As a teacher I have been through many stages in my 10 years of full-time experience, and I have had to constantly re-imagine myself and adapt to new surroundings. I have only ever taught in Japan and England, in both countries I have only taught in either private language schools or universities. I have never worked in contexts where English is spoken as a second official language, I have never worked in developing countries, most of my experience is with university-level (and thus somewhat privileged) learners and teachers. Furthermore much of my research and experience is based in Japan, a unique EFL context which, although representative on some levels, will not reflect the idiosyncrasies of other local contexts. I am confessing all this (at the end of the book, I admit) in order to be authentic, or perhaps ‘sincere’ as Trilling (1972) would prefer. I confess this now in order to make sure that what I have said in this book is received with due diligence and criticism. When writing about the need to reconceptualise the idea of authenticity in journal articles, I was asked by editors and reviewers to clearly establish the need to do so, and I will admit that some editors rejected my papers because they felt I had not been able to do so. However, I was lucky that in my position I was able to see the gap between what had been an established opening up of authenticity that began with Widdowson (1978) and the rise in prominence of communicative language teaching, and the rather old-fashioned view which I still saw being held to by teachers and students in the language classrooms even to this day. However, these observations were mainly based in Japan. Works such as Holliday (2005) and Lee (1995) did help me to conclude and affirm that this problem was not isolated to Japan, and that rather than being a clear-cut problem of ‘people think that “native speakers” are more authentic’ the issue was actually multi-faceted.