraged?
Generally, if they’ve been dissatisfied with the work situation, they just exercise their agency and move and find a better one. Anecdotally, there was someone who was approached by a coworker who said to her, “I’m doing a research project on non-native English-speaking teachers”. She’s from Jamaica, so she was like, well, “I am a native English speaker”. Then, he said, “Oh, but I thought you were from Jamaica”. And she was like, “You know nothing about my country!” She was quite offended by that. So, she told him, “Come back and talk to me when you’ve learned something about my country,” and she kind of was very sharp with him. But in that situation, it worked. He went off, and he came back later and apologized. So, it really depends on the situation.
But if people are in an unpleasant working environment where people are not going to listen to them because they’re a black woman or a non-native speaker, then they’re just going to leave and go and work somewhere else. Some people you cannot change, unless they want to change.
So the strategy is to find people who will be allies, and they are out there.
They are out there. One thing that happened to one of my informants when she first came to Japan from England—this is not a good story. She worked at an English conversation school, and it was before her visa had been converted from a tourist visa to a working visa. Her hours got longer and longer. At the school, there was another girl from Lithuania. There was her and there was a guy from America who, she later found out, was paid more and was treated better. And he worked less. At first, she [my informant] was actually treated really well because she was from England. But as time went on, she noticed that the girl from Lithuania was being bullied by the owner, and she tried to stand up for her. Then, the owner turned it around and started to bully them both. It reached the point where she walked into work one day and the owner said, “I don’t think you’ve worked enough this week, so we’re not going to pay you.” And she said, well, “I have worked. I don’t care what you think. I need you to pay me.”
It became this awful situation. The next day, she was kind of hijacked by the owner and four workers. They literally manhandled her out of the school. And they were recording her and shaking the camera and saying things like “Don’t hurt the children! Don’t hurt the children!” It was awful. And she still didn’t get her money, so she went to the police, but the police, of course, they can’t really do anything because they haven’t actually harmed her. Eventually, she phoned the school and said, “I’m coming for my money.” She went, and the American guy was there. He opened the door like he’s the protector. The owner of the school pretended in front of the students that she was really scared while she gave her the money, saying “Don’t come back.” That was a terrible situation, and not that long ago.
So that teacher left.
She left. She found a better position. She didn’t go back to England straight away. She stayed in Japan because she liked Japan. She found a better position teaching young kids. But she does think that it was the intersection of her gender, as a woman, and as a black woman, and also the fact that she didn’t have a visa, as in they were holding that over her, blackmailing her. Those sorts of things in the industry, they really should not be happening anymore. Not in this day and age.
In the plenary, you talked about the idea of there being a “lesser linguistic evil” (Haye-Matsui, 2022), where your informant (an experienced, female teacher from Jamaica) was able to keep her job because she was still more favorable than her alternative (a Japanese-American male teacher who didn’t “look foreign enough” to the parents of a Japanese student). In your story, we’re relieved for your informant, but I couldn’t help wondering what happens to the other teacher with even lesser status. I understood the point of your talk was that we are different in different ways, and in the end, we’re trying to bring everyone together. If you establish the concept of a “lesser evil,” that means there is an even more poorly treated person. How do you bring the people who are further marginalized back into the picture?
The idea of making judgements based on a “lesser linguistic evil” was not according to me. That was according to the actions of the Japanese student’s father in the story. I feel that what we’ve been doing in the last decade or even longer, is that people are writing about their experiences, talking about them, making the stories more known, and people are speaking up. It’s the same for the Japanese-American male teacher in that school, who was also a trainer, a really respected teacher. Since that time, there’s been a lot of research on the narratives of teachers from different backgrounds. I think that when we speak up, it gives us more power. It also makes people feel more seen, and it makes people feel heard. It makes them stronger to actually speak up in their place of work and to say no, or if things aren’t working, then to go on to something else. I think that’s really, really great.
I’ve had a Japanese female friend who went to America for a really long time. She went to university in America, did her master’s there, lived there for almost twenty years then came back to Japan and applied for a job at a university. And the university said, “We understand you’re a great teacher, but we don’t want you to teach because this position is really for a native speaker.” What she did is she didn’t go away quietly. She went home and wrote this really scathing letter of how she is a perfect model for these students. She shares their cultural background, knows what they’re going through, and also knows what they need to do to become better English speakers. She told them, “I understand these students, and it is discriminatory for you to refuse to hire me on that basis. It’s not about my qualifications. It’s not about my experience. It’s because I’m not a native speaker.” When she wrote that, she thought she wasn’t going to get the job and went ahead and wrote everything she was thinking about. She sent it to them. Then she ended up getting the job. They read the letter, and they were like, “Oh, okay, she’s right.” And she got the job.
I think when we take those chances. It may not always work. But it’s going to work at some point. If we stay quiet, it’s not going to work. And that’s how we stop having these hierarchies where people are told to be put in their place. We bring everybody up by speaking up. Everybody needs to tell their stories. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s easy because it’s not, but everyone needs to feel empowered to fight back in some way, or to get that support.
I have not always been like this. If I were an ALT (assistant language teacher), and I didn’t have a lot of power in my job, no agency in my classroom, maybe I wouldn’t fight back. However, now I know that I could have fought back when I was in that position. And I think that’s what I want the younger and less experienced teachers to know. You don’t have to take that.
So, your message applies to both those considered as the “lesser linguistic evil” as well as the relatively more valued “linguistic evil” person?
It applies to everybody. It really does. This year I was really fortunate to go to a language conference in New Zealand, called NZALT—the New Zealand Association of Language Teachers. I went to that and did my little presentation. Afterwards, two Chinese high school teachers came to me, and they said, “We experience so many of these things here in New Zealand. But no one has ever talked about it. So, thank you for doing that.” And that made me really happy, not happy that they were going through those things, of course, but happy that my research was relevant to people who are not black women, but othered in some way in their workplace or in the country that they live.
I see. Perhaps I can ask you this final question. You already talked about specific actions we can take, by speaking up and by telling our stories. What do you think, then, does it take overall to move toward holistic social change, as we talked about toward the beginning of this interview? We can reach out to those people who are willing to make those smaller changes or actions, and these people can try to come together and fight for change. But I think maybe a larger synergy or force is needed to propel us into the future. How would you describe the potential for these bigger changes? I’m not saying I think we can solve everything, just your insights in the broader sense.
It takes perseverance. And it takes support. For me, I think what really propelled me forward in the last year or so is having support from a community of like-minded educators committed to diversity and social justice. This community gives me this energy, and I think we all come together. Sometimes we commiserate, and we also celebrate. I just know that every time I post something online, someone is going to post something supportive. Or I can read something by someone else, even if I haven’t posted for a few days. I feel like it’s really made the biggest difference because when we are in some kind of fight or suffering from microaggressions again, or repeatedly facing the same kind of condescending attitude, we can just feel like we’re so alone, and we get so tired sometimes. And I was really, really tired. I thought, I just can’t. But then when you have other people who are in the fight with you, supporting you, it’s like, okay, I can go on and I can keep doing this because it’s perseverance that is going to propel us forward. It’s the strength of community and just knowing that you’re not alone. I don’t know if that’s practical advice, but it’s what we all need. And without it, you just can’t go on. Community is what we all need.
That’s a really important message to remember that it starts with each person. When you were on stage during the plenary, I felt it was mind-changing for us in the audience to have someone who represents diversity and embodies multiple minoritized identities talk from the ground level and focus on the personal lives of individuals, rather than prioritize theoretical concepts and talk from a top-down perspective. To clarify, you mean that it’s important and necessary for each person to find their community and sense of belonging.
Definitely. We have to do this together.
There’s no element that exists in an abstract world that will propel us into the future. Your message is that it starts with each one of us, and that is the core of the energy that is creating change and progress.
Yes, community is the core of the energy. I mean yes, it starts with you. But it’s like I said, you have to find your people. Find your people and like-minded individuals. That’s going to push you forward. Because sometimes we need those people to commiserate with as well, and to just give us the strength to continue.
Can you reiterate your advice for those people who might be feeling like they have not found that community? What is your advice for them?
Goodness. Find it! It can be difficult sometimes to put yourself out there but go to conferences and approach people. Look for people who are researching the same things as you. The people whose papers that you really like reading, contact those people. Tell your story, and other people will come to you and say that it really resonates with them. Do a presentation. Do a workshop. And people will find you.
References
Haye-Matsui, A. (2018). The narrative of a female Jamaican ALT in Japan: Status and identity. Journal of the Faculty of Foreign Studies, Aichi Prefectural University: Language and Literature, 50, 237–255. https://doi.org/10.15088/00003581
Haye-Matsui, A. (2020). Black, British and female in the Japanese university English classroom. In D. H. Nagatomo, K. A. Brown, & M. L. Cook (Eds.), Foreign Female English Teachers in Japanese Higher Education: Narratives From Our Quarter (pp. 207–224). https://doi.org/10.47908/11/16
Haye-Matsui, A. (2022). Exploring issues of race and gender among Black female English language teachers in Japan [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Ochanomizu University.
