Are They Really “Two Different Species”? Implicitly Elicited Student Perceptions About NESTs and NNESTs

Abstract

The native/nonnative-English-speaking teacher (NEST/NNEST) dichotomy has received much attention in the English language teaching profession. Although research shows that NESTs and NNESTs have different perceived strengths regarding English proficiency, personal characteristics, teaching behavior, and approaches to teaching English, more research is needed to discover learners' situated perceptions about teachers of English as a second language (ESL) in the classroom. A population of ESL students (N = 76) studying in a university-level English language program completed a semantic differential assessment scale that consisted of adjective pairs (e.g., approachable vs. unapproachable). Without being prompted by the NEST and NNEST labels, the students who were taught by either an NEST or an NNEST implicitly described their teachers' attitudes toward students, teaching style and practice in the classroom, and personality. Independent t-tests conducted on the scores for adjective pairs revealed that the NEST/NNEST status did not cause significant differences in students' perceptions, suggesting that NESTs and NNESTs are perceived as equals in the eyes of the students. The study has implications for language teachers and program administrators and promotes teacher empowerment and collaboration.

Are EFL pre-service teachers’ judgment of teaching competence swayed by the belief that the EFL teacher is a L1 or LX user of English?

“…In other words, they seem not to have been afflicted by Native-speakerism as we had feared (Holliday 2015; Holliday and Aboshiha 2009) and they generally did not perceive the teachers with different labels as two different types of teacher (cf. Aslan and Thompson 2016). However, the open-ended data does suggest that some individuals did still hold certain prejudices about teachers depending on whether they believe them to be NS/L1 or NNS/LX users of English, although these were notably in very low numbers.…”

Preservice ELT Teachers’ Native Non-Native Language Teacher Perception

“…When it comes to pedagogy, again, there is not a clear distinction between NESTs and NNESTs according to prospective non-native English teachers participating to the research. Similarly, Aslan and Thompson (2017) argue that a population of ESL students studying in a university level English language program perceive NESTs and NNESTs as equals in terms of teachers' attitudes toward students, teaching style and practice in the classroom, and personality while Ping and Ma (2012) conclude that their NNEST participants perceive higher pedagogical skills over NESTs. However, Alseweed (2012) looking at the same issues through students' perceptions, explain that learners taught by both kind of teachers show explicit preference for NESTs in relation to the teaching strategies used by them.…”

“You Teach What?” Black Males, New Latino South Classrooms, and Wanderlust

“…Challenging the certainty that NESTs are somehow superior to NNEST, Phillipson (1992) first coined the term, "native speaker fallacy." Decades later, a NNEST movement has exposed the "influence of White, modernist, male-oriented, Western, value-laden, discourses of TESOL" (Selvi, 2014) as scholarship for NNEST has examined and theorized NNEST's navigation of their professional identities, agency, status, and legitimacy (see, e.g., Aslan & Thompson, 2017;Reis, 2011;Rudolph, Selvi, & Yazan, 2015;Wolff & Costa, 2017).…”