Leaving the NEST

One of the most dedicated and experienced English teachers I have ever had the pleasure of working with, recently received the following reply to his job application from the principal of a “well-established” international school in the Middle East.

Your qualifications are impressive but we require that all our teachers are native speakers of English. We cannot afford to have a teacher travel halfway round the world only for our students to be taught by a non-native speaker (however good that teacher’s English may be).

Who is a native speaker anyway? Is it somebody who doesn’t have trouble pronouncing the “th” sound, and is therefore able to say “thing” instead of “sing” or “ting”?  (BTW: International pilots already pronounce the word “three” as “tree” in radio talk). Or is a native speaker of English simply an individual who was born in an English-speaking country? The problem with this theory is that birthplace does not always determine language identity. What about my friend Sean? He was born in the United States, but moved to Malaysia at the age of one, and didn’t return to his country of birth until he was 23? Since he learned to speak English as a foreign language, it would be odd to define him as a native speaker of English.

To make the situation a bit more muddled, let’s take a look at which countries qualify as English-speaking. Would that be the United States, Britain, Australia, and maybe a couple more? Perhaps, but this approach excludes countries where English is not the native language but it is used by the majority of the population, such as India or Singapore. On the other hand, the question of NEST (native English-speaking teacher) or non-NEST appears irrelevant when we consider that only one out of every four people on this planet who use English is actually considered a “native-speaker”.

According to Braj Kachru (1985), English and non-English speaking countries can be organized  into three concentric circles (shown left). The Inner Circle contains nations where English is the primary language. The countries in the Outer Circle have been historically affected by the spread of English, often as colonies; in these multilingual settings English is the second language, generally the major international means of communication. The Expanding Circle involves nations which have accepted English as the most important international language of communication and teach it as a foreign language. However, the divisions in Kachru’s diagram are far from perfect and countries in each circle tend to show a great deal of variation and mobility.

Now I’m no linguist, but I’ve been around the classroom long enough to recognize my strengths and weaknesses as a NEST. It only takes a little research on the net to get a good picture of the other side of the coin, and it is with pleasure that I bow my head to the advantages of being a non-NEST teacher of English. Here are my top three:

1. If all language teachers are native speakers, the students would reach the conclusion that one has to be born in an English speaking country to learn to speak English. As learners of English, non-NESTs make excellent models for their students because they use their personal learning experience in their teaching.
2. In order to compensate for their language “deficiencies”, non-NESTs spend more time preparing lesson plans, making them more effective teachers. Because non-NESTs are teachers and a learners at the same time, they develop learning strategies that can be very useful to their students. Their own challenges with English also make them more sensitive and understanding with their students.
3. Non-NESTs can provide more information about English language because they learned about how it works during their own learning process. Peter Medgyes (1999) points out that NESTs may not be aware of the internal mechanisms operating in the acquisition of a second language, since for NESTs language acquisition was unconscious.

Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski ( 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English. He was granted British nationality in 1886.

If you are still willing to defend the 20th century stereotype that native speakers are by nature the best people to teach their own languages, let me leave you with two quotes, each in its own way related to the ownership of English. One is from Bonny Norton (1997):

English belongs to all the people who speak it, whether native and non-native, whether ESL or EFL, whether standard or nonstandard.

And the other from Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1899), also known as Joseph Conrad, a Polish writer who wrote in English, but did not speak it fluently (with a heavy accent) until he was in his twenties:

I don’t like work… but I like what is in work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – which no other man can ever know.

Looks to me like English is no longer in the hands of a few chosen scholars. It has become a rapidly-growing means of global communication shared by over 2 billion people. It has finally spread its wings and left the NEST for good.