THE POSITION OF A NON-NATIVE SPEAKER IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Keywords:
native speaker, non-native speaker, foreign language teachingAbstract
The English language is the linguistic code of the modern world. As a means of international communication in the globalized world, English is increasingly becoming the property of anyone who is using it (Widdowson 1994). Concurrently, and as a direct consequence of this process, the glottodidactics of the 20th century saw the rise of criticism directed at the traditional, almost axiomatic position on the native speaker’s supremacy in foreign language teaching, which Philipson (1996) termed ‘the native speaker fallacy’. Nevertheless, even today, the vast majority of English teachers - approximately 80% according to Oxford (2010) - remain invisible to the theory of language teaching. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to reassess the role of non-native language instructors and draw attention to some of their assets, especially those pertinent to homogeneous groups of language learners sharing the same mother tongue. Given that we strongly believe not only that non-native speakers are not per se inferior in language teaching, but also that the knowledge of a foreign language does not automatically qualify one as a teacher (Medgyes 1994), in this paper we will re-evaluate the dominant traits of both native and non-native speakers teaching English. Additionally, we will present the results of a study conducted with the students of the English language and literature program at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in Kragujevac in 2013. This study was designed with a view to investigating the students’ beliefs about (non-)native English-speaking teachers.
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