“More Like You”: Disrupting Native Speakerism Through a Multimodal Online Intercultural Exchange

Abstract

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the harmful effects of native speakerism in English language teaching, including how perceptions of native speaker status are deeply intertwined with race and national identity. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate how teacher training programs might push back on native speakerism by providing classroom opportunities for students to challenge their assumptions about native speakers. This article discusses the disruptive potential of an online intercultural learning activity in which MA TESL students in Sri Lanka communicated through digital platforms with undergraduates in New York City. Drawing on data from interviews and students’ online writing, this study suggests that, as students shared videos and “linguistic landscape” images and discussed language differences, the MA TESL students confronted linguistic and racial diversity in the United States, recognizing the presence of dialects like African American Vernacular English and drawing on shared English as a second language status to gain confidence in communicating internationally. Ultimately, both groups of students began to question their beliefs about the superiority of inner circle speakers. The article concludes by discussing the benefits of the increased awareness of linguistic variation, considering how this might encourage teachers to move beyond native speaker standards in the classroom, and offering practical suggestions for implementing similar projects.

Translanguaging Pedagogy in the ESL Classroom: A Systematic Review

“…A total of six articles reviewed had research purposes that did not reference translanguaging directly but discussed concepts of translingualism with English as the L2 as an outcome in their research (e.g., Eisenstein Ebsworth et al, 2018;Ali, 2020;Lindahl, 2020;Lindahl et al, 2020;Qiu & Fang, 2019;Schreiber, 2019). Holi Ali (2020) as well as Qiu and Fang (2019) carried out their studies in English Medium Instruction (EMI) university courses where students attend classes about a subject matter in English in order to learn content in addition to L2.…”

“…As for Eisenstein Ebsworth et al ( 2018), the authors studied on the perspectives and experiences of English teachers in Puerto Rico on how learners acquire the English language then provided suggestions for the teaching and learning of English as the target language. Lastly, a research by Schreiber (2019) inspected the effects of intercultural exchange among Sri Lankan postgraduate master degree students and undergraduate students from New York. The impacts of the programme were also analysed in conjunction to Sri Lankan students' selfperception as L2 speakers.…”

“…Two other articles from Macaro et al (2020) and Qiu & Fang (2019) carried out their research in different universities in China. The ten remaining research settings of the remainder reviewed articles (e.g., Akbar & Taqi, 2020;Amin et al, 2020;Eisenstein Ebsworth et al, 2018;Holi Ali, 2020;Im, 2020;Lindahl, 2020;Lindahl et al, 2020;Schreiber, 2019;Tsang & Lo, 2020;Turnbull, 2017) were from a college in Kuwait; universities in Pakistan; educational institutions in Puerto Rico; an Omani college; the Korean media; the western United States of America public school district; universities in Costa Rica, Dominican Republic and Mexico; a Sri Lankan university and a New York college; a language-enrichment course in Hong Kong; and, a university in New Zealand according to the articles cited in order. Hence, recent research about translanguaging pedagogy was not particularly concentrated in a geographical setting but all research revolved around the theme of translanguaging in the ESL teaching and learning context.…”

“…In relation to research articles with undergraduate students, 101 China university students aged 18 to 23 with minimum six years of English learning experience enrolled in EMI programmes participated in a quantitative and qualitative research by Qiu and Fang (2019) while the data was analysed accordingly. Schreiber (2019) gathered data from 12 groups of students consisting of Sri Lankan university Masters of Arts TESL postgraduates and New York college undergraduates. A grounded content analysis approach and qualitative data analysis was done for the study.…”

Personal and Professional Readiness of In-service Teachers of English for Culturally Responsive Teaching

“…Holding a global status, the English language has already become the medium of interaction among many non-native speakers (Crystal, 2003;McKay, 2002) which has led to diminishing the role of native speakers in ELT pedagogy (Byram, 2008;Graddol, 2000;Matsuda, 2006;McKay, 2002). This paradigm shift has culminated in that one of the ultimate aims of ELT is preparing students to communicate effectively and appropriately in various settings where speakers' world of linguistic and cultural origins are mostly diverse (Deardorff, 2006;Kiczkowiak, 2019;Schreiber, 2019;Seidlhofer, 2011) and "to which each speaker brings their own cultural frames of reference" (Matsuda, 2017, p. xiii). From this standpoint, ELT pedagogy "goes beyond acquisition of linguistic, non-linguistic etc.…”