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Abstract

Although the detrimental effects of native speakerism on hiring practices have been
documented by research, little is known about how much native speakerism affects attitudes
of teachers, including expatriate “native speaker” teachers, local “non-native speaker”
teachers and expatriate “non-native speaker” teachers. It is particularly the last group that has
not received much attention despite its numbers growing in the globalised world of the 21st
century. This dissertation aims to examine views on the qualities of an effective language
teacher, discover to what extent, if any, “nativeness” is valued and what potential traces of
native speakerism the three groups may reveal. An open-ended questionnaire is used to gather
data from the total of 86 respondents and semi-structured interviews are arranged with the
total of 32 interviewees for more rich data to be collected. The study reveals some similarities
between the three groups in terms of the qualities they consider most important but
differences regarding certain categories also emerge. For example, the two “non-native
speaker” groups appear to value language proficiency a lot more than the “native speaker”
group while the two expatriate groups appear to consider understanding students’ culture and
knowing their L1 as more important when compared to the local group. Moreover, the results
indicate that “native speaker” teachers tend to be less qualified than their “non-native
speaker” counterparts which potentially implies unfair hiring practices while further possible
traces of native speakerism are discovered in interviewees’ accounts of their personal
experiences.

Course: Applied Linguistics and TESOL (DL) - MA - C2023

Date Deposited: 2022-09-06

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis14015.html