Square-Headed Frogs and World Citizens: Attitudes and Identities of ESL Teacher Candidates in Québec

Abstract

This study explores the attitudes and identities of future ESL teachers in a 4-year teacher education program in a regional university in Québec, Canada. We describe the sociopolitical context of learning English in Québec and explain studies describing the position of nonnative-speakers who teach English in various political and geographical contexts, drawing on Kachru’s work on the 3 concentric circles from a World Englishes perspective. Fifty-four future teachers responded to an online survey designed to understand their attitudes toward native speaker proficiency and their linguistic and cultural identities as future ESL teachers. Respondents had contradictory attitudes toward their own linguistic proficiency and accents, the native-speaker model, and conflicting desires of retaining their assumed identities and adopting native-speaker identities. Our conclusions indicate the importance of political discourses in their society and international discourses, such as the native-speaker fallacy, which have complex, conflicting influences on these future teachers.