Job Discussion Forums

[ipasia]

I have read quite a lot of hatred or at least very prejudiced stuff in the forums against non native teachers of English. I understand that being a native may be important, especially because of the accent. However, I would like to point that there are people out there - and I am one of them - that have lived for years in English speaking countries, have children born in these countries and have got an university education in English. Moreover, the English literature presents many writers whose first language was not English (e.g. Joseph Conrad, Ukrainian-Polish) and they are nonetheless acknowledged as the great writers they are.
Other aspect to consider is that many non native people can actually teach, read, write and express themselves better in English than the average people whose interest is not the study of languages (not to mention last year high school students). In Canada, many ESL teachers are not native and still they do a great job teaching tons of immigrants that arrive here every year. The fact there you are born in a country does not make you a specialist in its language or at teaching it. Studying, working hard and having a certain talent may do it.
Therefore, I would like to open a discussion on the obstacles (and rewards) you find teaching English when you are not a native speaker of this language. I would like to ask the "hatred and prejudice" people to abstain themselves from the discussion, as I believe their opinion have been well expressed along most of the topics of both the General and Korean forums.
Thanks to all.

[Steiner]

Well, first of all, you aren't going to have much luck keeping people from posting if they feel they have something to say.

Secondly, I think you've misread the popular sentiment about non-native speakers, at least on the General Discussion board. Take a look at the "Would you learn a language from a non-native speaker?" thread. I can't remember the exact title, but the overwhelming answer was yes.

And now on to others about obstacles and rewards....

[ipasia]

Thank you, Steiner. You make me feel better. I will read the post you mentioned. Of course I do not intend to keep people from posting. I am just saying that I am fully aware that some guys just hate non native teachers and I have read their postings, so there is no need for repetition. I confess I had to think several times before posting because I was afraid of getting some aggression. I am more interested in discussing the issues of getting a job when you are not an Australian-American-Canadian etc. but you are still confident in your English and teaching skills.

[denise]

I agree with Steiner on both counts--people with an opinion will jump in even if asked not to (as is their right, really, in a public forum), and the majority of the postings here in fact indicate an appreciation for non-native speakers. If anything, the sorts of teachers who get flamed on this forum are the native-speaker blond, blue-eyed "backpacker" types who assume that because they are native speakers, they can teach the language. That attitude angers well-trained teachers regardless of their native language status.

I am a native speaker, or, for the purposes of this thread, I am NOT a non-native speaker (does that disqualify me? ), but I can think of several advantages to having non-native speaker teachers.

1) since they don't have that native speaker "advantage," they are usually TRAINED
2) if they speak their students' L1s, they can anticipate the problems that will arise
3) they often give clearer explanations of grammar points--we native speakers know that something is right or "sounds right," but without having studied the language properly (and of course well-trained native speakers HAVE studied the language properly), we often cannot explain why it is right

I'm sure other posters will point out other advantages.

d

[Roger]

This question has been raised a number of times, and as Steiner put it, it is being debated in a different forum.
As Denise said, non-native teachers have the TRAINING that many native speakers don't have. It really does not matter whether you are a mother-tongue speaker or not - what does matter is whether you are likely to misinterpret the target language due to some cultural baggage from another language. That's why native speakers seem to have an advantage, but let's be clear about this - one advantage alone may not be enough.
The non-native English teacher probably is more open to new angles in the language he or she is teaching; he reflects on his first tongue too. If native English speakers know a second tongue they have the same advantages that all non-native (good!) English teachers have - an educated grasp of the language rather than just one of habit.
I do not know how important it is to "sympathise" with students - we don't need to feel any pity for those who are studying English; what we need to is to be reliable guides, and as such, we need to anticipate the pitfalls on their road to English proficiency. Again, a non-native clearly has an edge over natives in this respect!
I think the "native' versus the "non-native" is an Anglophone thing. There seems to be an obsession with native fluency and often at the expense of proficiency. I note that conversation classes are more widely practised in countries where English is a foreign language than in other countries where the foreign language is not English. The teaching of French, for instance, relies more on literacy (reading and writing), and there is absolutely no bias against any non-native French speakers.
I may be terribly wrong, and I do not wish to be, but it is my feeling that there are some nationalist agendas behind this native-speaking phenomenon: clearly, the market has to choose native speakers from certain countries, and the choice seems to be "British English" or "American English".
Drop the native-English speaking qualifier, and see how many more well-trained and experienced teachers will flood the market!

[shmooj]

For my MA I did a very interesting piece of research on all adults and parents of kids at our school - about 200 survey forms in all.

The surveys asked them about various aspects of non-native and native speaker teachers.

OVERWHELMINGLY, (85%+) respondents said they would choose a native over a non-native speaker because they believed they would learn better English from them.

This wasn't really an eye-opener to me about Japanese student attitudes. It just confirmed what I suspected that despite research strongly to the contrary, in Japan, native is best from a business point of view and possibly, psychologically, students are going to be more open with a native and perhaps acquire language faster.

Interesting though...

[denise]

[shmooj]

Denise, that was exactly my initial reaction.

As DoS, I felt such a jerk pandering to the needs of my students (as all good student centred research insists we should ) while research from another field was telling me not to throw those valuable CVs of non-native teachers in the bin.

But, hey, I got over it in ... oohh... about ten minutes I think and regularly have meetings where the parents tell me what changes they want me to make around the school in the next month or so. In fact, last month they suggested we offer a class for foetuses of expectant mothers using reversed stethoscopes attached to their bellies to speak into. I'm just running off some advertising on the printer now....









NOT

[Lucy Snow]

Actually, a friend of mine in Japan who works for a language school said that they get many calls from mothers who want their children to start learning English at 6 months old.

[ipasia]

Your opinions are all very interesting to me. I did read the topic mentioned by Steiner. It has a good discussion about the advantages of the educated non-native teacher. Unfortunately it does not keep agents and directors from throwing our resumes in the garbage can as shmooj just pointed out.

[shmooj]

Hey ipasia, I put that word "possibly" in there for a reason. It would be a tad foolish to underestimate the role played by internal motivation of a student in acquisition. There are plenty of papers out there that would justify a claim that this is perhaps the key factor in acquisition - crap teacher or not.

How do you think students actually learn at places like NOVA in Japan? Believe me it is nothing to do with their approach to language teaching.

The affective filter is real IMHO

But come on, how do they know you are not native. I'm not talking accents. MOst of my even advanced students cannot tell between various English accents. If you look the part and for that the plain fact is you are white (I don't agree with it but it is the stereotype), they would presume you are native anyway. Look at some of the hassle native speaking black people have in finding work in Japan sometimes.

A book is definitely judged by its cover over here.

So, read this right: if you look the part you will find work in Japan. Don't know about anywhere else. Your "cuttest" [sic] accent will probably not be noticed.

[ipasia]

Yes you are right. My students may not even notice if I have an accent. The problem is to get to them, since the people that hire will ask for my passport. And the �cutest accent� is not mine; it belongs to the French Canadian.

[woza17]

I find it really deplorable that a person who is actually a native speaker but is 5th generation Australian Chinese is not given a job but the guy from Turkey with a very thick accent is.
Cheers Carol

[cabbagehead]

Well, that's interesting woza17.

Are you saying that native speakers are preferable to non-natives then? If so, research would disagree with you although many employers in Japan would agree with you.

Speaking of unclear accents though, we had terrible problems with a US teacher we had here at our school. He was from Arkansas in the USA and did not speak clearly at all in class. We had endless complaints about this with students saying they just couldn't understand him.

Guess it works all sorts of ways...

[Wolf]

In China if you look like a foreigner they might hire you (in some places.) If you look Chinese it might also be a problem (Kyopos in Korea sometimes complain about this on the Korean forum as well.) I had a friend who was Japanese by citizenship but lived in the US from age 2 - 37. He had a law degree. He had a hard time finding work as an EFL teacher.

Other places might hire you if you could do the job.

Still others might be jerks about skin colour/nationality/accent/length of umbicial cord at time of birth/favorite Fruit Loop colour/whatever. DoS's often have to do the dirty work, but as smooj pointed out, they're doing what they have to to please parents and owners.

In some schools in South Korea (so I hear) and Japan (experience) they prefer "native speakers." Some ads will say "American only (excluding Canadians)" or "British only." The deep, throbbing irony being a) I have never, ever had a Japanese identify me by my accent and b) after three years of teaching in Japan none of my students sounded like me.

My French teacher in high school wasn't a "native" French speaker, but she taught us tons. I've taught a couple of Japanese courses.

Interesting, I often use the Joseph Conrad reference as well....