The Heart of the Matter: Native Speaker Teachers of English and Non-Native Speaker Teachers of English

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

This is a highly subjective look at the issue of native speaker teachers of English and non-native speaker teachers of English. I almost put a “versus” rather than an “and” between the two noun clauses of the title, but I am glad that I caught myself because one of my opinions is that good teaching trumps most every other quality or “variable” that a teacher might possess. I am going to begin this “recherche du temps not quite perdu” with two anecdotes.

The first takes place nearly forty years ago, when just out of university, I joined the U.S. Peace Corps and signed up to teach English in the Republic of Korea (ROK), “South Korea.” The trainees, of which I was one, had intensive Korean every day. We studied with native speaker instructors, who were themselves not much older than we were. They were recruited mostly from the ROK’s top universities, but hardly for their ability to teach. They were trained in a method devised by Earl Stevick, then at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute. It was called the microwave method, and was a variation of the audiolingual method then current. The classes were high pressure environments because if we were judged to be poor learners of Korean, we could be asked to leave the training program. By the end of the training program, we had studied Korean intensively for about three months. However, few if any of us, received a rating of S1, R1, which score made the best of us little more than high beginning level students at the end of training. I received a 0+, which was probably the average score. The native speaker instructors weren’t very good in the classroom although they tried very hard, sometimes too hard. I can remember one female trainee running out of the classroom in tears. I can also remember a lesson where the Korean we repeated back to our instructor was such that he doubled up helplessly in laughter near the classroom door.

The second story took place in the late nineties at the School for International Training. I was asked to step in to teach a group of MAT students a “shock” language. The idea behind studying a “shock” language for a short time is to return the trainee teacher to the state of being language students again, and to place the work of the teacher in the context of the methodologies taught in the MAT program. I taught Korean for a few weeks. I loved the experience. I had to plan my lessons carefully so as not to make mistakes in the classroom, and I was very aware of my limitations in the language. I tried to implement in my Korean classroom the methods the MAT students were learning. The students were good natured and positive, but I think learned very little despite my best efforts. However, we did end with a visit to a Korean restaurant during which each student in the class was provided with a line or two in Korean to interject into the conversation, including “He’s paying for all of us.” That worked quite well.

When I look at my experience working alongside and training non-native speakers of English, I find there are certain characteristics that obtain. First of all, almost all non-native speakers of English who teach the language are aware that they don’t handle the language in its nuance and creativity as well as native speakers do. Some non-native speaker teachers hardly speak English at all. This has been my experience in East Asia.
On the other hand, my experience in Europe has been that most English teachers who are not native speakers are quite fluent. So there is certainly a range of abilities in the target language as far as non-native speakers go.

Non-native speakers are mostly well-attuned to the challenges of learning English because they themselves have struggled with the language. They may still have challenges in areas such as control of articles, prepositions and two word verbs. Their pronunciation may be slightly off target as well. Perhaps they have a final voicing problem such as German speakers of English do or perhaps they have problems with short and long vowels of English such as Spanish speakers do. Certainly, all non-native speakers have different lexical representation of words and phrases from native speakers because of the fact that language is embedded in a particular culture. So, a non-native English teacher might not have the same richness of association with the word “buffalo” for example. They might know it as a shaggy animal from the North American plains, but would they know it as once on a nickel? Would they associate it with a certain spicy hot variety of chicken wings? Would they understand it as a word used to mean to confuse someone? Would they know it as a city in New York State or the hometown of the football Bills? Mostly, non-natives know primary definitions of lexical items and not their particular associations. Of course, this is not always true because one of my old friends, a university English instructor from the University of Prishtina in the former Yugoslavia (now Kosovo) followed me to the State University of New York at Buffalo to study linguistics.

Finally, particularly for non-native speaker teachers of English who have not had the opportunity to travel and interact with native speakers of English, the pragmatic domain might be a challenge. When should one use “wife” in speaking about one’s own wife?
Is it okay to use “my woman?” (Not). Do North Americans really say “my better half” when they mean wife? How can someone know this without an experience in the target culture? There are just too many English teachers in the world for very many of them to have had such target culture experiences.

Everything I have written above can easily be refuted by the experience of others.
Let’s move on.

Native speaker teachers of English come in lots of varieties. In the United States, most of them begin by knowing very, very little about the language they will teach. Grammar is not commonly taught in the public schools Exposure to terms such as “noun,” “part of speech,” “clause,” and “verb tense” if learned at all will likely have been learned in secondary school foreign language classes. Most new teachers haven’t worked out that linguists treat language one way, descriptively, and popular writers on language treat it another way, prescriptively, but that they must look at language from a third point of view, that is pedagogically. They must make the best choices for models to teach their students, and they must make use of what is known about how oral and written language use differ in English. I would say most native speakers in the U.S. would be hard pressed to explain what grammar is, how it can be taught, and on what basis choices are made.

If we take the special case of ESL teachers who have training in the subject area we come to the trump card of good teaching. Many master’s degree level students have gone through programs where the actual pedagogical apprenticeship was subordinate to the theoretical and research concerns of the faculty. Students receive a degree in their chosen area, English as a Second Language, but they may have learned very little about themselves as teachers, and unless they undertake the work themselves through action and reflection, they are not likely to make much progress. Most teachers in most disciplines would say that they have had little training in how to teach, so they model themselves after their favorite professors. This has mixed consequences for learners in such teachers’ classrooms.

Returning to the two stories which began this essay. In the first, clearly the Korean native speakers could not guarantee student success, and their mastery of the language did not result in any special knowledge gained by their students. In the second story, awareness of teaching methods, hard work, and focus by a non-native did not yield much success either. Both were instances of a lot of input without much output by students. Perhaps my MAT students did not try very hard because their schedules were so full of classes and assignments and they knew that they weren’t going to use Korean beyond my classroom.
In short, they weren’t motivated. Yet as a Peace Corps trainee I was very motivated to learn Korean. Motivation got me a 0+ after three months. Not very much.

Good teaching and good learning go together. Perhaps motivation is the key factor in learning from the student point of view. Without it, not much seems to happen. I realized this just a week ago as I finished teaching two intensive modules on teaching English grammar and testing and assessment with a group of native speakers and non-native speakers. Those who saw themselves teaching English in the future were quite focused on the course content while those who weren’t sure seemed to do less and have less interest. The native speaker, non-native speaker dichotomy had little do to with motivation. However, the limited abilities of some non-native speakers made it hard for them to engage fully in the course.

Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, “Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.” I suppose then that distinctions between native and non-speakers of English become important when one understands oneself and begins to change from that point on. So the importance of these distinctions exist only for those who concern themselves with them. For others, such distinctions may be hard to make (What determines native-speaker competence? Certainly not Bloomfield’s old definition of being accepted as one by a speech community. No matter how well I eventually handled Korean, even “passing” as Korean on the telephone, no one would ever mistake me for a member of the speech community upon seeing me.). Or perhaps the distinctions themselves are counterproductive in the end for as Kierkegaard also wrote, “Once you label me, you negate me.”

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