Exploring English Native-Speakerism in Thai Society through English Tutorial School Advertisements: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis
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Abstract
This exploratory qualitative study attempts to elucidate how and the extent to which the concept of native speakerism is conceived and commodified multimodally and aesthetically in Facebook advertisements posted by English tutorial schools in Thailand. Through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, 60 advertisements posted between March and November 2025 were purposively selected, all of which explicitly or implicitly provided semiotic references to superiority based on nativeness, expertise, and supposed global accolade. Verbal elements were analysed for recurring discourses of authenticity, legitimacy, and aspiration, while visual elements were examined for representational and compositional strategies such as teacher depiction, gaze, social distance, colour, and branding. The analysis identified four recurring discursive patterns through which native speakers are framed: authenticity, professional/global-standard legitimacy, aspirational self-transformation, and culturally attuned nativeness. These verbal patterns were reinforced through visual strategies that idealise white Western instructors, use gaze and social distance to naturalise pedagogical hierarchy, and incorporate Western cultural authority through colour palettes, branding, and lifestyle-oriented imagery. The emergence of “localised nativeness,” through which native speakers were presented as culturally comparable to local teachers, further illustrates how native-speakerism was adapted to address critiques of contextual mismatch. The findings indicate that native-speakerism remains prevalent despite the rise of Global Englishes and has, in some respects, become even more commercially powerful by aligning Western linguistic superiority with local stakeholders’ aspirations for economic, cultural, and social mobility through identity transformation. By shedding light on the existing ELT discourse that continues to reiterate Western norms despite academic calls from academia for plurality in English use, this study invites further debate on the tension between ideological critique and context-responsive stakeholder desires in the age of neoliberalism.
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