Non-Native Teachers and Advocacy

Abstract

Non-native language teachers have historically remained invisible in mainstream applied and educational linguistics, their contribution disregarded or looked down on. The dominant vision in the language teaching profession has entrenched the native speaker as the ideal teacher, and therefore only native speakers have been endowed with the knowledge and authority to pass on the language to learners, much like a religious guru can implement certain sacred rituals that are forbidden to non-members of the group. Only when native speakers have not been available have non-natives been tolerated as teachers of the language, although they could never aspire to the same level of authority and legitimacy of ‘real’ native speakers. They have been accepted as surrogate teachers, but have had no right to claim a legitimate role in the language teaching task, and so their voice has hardly-if ever-been heard. The literature on language teaching and language acquisition has, therefore, been historically dominated by a native speaker bias, which has affected the way second language acquisition has been conceptualized as well as the guiding principles of second language teaching. For instance, if we look into the different methods and approaches that appeared in the second half of the 20th century, we can find several discrepancies regarding the teaching of grammar, the type of materials used in class, and the use of spontaneous language vs. planned structures (Richards and Rodgers 2001). What we cannot find is any discrepancy in the teacher model that underlies all those proposals and ideas for classroom intervention. In all cases, the native speaker has remained the default teacher, the one who spoke ‘with no errors’ and could therefore guide the student into the realm of the new language. In short, the unchallenged assumption was that you cannot invite somebody to a place unless it is ‘your’ place; you cannot teach a language unless it is ‘your’ language, and you can only claim the language to be ‘yours’ if you are a native speaker. The invisibility of non-native teachers has had its manifestation in how methods of language teaching were designed, packaged, and promoted, but also in research of classroom-based interaction, in which the issue was not even mentioned or discussed, and more especially in the whole field of teacher training, completely ignorant of the specificity and the needs of this particular group of teachers.