May 2012

ntz.iup [at] gmail [dot] com

Nugrahenny Tourisia  Zacharias is a teacher-educator at a pre-service Teacher Education at the Faculty of Language and Literature, Satya Wacana Christian University, Indonesia. She obtained her Ph.D. in Composition and TESOL from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, U.S. in 2010. Her dissertation focuses on the identity construction and re-construction of 12 South-east Asian English teachers from Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Thailand when they were taking a (post)graduate in the US.  Her research interest is in the area of identity issues in teacher education, curriculum and material development, and  the implementation of EIL concepts in second language education.  She has published in various national as well as international journals such as RELC Journal and Asia TEFL Journal.  Her recent book publication includes Stories of Multilingual English Teachers (2010), Bringing Linguistics and Literature in EFL Classrooms (Co-edited with Christine Manara) (2011) and Qualitative Research Methods for Second Language Education: A Coursebook (2011). She also involves in training junior and senior high schools teachers in conducting Action Research.

NNEST May Interviewer: Todd Ruecker

Thank you for being our May 2012 NNEST Blog Guest. It has a been a pleasure to learn about your work and to have you share your diverse experiences as a NNEST researcher and teacher in Indonesia, Thailand, and the U.S. In our email communication before this interview, you noted that you have been interested in exploring English as an International Language (EIL) and issues facing NNESTs for a long time. Could you explain how you initially became interested in exploring these topics?

First of all, thank you very much for giving me the opportunities to share my voice in this forum.

I become acquainted with the topic when I was taking a graduate course in Thailand. At that time, I was registered in a course entitled “World Englishes” (WE) taught by Dr. Mario Saraceni. The course was an eye-opening experience for me, to say the least, because it has challenged my previous understandings of English teaching and English language teachers. From my previous education, I realized that my understanding of NNEST identities have been constructed around the projections of NNESTs as both culturally and linguistically deficient. I am not saying though that these unequal construction of NNEST teachers have necessarily led me to become an unconfident English teacher because in Indonesia, English teachers are constructed around various identities and non-nativeness is just one of them.

The WE course in Thailand has challenged my long-standing conceptualization of NNESTs. I was made aware of the existence of the so-called ‘native-speaker paradigm’ that I had thought to be the most appropriate and the only orientation in teaching English. I also was made conscious of the disempowering nature of the native-speaker paradigm for NNES teachers and learners, who made up the largest portion of English users globally. Most importantly, I underwent a deconstruction process of my previous belief and slowly instilled and reconstructed my belief of the value that NNESTs can bring to the profession and English language teaching and learning.

If I may use a metaphor to summarize how important the course has been for my self-confidence as an NNEST, it would be like being given the opportunities to be in the driver’s seat. Prior to knowing EIL concepts, I always sat in the backseat and allowed NESTs lead the way. My role was just to follow and emulate the way they drove the ‘ELT’ car without really being given the chance to be in the driver’s seat. The WE course has given me the realization and courage to take the driver’s seat and contribute to the direction and purpose of learning English. Certainly, this significant change of position (from the passenger to the driver) is not always comfortable as it requires a different set of skills and knowledge, but the feelings of actually being legitimized to hold the steering wheel is priceless. Since that time, I am always interested in NNEST issues and consider myself as “an EIL pedagogue”, attempt to bringing NNEST issues in my teaching, “a believer”, trusting that EIL paradigm will lead to a more fair balance of NNEST and NEST in the field and “a seeker”, always attempting to find and provide ways for EIL issues to exist.

I initially heard about your work through George Braine, who was a speaker at a seminar you organized, which was focused on “Teacher Education in the Era of World Englishes.” Could you talk more about the history of that seminar, the goals behind it, and the role it serves in raising awareness of issues that NNESTs face?

The seminar was, in fact, a part of a series of activities to raise awareness and integrate EIL issues in the department. It is based on the belief that awareness of EIL issues needs to be implemented through multilevel approaches. In the English Department, the awareness of EIL is raised through the faculty’s annual seminar, classroom pedagogy, teacher research and the department curriculum change, to name a few.

The selection of the seminar theme was a response to, what I believe, a lack of awareness of EIL issues in my own English department as well as in Indonesia. The seminar was expected to jump start and continue the conversation about the role of teacher education programs especially in the Expanding Circle with regard to EIL and NNESTs issues. Another purpose is to give a role model of what successful English teacher-scholars looks like. Therefore, all the plenary speakers (George Braine, Suresh Canagarajah, and Mario Saraceni) were specifically selected to showcase successful “nonnative speaker” scholars. For pre-service students, who made up the majority of the seminar participants, the selection of NNES plenary speakers encouraged them to envision their roles as NNEST scholars. In fact, after the seminar there were many students who personally came to me and shared how much they have been inspired by the speakers and felt more confident as future NNESTs.

In communicating with you and reading your 2011 article in k@ta, “An English Teacher Struggles to Establish Voice in the Periphery,” I learned that you have worked to raise your students’ awareness of the challenges NNEST teachers face and help them begin to reenvision their status as NNESTs through discussions/readings on World Englishes in your classes. However, you noted that you have had mixed success in this regard. Could you first talk about some of the ways you have integrated NNEST issues in your classes? Then, could you share some of the successful moments and less successful moments you’ve had when doing so?

Well, I have tried to integrate NNEST issues in my classes since the time I came back from the US in 2010. Interestingly, I felt students are more accepting now compared to the time when I introduced them to NNEST issues back in 2005, the experience that I wrote in the k@ta article. In all the courses I teach, I try to ‘slip-in’ NNEST issues either as the content of the course or peripherally. For example, in my Research Methods class, I gave students a text by David C. S. Li entitled “Researching Non-native Speakers’ Views Toward Intelligibility and Identity: Bridging the Gap between Moral High Grounds and Down-to-earth Concerns” and asked students to dissect the possible methodology in the article. For example, I asked the students to adapt the original questionnaire for Chinese students and targeted it for Indonesian students. During the discussion of the questionnaire, issues such as ‘the relationship between accent to NNEST identity construction,’ ‘issues of intelligibility’ and ‘L1 identity, accent, and NNES identity’ were some examples of discussion topics during the design of the questionnaire.  Some students were excited by the article and decided to use the topic for their own thesis.

In another class, Microteaching, I challenged the students to develop their 20-minutes mini teaching to reflect EIL orientations. Compared to the previous Microteaching classes, one interesting, yet significance, change that I noticed was that students started to design their own materials. One student created her own listening text about ‘food’ featuring local foods such as soybean cake (tempe) and fruit salad (rujak). Another student consciously drew a topic from current events happening in Indonesia like Sea Games. Many students admitted that knowing EIL approaches helped them to be more confident beginning NNESTs.

Of course at this point, there is varying degree of success and I am not sure if I can pinpoint one successful moment or less successful moments. As stated by many students, an EIL approach is relatively new in Indonesia so it is important to find ways to provide more outlets where EIL issues can be accommodated and also, “appropriated” to existing beliefs and practice.  Therefore, many students admitted that they were ‘confused’ and felt disoriented. Despite their confusion, it is interesting that many students, such as those in the Microteaching class, were so excited about knowing the approaches. Based on the focus group I conducted during the reflection session, students loved it because the approach validated their bilingual self. One of them said that prior to knowing EIL approach, she was not confidence as an English teacher because her English was decorated with Javanese (the local) accent. After knowing the approach, it was interesting that she has the courage to record her own voice for the listening text. Some even admitted that they want to integrate some parts of EIL into their teaching practicum. Others confessed that knowing the positive contribution of NNESTs boosted their self-confidence as beginning English teachers.

Canagarajah (1999) noted, “Among the worst culprits to popularize and/or legitimize the native speaker fallacy are the Periphery academic institutions themselves” (p. 83). In reading your work, this idea came back to me at several points. For instance, at one point you mentioned how Korean Universities require a U.S. doctoral degree for tenure. At another point, you explained how you really became aware of the benefits that NNEST teachers bring to the profession in a World Englishes course in a Thai MA program taught by NESTs. Finally, you noted that many of the graduate NNESTs you worked with for your dissertation project were exposed to critical pedagogies “challenging the monolingual bias in the profession” during their studies at a U.S. university. You said you plan to run for the dean of Faculty of Language and Literature at your institution in Indonesia, with the goal of raising awareness of EIL issues. What kind of changes would you like to see periphery institutions make in this regard?

I would like to contextualize my answer with regards to pre-service teacher education programs because those are the contexts I have been working in the last 10 years and have the most knowledge of. I think NNES teacher educators, who are actually the forefront of teacher education programs, need to truly believe in themselves and the positive contributions they bring to the teaching profession and English Language teaching. This is very important because “the culture of inferiority” (Rubdy, 2009, p.159) continues to be pervasive in periphery contexts especially in Indonesia. I continue to witness many teachers who often apologized if their English is decorated with local accent and labeled it as “bad.” So I think, the change needs to start from within, that is, NNESTs need to believe and advocate themselves that they too can be the role model for their learners.

In this regard, teacher education programs need to provide ways to create a space for identity reflection so that pre-service students can be aware of the teaching paradigm they have been exposed to and provide ways to question and even challenge them. Teacher Education programs need to focus on polishing pre-service teachers’ language skills so that they themselves can be confident of their language skills and competence.

At the institutional level, teacher education programs in the periphery need to focus on generating and appropriating knowledge from and to their own context. This is important so that periphery institutions can minimize “the culture of dependency” (Rubdy, 2009, p. 160) on the so-called Western countries.

Following on the previous comments and question, I’d like to ask what role you think NESTs can and should play in raising the status of NNESTs in ELT.

I am not sure if they have significant roles in raising the status of NNESTs in ELT because personally, I am of the opinion that it is the NNESTs who really need to be made aware of the positive contributions they can give to the profession. I know that this is hard since many NNESTs are educated under the native-speaker paradigm where their English is, most often, described as interlanguage or error-laden and thus, need to be “appropriated” to NS norms.

However, it might be good if NESTs can also be made aware of the current sociolinguistic profile of English uses and users and its’ implications on the teaching of English. This will help NESTs so that they do not perpetuate the native-speakerism in the field. For example, in many departments and/or institutions in Indonesia I often witness a tendency to hire NESTs simply because of their nativeness, not their expertise. Under such conditions, I personally think it is fair if NESTs, similar to their fellow NNESTs, attempt to increase their professionalism, perhaps, through pursuing higher degree and joining trainings in TESOL, for example.

In your book and 2010 article in The Journal of Asia TEFL, you explore the construction of teacher identities of 12 EFL teachers in U.S. TESOL Graduate programs. Could you share with us some of the major findings from this study?

There are generally two major findings from the study. First, is the importance of exposing NNES(T)s to critical pedagogies especially those relate to NNEST identity construction and the underlying power relations between NNES(T)s and NES(T)s (Pavlenko, 2003). If the goal of TESOL teacher education is not to indoctrinate or train NNESTs to robotically perform prescribed teaching behaviors, which most often come from the West, but to educate NNESTs to strengthen their unique characteristics and to use their own voice and knowledge in sound teaching practice, then helping NNESTs develop their own voices and establish positive identities becomes an essential pedagogy.

Second, the findings of my study also point to the need for integrating issues of returnee teachers in the university program. Teacher returnees are no longer the “personas” that they were when they left their home countries. Due to the fluid nature of identities of teacher returnees, attempts need to be taken to establish “an effective mechanism” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to ease and assist their reentry processes into the home institution. Providing a space where teacher returnees can share their experiences while they were studying and living abroad might be useful. Such information-sharing activity can be useful for teachers who are planning to study abroad as well as for the department to accommodate the needs of teacher returnees to ease their re-entry process into the department.

Following on the previous question, could you tell us more about your own process of identity construction when pursuing graduate studies in the U.S.? Did previous exposure to scholarship on NNESTs and World Englishes help you adjust more easily to the program than some of the students you worked with did?

That is a very intriguing question. If you want to make a certain dish, does reading the recipe will make the cooking easier? Perhaps to a certain extent but not necessarily. Similarly, although prior engagement in scholarship on NNESTs issues might help to a certain extent, I found that the awareness did not guarantee my easy access to the U.S. communities of practice. I experience more or less the same struggles shared by many Asian graduate students when it came to position myself in the U.S. classroom. For example, although I knew that U.S. graduate professors expected active participation, I also underwent silent period or moments in the classroom and similar to many Asian students, I felt guilty for being unable to be active as expected.

Even though the awareness of NNESTs issues did not guarantee easy access to the U.S. academic communities, it sensitized and made me aware me of my own identity formation including my feeling of discomforts and uneasiness. Most importantly, I was able to, in some ways, ‘make peace with myself’ and quickly found strategies to help myself. Some of the strategies that I found useful is being more prepared when coming to class, including annotating the assigned reading, and discussing with fellow classmates.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with the readers of the NNEST Blog, especially new NNESTs establishing their identities as teachers and scholars?

I would suggest that they continue to develop professionally. This includes publishing and presenting in conferences as those opportunities will help you to align and make friends with other NNESTs and share your struggles and success stories with them.

Thank you again for the opportunity. It’s been truly an honor.

References

Canagarajah, S. (1999). Interrogating the “Native speaker fallacy”: Non-linguistic roots, non-pedagogical results. In G. Braine (Ed.), Non-native educators in English language teaching (pp. 77-92). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rubdy, R. (2009). Reclaiming the local in teaching EIL. Language and Intercultural Communication, 9(3), 156-174.

Pavlenko, A. (2003). “I never knew I was a bilingual”: Reimagining teacher identities in TESOL. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 2, 251-268.

Zacharias, N.T. (2011). An English teacher struggles to establish voice in the periphery. K@ta, 13(1), 64-77.

Zacharias, N. (2010). Stories of mulilingual English teachers: Negotiating teacher identities in the land of the natives. Germany: VDM Verlag.

Zacharias, N.T. (2010). The teacher identity construction of 12 Asian NNES teachers in TESOL graduate programs. The Journal of Asia TEFL, 7(2), 177-197.

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 April 2012

nutica@gmail.com

Nuria Villalobos holds a Master’s degree in Linguistics/TESL from Indiana State University, where she was an exchange student through ISEP. She has taught English for 10 years and is currently a professor at the Escuela de Literatura y Ciencias del Lenguaje, Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica. Her interests include L2 teacher education, global issues in language education, and non-native speaking teachers-related issues. Nuria has participated and presented in many national and international congresses, including TESOL. Her work has been published in Costa Rica, Brazil and Spain.

 NNEST April Interviewer: Ana Solano-Campos

 Can you tell us about yourself? When did you first become interested in learning and teaching languages? 

I am Costa Rican and, therefore, a native speaker of Spanish. I first learned English at the age of 13, when I started high school, since the teaching of English in Costa Rican public elementary schools was declared mandatory by the government in 1994. As a senior student in high school, I still did not know what I wanted to study at the university, but becoming a teacher was definitely not one of my options. It is interesting how things turn out because I am now a professor of English and I love it. Looking back, I realize how the desire of being an educator was probably hidden deep inside of me.

When I was little, to celebrate Children’s Day in our school every September 9^th, one of the students in every group was chosen to be the teacher that day, so he or she would have to plan a class and actually teach it. I remember I played the role of the teacher more than once, and I enjoyed it so much! My mother is a retired Spanish teacher, so she would help me plan the class and prepare for it. One year, I read a story about a pine tree for my “students” and I had them make a drawing about it. To my surprise, one of the kids gave me his beautiful piece of art as a present and he wrote: “Para la Niña Nuria” (To Teacher Nuria). I felt so loved and I thought it was simply wonderful to be a teacher.

I think my love for languages was born as I grew up, since my mom’s passion for books and the Spanish language has always been present in my life. I recall how she would ask me, a little girl, to spell different words as we walked in the streets of my town. That is just one of the many examples through which I was taught the value of languages.

When did you first start working on NNEST/NEST issues? 

I became aware of the native/non-native speaking teachers issue while I was studying Portuguese in Costa Rica. All the teachers in this school were Brazilian, but just a few of them were certified teachers. Since I was already an English professor while studying Portuguese, I always paid attention to certain aspects of the class. As a student, I did not like to have a teacher whose main reason for coming to Costa Rica was to surf and who considered teaching Portuguese “an easy way” to earn money and have a living here. The fact that some teachers did not even know how to explain the language or could not manage the class made me feel impotent. I started thinking about the differences between a non-native language teacher who has actually prepared him or herself to teach, and a native teacher who stands in front of a class believing teaching his or her native language is a piece of cake.

Since I experienced this as a student myself, I linked it to my career and began doing research about NNEST/NEST issues. The more I read about it, the clearer I was of the need to demystify the native speaker fallacy, and of how important it is for non-native educators to be competent in the language being taught. One day I read an e-mail from Toni Hull in the NNEST IS e-list, asking for advice on how to help teachers in an EFL environment maintain or improve their listening and speaking skills. After I shared my thoughts on it, I was encouraged to write an article in the NNEST Newsletter. I also communicated with George Braine, who inspired me to do research on the NNEST/NEST issue.

You have been a language teaching professional for over a decade. What are the challenges that you have faced as a NNEST teaching EFL in Costa Rica? In what ways have you tried to raise awareness of NNEST/NEST issues in your classes? 

Non-native language teachers are sometimes not considered as good as native teachers, and this situation occurs in different countries, in a variety of languages. I experienced this discrimination at a language school in Costa Rica some years ago. I remember I called this place to request information about an English teaching position and the very first question they made was: “Are you a native speaker of English?” This surprised and frustrated me at the same time. Since my answer was no, they told me they only hired native speakers of English as teachers of this language. It is terrible to know that some people overlook a professional’s education and experience and gives importance to his or her native language only, like if that said everything about him or her.

EFL teachers face challenges all the time; from motivating students and providing them with opportunities to learn the language more naturally, to maintaining proficiency in the language and having credibility as professionals. Because the majority of teachers in EFL contexts are non-native, discrimination towards them would seem illogical. Nevertheless, it might occur, like it did to me. Every school has its own teaching policies, and there is also the wide belief that a native speaker of English would make a better teacher. That is why it is so important to bring awareness on this issue to academic coordinators, teachers and students. I think we as non-native teachers have all the potential to become excellent role models, but in order to do that we must first believe in ourselves, be proficient in the language and grow as professionals.

Having learned English as a Foreign Language from non-native teachers myself, just as my students, is a reflection of how it is possible to do so. In addition, since learning English in an EFL context is more challenging, it immediately gives the learner a great sense of satisfaction. Sharing my personal experiences with students makes them understand and value what it is to be a non-native English teacher. Moreover, by sharing my experiences presenting at conferences and writing articles, students realize how much we NNESTs can contribute to the ELT field.

In your article in the Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, you shared the results of a survey on ESOL/EFL teachers’ perspectives about NNEST/NEST issues. The teachers you surveyed came from various countries around the world. Can you tell us about your study? What are the implications of your findings?

The purpose of my article “Insights towards Native and Non-native ELT Educators” is to create awareness regarding this issue and to recognize the fact that both, native and non-native teachers, can be good educators because of the strengths that each one has. I was curious to know the opinion of English teachers, so I carried out an online survey to 113 teachers in ESL or EFL contexts, 65 of them were NESTs and 48 NNESTs. It was interesting to find out that the belief of a NEST being the best at teaching the oral part and the NNEST at teaching grammar and writing is a mere assumption. In my study, most participants believe this preference for teaching certain skills has nothing to do with their native status. In addition, the majority of participants believe students prefer a native speaker for an English teacher, which shows that the native speaker fallacy is still strong. In terms of discrimination, the percentages were quite similar, but represented the opposite. In the case of native teachers, the majority has not been discriminated against; however, for non-native teachers, most have. Regarding the influence of having an accent, most non-native teachers think it does not affect them negatively while most native teachers disagree. Interestingly, for most of the NNESTs surveyed, it is very or somewhat important for them to sound like native speakers.

A lot of research regarding the NNEST/NEST issues has been done in the last years, which seems to be helping create awareness in the language teaching field. Nevertheless, the native speaker fallacy notion appears to be still powerful, even among teachers. This makes me wonder if perhaps a change of mind is what is missing. I believe we can contribute to this by making non-native teachers reflect on their confidence, proficiency and preparation. Professional development is crucial for both, native and non-native language educators, and there are infinite ways how we can grow professionally.

You are not only a language educator, but also an avid language learner. In addition to English and Spanish you also speak Portuguese. You are also currently pursuing a Masters in Teaching Spanish as a Second Language. What drives your passion to learn and teach languages? Has being both a Non-Native English Speaking Teacher and a Native Spanish Speaking Teacher given you any particular insights into the complexities of the native speaker fallacy?

I love languages because they make me a more open-minded, tolerant and wise person.  Learning about cultures is another passion of mine. I am an eternal learner, and I know I will always learn something new about languages and cultures. Being an educator is not just teaching the different skills of a language, it is more than that. Education involves learning about everything and from everybody, it means giving the best of me to make others better, as well as myself. I love learning how languages are different, but most of all, similar. I believe it is essential for a language educator to be bilingual or even better, to know several languages. Experiencing the process of learning a second or foreign language is amazing, and it is important to have gone through it if we want to teach someone another language since we would understand that person better. Finally, by knowing different languages, and therefore cultures, we help to have a better world because as we learn another language, we have more tolerance and comprehension towards one another. Here is a nice quote that summarizes this: “Monolingualism is an illness, a disease which should be eradicated as soon as possible, because it is dangerous for world peace” (Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1989)

One of the reasons why I decided to study the teaching of Spanish as a Second Language is to experience being a native speaking teacher, besides the fact that I love Spanish of course. It is now going to be the other side of the coin for me. Even if I speak Spanish as a native language, I do not know how to teach it. It might not be as difficult in terms of methodology since I am already an English teacher and so I know about pedagogy. However, teaching certain skills such as grammar, writing and pronunciation requires a deeper knowledge for which speaking the language is not enough. Logically, I feel more confident teaching English than Spanish, even if English is my second language. I believe it is critical for native speakers to actually learn the language they teach because that way, they will have more knowledge and confidence. As a matter of fact, having credentials to teach a language should be a must when hiring an educator, regardless of being a native or non-native speaker. This does not mean that the native speaker should be preferred over the non-native one because they are both capable of doing a good job. The native status must not determine hiring practices, especially if non-native speaking teachers (NNSTs) are academically prepared while the native speaking teachers (NSTs) are not. That action would represent nothing but discrimination.

Your most current research focuses on teachers, students, and program coordinators’ perceptions of Native and Non-Native speakers -not only of English, but of other languages like French, Portuguese and Italian- in Costa Rican language schools. You set out to investigate how or whether the native speaker fallacy applies to the learning and teaching of other languages. What were some of your findings? 

Since the research regarding the native speaker fallacy has been done mostly in ELT, I decided to investigate if the same occurs in other languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian. So, I chose several language schools in Costa Rica where these languages are taught. Most of them are well-known institutes around the country and the world: Intercultura, Centro Panamericano de Idiomas, INTENSA, Instituto San Joaquín de Flores, Alianza Francesa, Dante Alighieri and the Fundação de Cultura, Difusão e Estudos Brasileiros. I conducted a survey to the academic coordinators of the language programs in those seven schools, as well as by approximately 10 teachers and 30 students from each institute. In general, 7 coordinators, 58 teachers and 207 students completed the questionnaire, for a total of 272 people. Most teachers were native speakers with a language teaching degree or certification. The requirements for hiring language teachers vary a lot in these academies; in one of them it is an institutional policy to hire only native speakers, in another one the students are the ones who request native speakers as teachers, and another school requires having 50% of NSs and 50% of NNSs as teachers.

The findings of this study are very interesting. Most administrators, teachers and students believe it is very necessary for a language teacher to be a native speaker. Likewise, when asked what students prefer for a language teacher, the majority chose a native speaker. In these schools, nearly all teachers are native speakers of the languages they teach, so the participants were inquired if they agreed with this or not and why. Most administrators, teachers and students showed their favorable opinion towards this because they think it gives the schools more credibility, authenticity, a better quality and a status of serious institutions. Moreover, the opinions about having unqualified language teachers varied a lot. Most students and teachers agree with it while the majority of administrators disagree. Something surprising was that nearly all students would not mind having Costa Rican teachers. Besides, mostly all coordinators would choose a NNS with teaching certification and experience over a NS without any teaching certification or experience, if they were to hire a language teacher.

The results of this research reflect the existence of the native speaker fallacy in these language schools. Something important to highlight is that NNESTs seem to be more common in language schools due to the expansion of this foreign language and the need for more teachers specialized in this area. On the other hand, all Spanish teachers appear to be NSs, mostly Costa Rican, for obvious reasons. In the case of the other languages, NSs prevail, with a few exceptions. The reason for this could be that despite being foreign languages too, there are less certified teachers, at least in Portuguese and Italian. I believe this might promote the misconception that native speakers of those languages are the ideal teachers.

What is the current situation of the NNEST/NEST debate in contemporary English language teaching and learning in Costa Rica? 

In Costa Rica, English is learned and taught as a Foreign Language, which means that in all public and private institutions, nearly all teachers are non-native speakers of English. It is more common to find NESTs in private institutions than in public schools because in order to work for the government, teachers are required to have a teaching degree and go through a difficult selection process. The same goes for private language schools. Due to this fact, students are used to having Costa Rican English teachers. As everywhere, NNESTs are expected to be proficient in the language regardless of the place where they work.

Teaching hiring practices vary depending on the educational setting. In public elementary schools and high schools, it is rare to find NESTs, as mentioned above. At the university level, it is possible for NESTs to get a teaching job as long as they hold a teaching degree,  since only a certification is not enough. This might vary in private universities though. In general terms, discrimination towards NNESTs might occur only in private language schools, as I described before, but fortunately it is not quite often. After doing my most current research and presenting the results at an international congress, I realized that conversations about NNEST/NEST issues are not as common in Costa Rica as it should be. It seems that many accept the native speaker fallacy and take it for granted because of the lack of proficiency, confidence, and self-awareness. English teachers in Costa Rica should make an effort to be more critical towards the NNEST/NEST debate because we are all part of the ELT profession.

You are also a contributor for PocketCultures.com How does your work in PocketCultures complement your interests in issues of linguistic hegemony?

PocketCultures is a website with more than 30 contributors around the world who write posts about their own cultures, or the countries they are living in. Being the contributor of Costa Rica for PocketCultures has provided me with a wonderful opportunity to let people know about my country and its culture, and to learn about many others. Moreover, reading and writing posts gives me the exposure to the English language needed for any foreign language teacher. Since there are contributors from different countries such as the United States, India, Canada, England, New Zealand, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Romania, Japan, among others, I keep learning not only about their cultures, but also about their use of the language.

At the same time, it has been a great teaching tool for me as an educator. Every time I publish a post, I share it with friends, colleagues and students in different parts of the world. This represents good practice for learners of English and a nice way of promoting the use of English among NNESTs. I have asked students to access the site, read a post they find interesting and talk about it in class. In addition, in a culture course I taught last year, my students watched the video “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Adichie. After discussing it, they wrote their own single stories. They were so nice I had to share them! So, I thought a good way to do that was to publish them in PocketCultures. A culture video about Colombia and Costa Rica, created by some students, was also published in the site in order to promote students’ creativity and culture awareness. These are some of the reasons why being a PocketCultures contributor has enriched my life as a person and as a language professional.

What are your future research, professional, and personal plans?

I am a very ambitious person with a great deal of personal and professional plans. I believe we should make the best out of our lives to accomplish everything we dream of. In the professional field, I would like to graduate as a Masters in the Teaching of Spanish as a Second Language. When I do, I would like to teach English and Spanish abroad so I can have the experience of working in different countries and with different people. I would certainly enjoy this because I would be in contact with various cultures and lifestyles. After getting some more experience, I would like to pursue a Ph.D. overseas.

I hope I can continue doing research on the NNSTs/NSTs issues, hopefully comparing teachers’ and students’ opinions in different contexts. I am also interested in critical pedagogy and language teaching in general, for English, Spanish and Portuguese. Among my personal plans, I would love to do some volunteering, learn many more languages and live in different cultures.

Thank you Nuria!

References

Villalobos Ulate, N. (2011)  Notions of non-native teachers in Costa Rican language schools.

Memoria del III Congreso Internacional de Lingüística Aplicada, Heredia, Costa Rica:  

Universidad Nacional, 334-351.

Villalobos Ulate, N. (2011). Insights towards native and non-native ELT educators. Bellaterra

Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 4 (1), 56-79.

Skutnabb-Kangas, T. & Phillipson, R. (1989). ‘Mother tongue’: the theoretical and

sociopolitical construction of a concept. In Status and function of languages and language

varieties, Ulrich Ammon (ed), Berlin: de Gruyter, 450-477.

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March 2012

elis100 [at] hotmail [dot] com

Elis Lee has been teaching at Glendale Community College since 1998. She received a B.A. in English from UCLA and an M.A. in TESOL from Cal State University, Los Angeles. She has written articles for TESOL Matters, CATESOL Journal, and the NNEST Newsletter. Elis has presented at TESOL, CATESOL, and Regional CATESOL conferences. In addition, she was the coordinator of the NNLEI Interest Group from 1999 to 2001.

NNEST March Interviewer: Davi S. Reis

Many thanks to my colleague and graduate assistant, Rae Balog, for her invaluable help with various aspects of this interview.

1. Could you tell us about your educational and professional background and why you decided to become an educator?

I guess it’s true when people say that “nothing happens by accident.” I was in law school at the Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP), which is considered the best higher education institution in Brazil, when I came to the United States one summer to visit my boyfriend. I had never considered leaving law school because I was the first one in my family to ever have passed the difficult admission exam into the elite university. Giving up was not an option. However, the summer I spent in the U.S. left an impression strong enough for me to consider leaving everything in Brazil. I was tired of the violence and very disappointed to learn about the corruption in politics. Up until my admission to law school, I was a poor, naïve, idealistic Brazilian who wanted to become a judge or enter politics to help people, but learning about how the law worked, or didn’t work, crushed my dreams. Without any hope that I could really leave my country and my family and being afraid to crush my mother’s dreams to have a daughter graduate from USP, I decided to discuss the matter with my mother. To my surprise, she agreed to let me come and begin a new life with new possibilities.

When I came to the United States, I did not know much English. I had never attended a language school in Brazil, and my knowledge of the language was limited to what I had learned in my weekly one-hour classes beginning in middle school. But I was determined to continue my education in the U.S., so I went to a local community college and was placed in ESL classes. In the middle of my first class, my teacher said that I “learned very fast.” He suggested that I take English 101 right after that class. I always felt insecure about my language skills, so I took an English class below to get me prepared to compete with native speakers. In addition to the obvious vocabulary disadvantage, a lot of the material studied also required cultural knowledge, but I persevered and even took honor English classes.

When I transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I still felt my English was not strong enough even though I had graduated with honors. I wanted to be able to speak, read, and write like a native speaker, so I majored in English literature thinking that that was the best way to master the language. I think I succeeded in this regard, but after four years in this country and almost at the end of my studies, I felt a little lost as to what to do with a degree in English. I still felt that it was not good enough to work as an editor, which was the job that my professors mentioned.

“By accident,” I chose to take a TESL class as an elective. It opened my eyes. In that class, my professor told me that I was such a good learner of English that she was sure I could make a good teacher of ESL. The seed was planted that day. I decided I was going to become an educator so other ESL students could see that it was possible to learn ESL. I had the option to stay at UCLA as a graduate student, but at that time, I wanted to learn how to teach and focus on the practical side of TESOL, so I went to California State University, Los Angeles and finished my master’s in TESOL in one year.

My biggest obstacle was my own insecurity, which came in the form of a graduate school classmate’s voice. One day when I proudly said that I wanted to have a full-time teaching job, a classmate asked me, “Why would anyone hire you when they could hire me?”  I wanted to prove to this classmate that I knew there were some disadvantages in being a non-native speaker, but there were also many advantages.  After working at a language school for a year, friends suggested that I apply for a part-time position at Pasadena City College and Glendale Community College.  I buried my insecurities and tried to convince myself that I had something a native speaker could never have: the experience of learning ESL just like my students. After one semester working part-time, I applied for a full-time position and was hired.  I chose to teach at a community college because I wanted my students to be encouraged by a positive example. I know what my students feel because I was in their shoes. I also know that they can succeed even when they say they are “too old” to learn English.

2. You mentioned that you chose to teach at a community college because you wanted to encourage students by being a positive example and by letting them know that you have been in their shoes. Can you elaborate on why you feel reaching students at the community college level is important to you and the profession and why you can identify with students in this context?

As students in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, we learn about the “Critical Period Hypothesis” in graduate school. We hear about how we lose “plasticity” in the brain after puberty. This theory explains why adults have more difficulties learning a second language and even explains “fossilization” in language. But I believe that most, if not all immigrants, are unaware of this theory, and yet they come into the classroom already feeling defeated.  When they come to a community college, they are searching to better their lives, and they are motivated. However, at the same time, it is as if they are telling themselves that they know the language and age barrier are too strong for them to succeed. The main reason I wanted to focus on community college students is to not just tell them they can succeed but show them how it is possible. I was there; I was them. Like my students today, I was an adult in a community college trying to learn English. What I experienced and did, which ultimately led to my success, is much the same what the students are experiencing, and I hope that they, too, feel successful.

At the same time, I think that due to globalization, many professionals today are like me. There are many non-native speakers of English who are teaching or plan to become teachers, especially in California. Many of these professionals may have the same insecurities or even face discrimination. Perhaps when they read success stories, they too can feel empowered and focus on the positive aspects of teaching English as a non-native speaker. I want my students and the non-native professionals to be able to understand that their tasks, namely the task of learning ESL as adults and the task of teaching ESL as non-native speakers are very difficult tasks, but they can overcome the difficulties.

3. In the NNEST Newsletter of March 1999, you made a very timely analogy between what has been referred by many as the NNEST ‘movement’ and a human ‘wave’ at a sporting event. One of your arguments in this piece is that NNESTs must join forces to make this ‘wave’ more and more powerful and significant in the field.  For example, you described the creation of the NNEST Caucus within TESOL (now an Interest Section) as “the wave (…) on its way”. Now, 13 years later, how would you characterize this ‘wave’ or ‘movement’ today? Additionally, to what extent do you feel you have personally helped to make or strengthen this wave? How so?

Organizing and starting a wave at any sporting event are the hardest parts, for they require the participation of many and the synchronization of minds. However, unlike waves at sporting events, an intellectual wave does not have all bodies in one place looking at one coordinator. On the contrary, an intellectual wave consists of minds that think alike but may not be at the same stage of thought. It’s harder then to coordinate this wave because all minds must agree on a starting point and what direction to follow without having a coordinator to look at. When I wrote that article, the number of non-native speakers in TESOL programs was on the rise.  With that, schools were seeing an increase in the number of teaching applicants who did not speak English as their native language. There were problems on both sides. On one side there were non-native TESOL professionals who felt insecure about their skills, were discriminated against despite their qualifications, and felt powerless to deal with these issues. On the other side there were employers who did not see the value of the non-native professionals, quickly misjudged and dismissed well-qualified candidates due to a non-standard accent, or just were not sure if someone who did not speak English as a native language could teach it. We needed to start a “wave” to educate both sides. Dr. Lia Kamhi-Stein was instrumental in this part. With her as the co-founder and first coordinator of the NNEST Interest Group in CATESOL, we started gathering the minds in one place. Without her organization and coordination, the “wave” would have never started. Today the “wave” is strong. I helped with the beginning of the wave, but it is still going because more people have joined and because now we have more leaders to coordinate each section and make sure we all raise our arms and keep it going.

4. You have played a very active role in the professional CATESOL organization as the NNEST Interest Group coordinator. How and why did you get involved in this particular organization and what have you learned through this experience?

Well, this organization was the beginning of the “wave.” Dr. Kamhi-Stein served as my mentor and role model, and when she got me involved in CATESOL and TESOL, I started to see many facets of the profession. I attended conferences, I presented at conferences, but I did not know much about the inner workings of CATESOL. Once I joined the board, I learned leadership skills and the importance of being a leader in the field. There were many reasons to join this organization, but the most important ones were to increase the visibility of non-native speakers in the field and give them a place to call “home,” where they can find others in the same situation. The experience greatly increased my self-confidence and drive to succeed.

5. How did you prepare yourself for this type of leadership position? What advice could you offer emerging NNESTs who seek to become more integrated in the NNEST community and assume a leadership role in it and/or in TESOL as a whole?

At the beginning of my graduate studies, I thought that professional organizations were only for “professionals,” people who were already working in the field, not students learning about the field. Again, with guidance from Dr. Kamhi-Stein, I learned that belonging to a professional organization could enhance my learning process. In fact, when one becomes a member of TESOL or CATESOL, one has a chance to not only learn from the experts but also join the caucuses or interest groups and be a part of what is happening in a specific area of the field. To explore the “wave” idea, I would say that one can be a spectator and watch a wave during a game. Joining a professional organization would be like being at the game itself. It is only by being at the game that one can have a chance to be part of, to experience, and to feel the wave. There is a lot to be learned that does not fit in a book. Leadership is one of the greatest lessons I received from CATESOL.  It is a wonderful organization because it makes you feel as part of a team. The members of the board make sure that new people coming in know that they are not alone. I don’t think I prepared myself for the position as much as they prepared me for it, but before I joined the board I followed little steps. I volunteered at conferences, read proposals for presentations, went to interest group and level meetings, helped organize conferences, presented, and tried to learn as much as I could about every position in the organization. Anyone who wishes to be part of the organization in a leadership position can start by doing the same things. At the very beginning, one can attend regional and state conferences and start networking. The members of the board are always present, and approaching a member in person is always a good start.

6. You have participated in various CATESOL development conferences through which lesson plans and workshops for fellow educators are offered. What would you describe as your greatest accomplishment and/or most memorable moment as an NNEST leader during these events?

There have been several memorable moments, but I think one of the most memorable ones happened many years ago at the statewide CATESOL in Pasadena, when we had the first meeting of the newly formed NNEST Interest Group. I remember feeling very anxious that not many people would show up, but when I saw that the room was packed, with standing room only, I realized I was part of something important. Everyone in that room felt relief to see that we were not alone. The audience listened to Dr. Kamhi-Stein.  I talked about my experience and saw heads nodding in agreement. I met wonderful people that day, people who went on to become leaders, people who today serve as role models.

7. In your TESOL Matters piece (Kamhi-Stein, Lee, & Lee, 1999), titled How TESOL Programs Can Enhance The Preparation Of Non Native English Speakers, you discuss the importance of role models for teachers in preparation. Can you discuss the impact that role models have had on your own career and professional development? Additionally, do you perceive yourself as a role model for teachers in training?

My mentor and role model Dr. Kamhi-Stein has been very important. When I saw that a non-native speaker could be a professor in a graduate program, I felt empowered. It was at that point that I started thinking that I could become a good teacher in spite of my non-nativeness. It was when I started working even harder towards my goal of succeeding as a language learner and teacher and becoming a leader in the field. I don’t know if I can be considered a role model for teachers in training, but I hope that I can serve as inspiration not to give up. I want them to see that they can be excellent professionals even though English is not their first language. I want them to tell themselves that they can find a job even when they are competing with native-speakers.

8. You conducted a research study (Lee & Lew, 2001) on the voices of nonnative English speakers in a Masters of Arts Program through diary studies. How did the context of your study and the participants you worked with relate to your own experiences as a then Master’s student in the United States? Did you ever make use of a diary in a similar way as your study?

As I read the participants’ diaries I could see the parallels between what they wrote and what I had felt as a student. I could see the constant struggle with self-doubt and the tough reality of being an English language learner trying to become a teacher. The only difference was that at the time the participants were in their graduate programs writing about their experiences, the NNEST Interest Group had already been created and changes were already happening in the field. There were other studies and articles published, and the professional environment was more positive towards non-native speakers than when I was in a graduate program. The diaries served an important purpose, however, because the participants were encouraged to externalize their feelings and see that they were not alone. With externalization comes awareness of problems and possible solutions. More importantly, when one writes about possible shortcomings, there is also that self-defense mechanism that kicks in and makes one look at the positive side. That is, from the participants’ diaries I could see how the first entries reflected a stronger self-doubt in their abilities, especially when they compared themselves with classmates who were native speakers or when they had discussions in which the native speakers referred to cultural background the non-native speakers did not have. In later entries, though, the participants became more self-confident. It was the same as my experience as a Master’s student. When I started teaching, I also kept a diary which also showed the same self-doubt at the beginning and a gradual increase in self confidence, which came from not only experience in the field but also from connecting with other non-native professionals.

9. How many years have you worked as an NNEST at Glendale Community College? As an experienced NNEST teacher and now long time resident of the United States, how do you position yourself vis-à-vis others (both in TESOL and otherwise) who are unaware of both the challenges and the opportunities encountered by NNESTs?

I have been working at Glendale Community College since 1998. I have learned a lot and continue to learn about the language, the culture, and the profession. As with everything, nothing is perfect and there are many obstacles, but that’s what is called EXPERIENCE. I can say now that I am an experienced language learner and teacher. The experience I have gained makes me much more self-confident as a teacher. While at the beginning of my teaching I was afraid to reveal to students that I was not a native speaker, now it is one of the things the students hear from me on the first day of classes. In addition, although I still feel somewhat at a disadvantage when I talk to native speakers, my involvement in professional organizations made me realize that I can overcome this feeling by focusing on what I have to contribute to the field. That is, I believe that all professionals in the field can benefit from educating themselves about the challenges and accomplishments of NNESTs. To the NNESTs, the benefits are obvious: if they learn about the challenges, they can make plans to deal with the challenges and learning about the opportunities can direct them towards the right path in the profession. What about the others? They can learn that being a native speaker of a language does not automatically make a person a good teacher of that language. I know that although I am a native speaker of Portuguese, I would not be the best Portuguese teacher because I am not trained for that and have no experience in that area. In the same manner, just because a person was not brought up speaking English does not mean that he or she cannot become a great teacher of ESL.

10. As an experienced ESL Teacher, to what extent do you feel that your formal education (BA and MA) prepared you, as an NNEST, to confront and help dispel the native speaker myth? What advice would you give to teacher preparation programs regarding this issue?

Both my BA and MA greatly prepared me to confront and dispel the native speaker myth. With my degree in English Literature from UCLA, I feel prepared to talk about some aspects of the language that not even all native speakers can understand. I learned the history of the language from its birth and developed vocabulary and cultural background by reading. With my MA, I felt prepared to pass the knowledge I attained to my students using effective methods.

One of the things I wish teacher preparation programs would do is to use the nonnative speakers in their program in a way that would benefit all of the teachers in preparation. It would be great for a teacher to find out what worked and what didn’t BEFORE a lesson. Nonnative speakers could share their English learning experience from their cultural point of view so all teachers to-be could learn about cultural awareness when preparing a lesson. All parties could benefit from learning about the pitfalls of teaching different language groups. Non-native speakers would learn to see their experience as an asset instead of an impediment  and native speakers would have the chance to draw from the non-native speakers’ experience and improve their teaching methods.

References:

Kamhi-Stein, L., Lee, E., & Lee, C. (1999). How TESOL programs can enhance the preparation of nonnative English speakers. TESOL Matters, 9(4). Online at: http://tesol.org/s_tesol/sec_document.asp?CID=196&DID=813

Lee, E. (1999). Wanted: A wave of role models. NNEST Newsletter, 1(1), p. 11. Online at: http://nnest.moussu.net/news/news1.pdf

Lee, E., & Lew, L. (2001). Diary studies: The voices of nonnative English speakers in a master of arts program in teaching English to speakers of other languages. The CATESOL Journal, 13(1), p. 135-150. 

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NNEST of the Month

February 2012

lifen [underscore] lin [at] hotmail [dot] com

Li-fen Lin recently completed her Ph. D. in the department of linguistics at the University of California at Davis.  The title of her dissertation was On the Developmental Journey: An Ethnographic Study of Teacher Identity Development of NESTs and NNESTs in a US MATESOL Program.  She began her university education by majoring in English language and literature at National Taiwan Normal University.  After graduation she taught English at Taipei Municipal Ming Der Junior High School and later joined a three-year experimental research project on teaching English to elementary school students at the National Experimental High School (NEHS) in Hsinchu, Taiwan.  While studying for a MA at the University of Southern California, she taught in the OIS ESL program. Upon graduation she returned to Taiwan and became a full-time lecturer in the English Department at National Central University in Taiwan for two years. There she taught undergraduate students academic English, and also designed and taught courses such as English Composition, Oral Training, Language Acquisition and Teaching, and Introduction to Linguistics to English major students.  While she was a doctoral student at UC Davis, she taught academic writing to international graduate students new to UC Davis and also introduction to linguistics. After graduation from UC Davis she was a lecturer in Stanford University’s English for Foreign Students program in the summer of 2011.  Also, Li-fen has been active in the TESOL and CATESOL organizations. She was the web manager of TESOL’s NNEST interest group from 2009 to 2011 and has been the coordinator of CATESOL’s NNLEI interest group from 2010 to present.  She has also given several presentations at TESOL, CATESOL, and AAAL conferences. 

NNEST February Interviewer:  Terry Doyle

1.  Tell us about your educational, linguistic, and teaching background. For example, why did you decide to enter the major in your university in Taiwan to prepare to be an English teacher in Taiwan? Also, what experiences have you had as an English teacher in Taiwan and in the United States?

 I grew up speaking Taiwanese at home and learning and speaking Mandarin Chinese at school. I started to learn English in junior high school as everyone else in Taiwan at that time. I had great luck with my English teachers through high school, which helped me develop my interest in English language and literature. Also because of the high status of English as a foreign language in Taiwan (Chen, 2003; Tsao, 2004), I chose English as my major when I studied at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). As to why I decided to become a teacher, the feminization and high occupational prestige of the teaching profession in Taiwan (Fwu & Wang, 2002) “encouraged” me to think teaching would be the best career choice for me. And having found how much I love teaching since I was at NTNU, I have been committed to this profession, no matter whether I am given the chance to teach English or Chinese, young kids or adults. 

I began my TESOL career teaching secondary school students English as a foreign language in Taipei. In my third year of teaching, I joined a three-year experimental research project on teaching English to elementary school students. Upon the finish of the three-year project, I attended the University of Southern California (USC) to advance my study in TESOL. At USC, I taught as an ESL Teacher in the OIS English Language Program, teaching English to visiting scholars, international graduate students and their spouses for a school year. Hereafter, I taught English to EFL and ESL students at primary, secondary and tertiary level. After graduation from USC, I returned to Taiwan and worked as a full-time lecturer in the English Department of the National Central University in Taiwan for two years. At UC Davis, besides working as a teaching assistant teaching introduction to Linguistics, I also taught as a graduate student teaching Chinese and Advanced Academic English for International Graduate Students. In the summer of 2011 I was a lecturer in Stanford University’s English for Foreign Students program.

2. How do you compare your experiences as an English teacher in Taiwan vs. your experiences in the United States, especially concerning the development of your teacher identity?

When I taught at the secondary school in Taipei, I was a homeroom teacher as well as an English teacher. I was responsible for every aspect of my homeroom students’ total education. My teacher identity was maintained and reassured through my success in performing the roles of an educator, an empathetic counselor, a language model and a grammar expert. Then when I participated in the 3-year research project, I had the chance to work with NESTs as a team member to design and develop English teaching activities and materials. Even though I was aware of the privileging of NESTs in Taiwan, especially from parents’ perception, I did not find my identity as an English teacher challenged. Rather, I recognized my strengths of sharing the L1 and culture with students and my ability to manage big classes and to act in different roles as needed (Llurda, 2004; Medgyes, 1994; Tatar & Yildiz, 2010). In fact, I embraced my new identities as an elementary school teacher, a materials writer and a researcher. 

In the United States, I strived to reposition myself through my roles as an international graduate student in English in the US academic community, as an NNEST, and as a new member functioning in the society of my target language. At USC, I was the only non-native English speaker teaching in the OIS ESL program. This experience familiarized me with the diverse needs of students from different first language backgrounds and discrepant English proficiency levels. My confidence in ELT reached a new high because I found myself capable of adjusting and adapting teaching methods and styles in responding to these diverse needs. The positive teaching experience at USC gave new meanings to my identity as a TESOL professional. In short, my identity as an EFL/ESL teacher, as I reflected and wrote in the introduction of my dissertation, “has been in constant flux and change in relation to my linguistically and culturally diverse students and the immediate contexts in which we were situated” (Lin, 2011, p. 11).

3.  When did your non-nativeness as an English teacher become visible to you, and how did this affect and shape your future research and career expectations? 

What discrimination and unfairness have you experienced personally, and how have you dealt with these incidents?  Were you treated differently as an English teacher in Taiwan and in the United States? 

It was a discriminatory hiring practice that heightened my awareness of the gate-keeping role my nonnative status and race/ethnicity played in the TESOL profession, especially in American society. At the end of my first year as a doctoral student back in California, I was recommended and assigned to teach academic writing to international graduate students as a graduate student instructor for the following year. However, I was questioned by the graduate ESL program coordinator, who had an MA degree as I did, and was asked by her to take the very class I had been assigned to teach first. Her reason was that I was an international student and a non-native speaker of English. My nonnativeness suddenly became visible to me then. 

My lived experience of marginalization pointed to “the absurdity of an educational system that prepares one for a profession for which it disqualifies the person at the same time” (Canagarajah, 1999, p. 77).  To understand the “absurdity” of such an education system and practice, I started to investigate how the professional identities of both NES and NNES student teachers as ESL/EFL teachers are shaped by professional discourses in the MATESOL program, and how their (non)native status influences this enculturation process and their teaching practices. The purpose of my dissertation was to pursue an understanding of the discursive process of negotiation and construction of teacher identity.

4.  Your dissertation completed for your PH. D. at the University of California at Davis last fall was a longitudinal ethnographic study in which you examined case studies of four student teachers in an MA TESOL program in one of the California State Universities; one participant was an international student, one an immigrant student, and two were “native speaker” students born in the United States. You state that one reason for choosing this topic was because “the NNEST/NEST dichotomy remains the most prevalent way of theorizing teacher identity in TESOL” and that “the process of the search for and construction of professional teacher identity, especially within MATESOL programs, is understudied in the field of TESOL and Applied Linguistics.” Can you explain how your study begins to fill the gap in the literature of TESOL and Applied Linguistics? How has your study added to the literature of Applied linguistics, teacher identity formation, and NNEST issues? 

Before I answer this question, I want to thank Terry again for believing in my work and reading my draft. My dissertation study contributes to the previous NNEST literature and the literature on ESL/EFL teacher identity in three ways. First, drawing on ethnography as methodology, this longitudinal project contributes new insights into the importance of teacher identity development in the process of learning to teach in an MATESOL program from the student teachers’ perspectives. My participant and non-participant observation of the student teachers’ interactions in multiple dimensions inside and outside the classes they took or taught provides a situated description and situational comprehension of the kind of participation and negotiation that student teachers experience in the process of becoming an ELT professional. These are issues that quantitative research neglects to explore, and that interview-based research cannot provide data for (Lin, 2011). 

Secondly, since no study has addressed the issue of teacher identity in TESOL and related fields by comparing the identity construction of prospective NNES and NES teachers within an MATESOL program, this study contributes to the bodies of existing research by providing a comparative study of NNES and NES student teachers’ identity construction within a MATESOL program. By including both NES and NNES student teachers, this study gives voices to student teachers coming from marginalized groups as well as from the dominant group. This dissertation adds to the understanding of  how the idealized NES and the marginalized NNES student teacher negotiate and articulate their professional identities as they participate in dialogic interaction in the MATESOL program and in the wider TESOL community (Lin, 2011). 

Finally, this study contributes to the understanding of teacher identity construction through a situated examination of the linguistic choices made by student teachers to position themselves in relation to their colleagues and other interpersonal, institutional, and social contexts. Following Weedon’s (1987) idea that language and identity are mutually constitutive, my dissertation study looks locally at multiple aspects of teacher identity in relation to the larger social, cultural and political contexts through language and discourse.  (Lin, 2011).

5.  The last sentence of your dissertation is “Developing and gaining one’s autonomy to navigate our continuous journey in development should be the central task for teachers, student teachers, and teacher trainers.”  How has your research helped you, the participants in your research, and readers of your dissertation to develop and gain such autonomy?

Working with my participants in this dissertation project has allowed me to continuously examine and reflect on my professional self. In the course of writing this dissertation, I have found that my own teacher identity has been transformed over and over again through their narratives of struggles and growth. Their stories add to our understanding of the realities facing student teachers in the local contexts like this MATESOL program and how they navigate their developmental journey. I feel deeply grateful to my participants and it is my hope that this dissertation brings their voices, NESTs and NNESTs, to the dialogue on teacher identity in language teacher education and teacher development. It is also my hope that this dissertation and the stories of my participants will engage my readers in the dialogues with themselves and others, internally and externally, and hopefully help to develop and gain their autonomy in this life-long developmental journey.

6.  As an ESL teacher in a community college which is in the same city as a well known and respected MA TESOL program in a large public university, each semester I have the opportunity to work with one or more student teachers from this MA TESOL program. What advice can you give me on how to better mentor student teachers? In particular, should I and if so how can I focus on their identity formation as a mentor teacher? 

As I concluded in my dissertation, “a focus on teacher identity construction in a teacher preparation program allows student teachers to become more conscious and in control of their learning-to- teach trajectory” (Lin, 2011, p. 229). It is important that each student teacher has an individual sense of his or her identity development. Teacher educators and mentor teachers should support and encourage their student teachers to explore, experiment with, negotiate, and create their pedagogical selves. As I have known from your work, you have committed a great deal of time and work helping your student teachers develop pedagogy that is sensitive to their immediate local social and cultural contexts. Your work is an excellent example of how mentor teachers’ meta-awareness of student teacher identity development provides space and opportunities for student teachers to self-initiate their professional development.

7.  You are a wife of a busy hard-working husband and also the mother of two young children.  How do you find the time, energy, and motivation not only to complete a PH.D. degree, be the coordinator of CATESOL’s NNLEI interest group, be the web manager of TESOL’s NNEST interest group, give XX presentations at TESOL and CATESOL conferences in the past three years, be busy writing a book version of your dissertation which you hope to publish in the next year, AND take care of two kids and a husband?  

Upon further reflection on my life as a doctoral student and a mother of two children, I am grateful to my family for their unflagging support and love. Without their support and love, I wouldn’t have the time and space to accomplish what I have been inspired to do. 

Balancing motherhood and doctoral work had been a great challenge for me. One thing I learned from my own experience is to be flexible. I was a mother first, though it was my newly added identity. I cooked, fed, played, gave a bath to my children before I could open my dissertation file to take on the role of a doctoral student in front of my laptop. I was a wife last because I thought my helpful husband could take care of himself while I focused on being a mother and a graduate student. But there were always times when the situations went against the priorities I set. Sometimes I didn’t get to go near my dissertation file for two whole weeks when my children got sick. Very often, my helpful husband just wouldn’t take the kids to the park by himself because he wanted me there too. Not to mention that I had other various roles I played at the same: a daughter, a teacher, a friend, etc. So I needed to learn to be flexible to curb my anxiety of not being able to fulfill them all. I had to learn to set realistic goals for my daily schedule. And I had to admit it to myself that it takes a long time to earn a doctorate, especially juggling the conflicting demands of motherhood and doctoral studies at the same time.

As for the motivation, I have been inspired and encouraged by the work done by the leaders of our community. I have been fortunate to meet and get to know and work with some of these extraordinary leaders: Kathleen M. Bailey, Luciana de Oliveira, Terry Doyle, Lia Kamhi-Stein, Ahmar Mahboob, Ana Wu, to name a few. Working with them enables me to see the importance and action of shared leadership, mentoring and collaboration. I believe that active participation can lead to the changes we wish to see. So I follow their lead to assume leadership roles in hoping to help further the goals of our community. Inside or outside of TESOL, I hope I will be a part of the force that leads us to a better world.

References

 Lin, L. F. (2011). On the Developmental Journey: An Ethnographic Study of Teacher Identity Development of NESTs and NNESTs in a US MATESOL Program.   Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Davis.

 Canagarajah, A. S. (1999). Interrogating the “native speaker fallacy”: Non-linguistic roots, non-pedagogical results. In G. Braine (Ed.), Non-native educators in English language teaching (pp. 77-92). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

 Chen, S. C. (2003). The spread of English in Taiwan: Changing uses and shifting attitudes. Taipei: Crane Publishing Co., Ltd.

 Fwu, B. J., & Wang, H. H. (2002). The social status of teachers in Taiwan. Comparative Education, 38 (2), 211-224.

 Llurda, E. (2004). Non-native speaker teachers and English as an international language. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 14(3). 314-323.

 Medgyes, P. (1994). The non-native teacher. London: Macmillan.

 Tatar, S., & Yildiz, S. (2010). Empowering nonnative-English speaking teachers in the classroom. In A. Mahboob (Ed.), The NNEST lens: Non native English speakers in TESOL (pp. 114-128). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, Cambridge Scholars Press.

 Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

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January 2012

Anne-Marie Truscott de Mejía is an Associate Professor at the Centro de Investigación y Formación en Educación at Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia.  She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics in the area of Bilingual Education from Lancaster University, U.K.  Her research interests include bilingual classroom interaction, the construction of bilingual curricula and processes of empowerment, and bilingual teacher development. She coordinated a research project sponsored by the National Ministry of Education on the state of the art of bilingual education in different regions in Colombia, as well as a diagnostic study about the conditions and needs of three bilingual public (state) schools in Bogotá in their transition towards bilingualism.  She is the author of a number of books and articles in the area of bilingualism and bilingual education both in Spanish and English.  Her latest publications include Forging Multilingual Spaces (2008) and Empowering Teachers across Cultures (2011), jointly edited with Christine Hélot.

January Interviewer: Ana T. Solano-Campos

1.      In Power, Prestige and Bilingualism, you point out that elite bilingualism is a world-wide phenomenon.  What is elite bilingualism? And what are the implications of this for teaching and learning around the world?

From what I know of so-called “elite” bilingualism, most programmes, at least in Colombia and other parts of Latin America, have developed from private schools set up originally to cater to children of foreign speaking people who settled in the country.  So today we still have various schools for French, German, Swiss, Italian, English and Hebrew speaking children.  For many years, these were the point of reference for the elite bilingual programmes developed for Spanish-speaking Colombians.  When they came into vogue, about 30-40 years ago, they were modeled on these community bilingual education programmes, and therefore paid a lot of attention to the development of the target language (in this case the international language the school had adopted rather than the student’s native language, or L1).  In many cases, Spanish, the L1 of most of the students, was used in such subjects as Religion, Physical Education, and Music, while English or another foreign language was used for the “high profile” subjects of Math, Natural Science, Economics, and others.  There was also very little reference to cultural considerations, as these were presumed to be non-problematic since the students came from the dominant language and cultural group.   It was considered important to have native-speaking teachers of the target language, as the development of a “native-like” accent was (and still is) seen as essential.  Moreover, most of the teachers hired had little knowledge of how to teach second or foreign language learners and therefore fell back on their knowledge of how to teach first language learners.

Now, although things have changed a lot in this respect and teachers and school principals are more conscious of the challenges involved in educating bilingual students, I think there are certain implications which can be drawn for teaching and learning around the world.  First of all, it is important to recognize that in a profession which historically has had a monolingual, foreign language ideological orientation, as Grosjean (1985) has noted, a bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person; and that therefore a bilingual education programme needs to focus on the bilingual development of the learners and not on second or foreign language learning per se.

Furthermore, I think that the question of academic language and content learning needs to be balanced in the curriculum by attention to communicative language interaction if, as is often the case, parents expect their children not only to be able to do examinations in the foreign language, but also to interact with speakers of that language.  I also feel that the notion of “the native speaker” and “native-like” accents needs to be problematized in light of the current debate as to whether the native speaker is now an anachronism.  In my experience, many teachers currently teaching in elite bilingual programmes have not questioned the value of native speaker expertise. Rather, they automatically assume that native speaker expertise is superior to the expertise of high-level bilingual teachers, who can also act as linguistic and cultural role models for their students. This is especially important in these days where, according to Graddol (2006), most interactions in English are between non-native speakers of the language.

Finally, I would recommend that the sensitizing of students to cultural similarities and differences be carried out from an intercultural perspective which is not limited to the celebration of festivities per se, but which tries to engage learners in an on-going debate leading to deeper understanding of the meanings and implications of difference, diversity and similarity from a historically-situated viewpoint.

2.      In what ways does the meaning of the term “bilingual education” differ in Latin American countries, like Colombia, and the United States?

As I understand it, this is a rather ironic situation. Whereas the term “bilingual education” in the US is generally seen from a rather negative point of view (one publisher told me that it was difficult to sell books with a title using the expression), the notion of “dual language education” is high profile.  The situation in Colombia, and I believe in many other Latin American countries, is different.  Bilingual education is often seen as the key to success, both in education and job-wise.  People believe, often against contradictory evidence, that if they are bilingual, understood here as being proficient in English, then they are en route to a better future.  Thus, bilingual education is a very positive selling point for private schools.

This, in fact, influenced the last government under Alvaro Uribe to name the language and education policy implemented in 2005 as “The National Bilingual Programme”, instead of referring only to ELT.  It was considered a more international perspective. In fact, up to now, it has taken into account the learning of only one language, English, and coincides with what many of my students have told me when they interview people about being bilingual: that to the majority, bilingualism means “investing in English”.  This “investment” has extended from the private sector to all public schools in Colombia and thus has made bilingualism potentially available to a much wider public.

3.     How do notions of inequality, deficiency, or prestige permeate bilingual and intercultural education in Colombia? How are these notions currently being contested?

As Enrique Hamel (2008) has noted, in Latin America, there are two sets of actors involved in bilingual education, situated at different poles of the social and educational scale, who hardly ever meet.  These are the teachers, researchers and school administrators who work in high prestige, bilingual education programmes for those learning so-called “majority” or international languages, where the bilingualism involved is valued and thus “highly visible”.  At the other end of the scale are the programmes designed for speakers of “minority” languages, particularly indigenous languages, where bilingualism is frequently undervalued and discriminated against and is thus “invisible” to most of the mainstream.

In view of this situation, a group of academics decided to do something practical to try and reduce the gap between researchers, teachers, students and others concerned with different types of bilingualism and bilingual education in Latin America.  In 2004, we organized a symposium in Buenos Aires, Argentina, (International Symposium on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education in Latin America – Bilinglatam) aimed at providing a forum for those working in bilingualism and multilingualism in both majority and minority languages.  This was initially supposed to be a “one-off” event, but has, in fact, continued, with symposia being held in Bogotá, Colombia in 2006, in São Paulo, Brazil in 2009 and more recently in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2011.  These events have helped to put people from Ethno-education programmes as these are known in Colombia (and as Intercultural Bilingual Education in the rest of Latin America), in contact with their counterparts who work with foreign languages. They have also helped to find points of contact among differences in policies and practices of bilingual and multilingual education in different Latin American countries, and thereby to contest the positioning of different types of programmes and languages as more or less prestigious and “useful” than others.

4.      When did you first become interested in bilingual education?  What motivated you to do research in this area?

My interest in bilingualism started, in fact, from very a personal situation.  My husband is Colombian and speaks Spanish as a first language, while I come from London and my first language is English.  I was trying to decide how to bring up our two children bilingual in English and Spanish and started asking around and reading about bilingualism.  The “one person – one language” was the formula recommended and seemed to work, up to a certain point.  I gradually became increasingly interested in the subject, and when I started work at Universidad del Valle, in Cali, I decided that I would like to do some research in the Colombian educational context on the effectiveness of foreign language teaching and learning.   I had noticed that the level of English Language Teaching (ELT) in the public schools was extremely low and thought that there must be an alternative.  The only other possibility seemed to be to look at the private bilingual school system, which had enjoyed a high level of prestige and success for over 80 years.  This led, in fact, to my PhD research project on code-switching at preschool level in two bilingual schools in Cali.

At that time (the late 80s), there was very little research being carried out in the field in Colombia.  Anything interesting in this area was related to indigenous bilingualism, but bilingualism in majority or international languages was not really recognized as a suitable study for research. I am glad to say that today this has changed radically and that bilingualism is commonly referred to in discussions about language and education in Colombia.

5.      How can teachers become empowered?

In our most recent book, “Empowering teachers across cultures”, Christine Hélot and I try to tackle this question in different linguistic and cultural contexts.  I don´t think there is any single way to bring this transformation about.  What I do believe is that helping teachers to become aware of power differences, both in the classroom and in the education system they work in, may lead to a realization that they can take responsibility for decisions about such things as the curriculum, about teacher education, about the use (or not) of code-switching in their classrooms, grounded in their pedagogical knowledge and experience, and not necessarily think their voice is not valued in these types of decision.  While it is a truism to state that no-one can empower anyone else, it is also possible to facilitate conditions where people can be helped to empower themselves, and the first condition for empowerment is conscientization, as Freire (1974) said many years ago.

When working with schools on these issues, what we have tried to do is literally to “let teachers´ voices be heard”.  In the discussion groups on specific readings in the area of bilingualism and bilingual education in our projects, which include different actors from the school community, teachers, parents (when possible), head teachers, students, and academic researchers, we try to keep silent, to encourage others to relate aspects of their practice to the issues under discussion.  This, in fact, is quite difficult to do sometimes, as we have found.  As academics, we are perhaps very accustomed to giving our views about the topic under discussion and often find it hard to take a back seat.  However, the result is worthwhile.  In one of the projects, teachers from the preschool section, who are sometimes seen as the least capable participants in such discussions, took the lead and provided a wealth of interesting and valuable considerations on their experience of teaching their bilingual learners.

One important consideration that I have found in projects relating to teacher empowerment is that it is vital to involve school administrators, such as coordinators and school principals,in these activities.  The decision making resulting from empowerment needs to involve both top-down, as well as bottom-up perspectives.  Sadly, I know of cases where teachers have tried to bring about change, but these attempts have been thwarted by the school administration.

Another important aspect in helping teachers and their students to become more empowered is to encourage them to carry out small-scale classroom research projects, which may or may not be action research projects.  Many teachers still think that research is done by those who work in universities, but often when they realize that they themselves can create knowledge and possibilities for change in their schools and classrooms by careful observation, analysis, and reflection on the implications of the findings of classroom data, then things begin to change.  I´m not saying that all teachers will respond positively to the carrying out of classroom research project.  Many will say that they do not have time in their busy schedules for such activities.  However, in my experience, there are always one or two committed individuals who will be encouraged to take on the role of “teacher-researchers”.  Then, of course, the door is open for teachers to work with their students on projects aimed at raising awareness on issues of power, resistance and empowerment.

6.      What research projects are you currently working on?

At the moment, I am currently finishing two longstanding projects along with other colleagues.  One has to do with the formulation of “Orientations” for schools in Colombia who wish to become bilingual or multilingual in international languages, such as English or French.  The Ministry of Education commissioned this project and hopefully, in 2012, the document will be published as official Ministry policy.

The other project has to do with language and content teaching and learning at the primary school level.  We looked at how teachers in eight bilingual primary schools in Bogotá taught content areas, such as Natural Science and Math in English, and their views on the difficulties, challenges and decisions involved in this.

Next semester, we are beginning a new project relating to teacher empowerment.  This time we are going to work with another university in the west of the country, Universidad del Quindío, on a joint project looking at how certain teachers in bilingual schools in Bogotá and in Quindío implement change in their classrooms, leading to empowerment, not only of themselves but of other colleagues working in close collaboration with them.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk about some of the things we have been doing recently, here in Colombia, and I do hope some ofwhat I have said here resonates with people who may read this blog.

References

Freire, P. (1974). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.

Graddol, D. (2006). English Next. London: British Council. Available for free from the website of the British Council.

Grosjean, F. (1985). The bilingual as a competent but specific speaker-hearer. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 6, 467-477. Also in Cruz-Ferreira, M. (Ed.). Multilingual Norms. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010 (19-31).

Hamel, R. E. (2008). Plurilingual Latin America: Indigenous languages, immigrant languages, foreign languages- Towards an integrated policy of language and education. In C. Hélot & A. De Mejía (Eds.), Forging multilingual spaces: Integrated perspectives on majority and minority bilingual education, 58-108. NY: Multilingual Matters.

Hélot, C., & de Mejía, A. (2008). Forging multilingual spaces: Integrated perspectives on majority and minority bilingual education. NY: Multilingual Matters.

de Mejía, A. M., & Hélot, C. (Eds). (2011). Empowering teachers across cultures. Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang.

de Mejía, A. M. (2002). Power, prestige, and bilingualism: International perspectives on elite bilingual education. Buffalo, NY:  Multilingual Matters.

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December 2011

Xuan Zheng is a Ph.D candidate in Language and Rhetoric in the English Department at the University of Washington, where she serves as a graduate instructor of College Composition. Grew up in Wuhan, China and finished her BA degree in English Linguistics and Literature from Central China Normal University, she holds an MATESOL degree from the University of Washington. In China and the U.S. she has taught English language classes, Chinese language classes and College Composition. Her research interests include non-native English speaking teacher identity, intercultural rhetoric and communication, and global Englishes. She has presented (and is to present) in several international conferences in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Her publications have appeared in TESOL Newsletters and the International Journal of Learning. She is now writing her dissertation research, which is a qualitative exploration of how four international teaching assistants of College Composition negotiate their identities in becoming competent English writing teachers.

NNEST December Interviewer: Todd Ruecker

Could you please describe your background as a language teacher and talk some about the similarities and differences between your experiences teaching in the U.S. and China?

I started teaching as a student teacher in a high school in Wuhan, China. As a young, novice teacher, I had many creative ideas in making the English class more fun and communicative: e.g. using PowerPoint, pictures, and games. However, many classes in high schools in China at that time were still test-driven, so I didn’t have much freedom in creating materials. Besides, although as a young teacher I naturally got along with the students, I wondered whether the students learned. That’s why I came to the U.S. for an MATESOL program: to become a better English teacher. Once I started the program, I realized how different teaching was in the U.S. In my first ESL class as a student teacher, I was embarrassed by not being able to understand a student’s kind greeting “How are you doing” because I was not familiar with his accent. Luckily, my first-time teaching experience was quite pleasant: working with an experienced master teacher I not only learned to teach without a textbook, but also to provide opportunities (e.g. student-led discussions) for students to take ownership of their learning. The class was also a true intercultural experience for me: I have learned a lot about different cultures from my diverse group of students, who are from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia. Other than having more freedom and diversity teaching in the U.S., the other difference compared to China is that it is more challenging to feel like a legitimate English teacher in an English-speaking country.

How and when did you first become interested in researching NNEST issues?

Being an NNEST was never an issue before I came to the U.S. Since our English curriculum in China was based on a standard American/British English model, and we had relatively little contact with English speakers, students like me assumed that British/American English was more “native” and thus, better. I spent hours watching American TV shows, memorizing idioms, and polishing my accent towards an American one. Not until I got to the U.S. did I realize my English was never considered “true American.” Because of the insecure feeling about my accent, combined with the uneasiness of being a new teacher, I didn’t feel confident in starting teaching right away like most of my American classmates. Besides, I was denied the TA-ship in teaching ESL anyways because I didn’t get 290 out of 300 in an English-speaking test for non-native speakers.

At the time when I was considering whether I should change into teaching Chinese as a profession, I was introduced to the NNEST movement in the very first class I took in the MATESOL program at UW, taught by professor Yasuko Kanno. I felt extremely empowered when reading professor George Braine’s collection Non-Native Educators in English Language Teaching, because for the first time I felt I was not alone. The non-native authors in this collection, many outstanding scholars, certainly became my role models. Meanwhile, the literature on World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca also changed my view on the ownership of English and reshaped my definition of English proficiency: the versatility to communicate with speakers from different linguistic backgrounds in English. I started to view myself as a bilingual, bicultural teacher whose linguistic and cultural background can benefit her students. I am very lucky to have many supportive mentors such as Sandra Silberstein, Suhanthine Motha, and Anis Bawarshi, who have always acknowledged the unique strengths I bring as a bilingual teacher, an international scholar and a human being. I also have many wonderful colleagues, American and international, who listen to my struggles and growth as an English teacher in the U.S. and offer their help generously. Because of these experiences and people I decided to do the NNEST research. I hope the literature can empower other international students like me in becoming a better English teacher.

You have described yourself as “an insider of the Chinese community in U.S. universities.”  How has that insider status helped you in researching the experiences of Chinese students studying in the U.S.?

Since I came to the U.S., I have been living in a house with other Chinese international students. In interacting with my housemates and watching them (as well as myself) getting adapted to the life in the U.S., I felt like an ethnographer working “in the field.” When we go out to school everyday, we speak English and learn to become a professional in our fields. But when we return to our house, we discuss in our native Chinese tongue what we see as strange or interesting and share our strategies in surviving the challenges. Speaking Chinese creates this safe space for us to negotiate conflicting identities. Since I have stayed in the house for the longest period, I have interacted with different housemates who shared a similar acculturation process but also with individual differences. These day-to-day interactions and in-depth observations are invaluable resources for my studies on Chinese students in the U.S. because I know first-hand that the struggles many Chinese students have are not academic or linguistic; their academic endeavors are intertwined with their personal lives, their emotions and their investment in the future.

Congratulations on winning the NNEST Paper of the Year award for your recent TESOL presentation, “Teaching World Englishes to Undergraduates in the U.S.”  In that presentation, you talked about a unique composition class you taught at a university in the northwestern U.S.  Could you please describe that course for our readers and explain the rationale of focusing a composition course on World Englishes and the benefits of doing so?

This is a required College Composition class for freshmen students, which are usually taught by graduate students in the English department. The goal of the class is to practice academic writing. Although the outcomes of the class are the same, teachers all have freedom in choosing topics for students to discuss and write. I have chosen the topic of multilingualism and identity as the course theme. As course materials, I have assigned scholarly and popular readings on language attitudes and multilingual speakers’ lives: Amy Tan’s (2010) Mother Tongue, news articles about the English Only Debate in the U.S., TESOL articles on bilingual education, Lippi-Green’s (1997) Teaching Children How to Discriminate: What We Learn from the Big Bad Wolf, and the documentary American Tongues (see References). For writing assignments, students were asked to write reading responses to the articles, conduct interviews with multilingual speakers, reflect on their use of multiple languages/Englishes, make arguments about language policy, and do research on the value and usage of a non-mainstream variety of English.

I have designed the course this way not only because I have a TESOL background and found the topic empowering for a bilingual teacher like me. I also read that in today’s world where most people live in a multilingual context, it is increasingly important for native English speakers to think about the issues of linguistic diversity and their responsibility in an intercultural communication exchange. Later on I found to my surprise that my “native speaker American undergraduates” were actually a mixed group of Americans, immigrant students and international students. The topic on multilingualism and different Englishes generated a great amount of debate among them because of their diverse background, and it proved to be empowering for multilingual students who tend to struggle in a regular academic writing class where Standard English is emphasized.

In an article based on your TESOL Presentation, you wrote, “Although I am aware that terms such as ‘native speaker,’ ‘non-native speaker,’ and ‘standard English’ are problematic, labeling is inevitable in teaching this topic.”  Could you talk more about the problematic nature of these labels and give advice on what teachers and researchers should consider when using labels, given that you acknowledge labeling is necessary?

This is the question that I have always wondered about and may not have a good answer to it. I found the terms problematic because ever since I came to the U.S., I did not meet anyone that speak or write in a “standard English” that I used to learn in China. People all seem to communicate in a different style and with a different accent. My “native speaker” students make grammar mistakes all the time in their papers. I have also met many people in the U.S. who moved here since young and do not know which language is considered their mother tongue.

I think I believed in these terms back then in China because I did not know how English was actually being used. Besides, images of “native speakers” in commercials for language schools as well as textbooks tend to be tall, good-looking Caucasians. In the commercials for test-preparation schools, they wear a tie; if the school is more modern and communicative, the teachers are young and attractive. Besides English schools, anything that has to do with America is good and will be sold well in China. For example, even a heater will sell better if it is named “Harvard Heater,” even when it has nothing to do with Harvard University.

Now, I knew new terms (e.g., “multilingual speakers,” “mainstream English”) were proposed to replace those problematic terms and I do believe the new terms are empowering in many contexts; however, I believe we as teachers and researchers should do more than just changing the labeling terms. In my Composition Class, I encouraged students to use “multilinguals” instead of “non-native speakers,” but later on this word in students’ writing gained the same negative connotation as “non-native speaker.”  For instance, one student wrote, “…bilingual programs distract multilingual speakers from learning English fluently.” I think the problem is that the critique of language ideology tends to remain in academia, instead of the general public. There always seems to be a gap between what researchers know and what students (who are going into different fields) believe. To change people’s attitudes, if possible, I think this dialogue should be more accessible to a common audience such as through popular writings

In another article, you report on a case study of a Chinese student Fang and describe her tendency for silence in the classroom as a “situated and strategic” choice.  Nonetheless, you find this choice problematic in that her contributions to the classroom were limited.  In response to these findings, you suggest that instructors from all disciplines have training in cross-cultural communication.  Could you please discuss what this training would focus on and how it could improve the teaching of multilingual students in the U.S.?

I have this ideal notion of a successful intercultural classroom, where the teacher and the students are equally responsible for making themselves understood. Silence from the students, for instance, tend be to considered as passivity or disengagement from a teacher’s perspective. However, in interviewing Fang I have found that her internal thinking was actually very active and critical; sometimes she wanted to speak up but she did not know how to get the floor. Fang chose to be silent for multiple reasons: to save face for not being able to use academic vocabulary freely, to be respectful to the teacher and peers, to rehearse what she wanted to say internally, to avoid stating negative comments about her home country, and etc. While the students know exactly what limits them from participating verbally, the teachers may not, because silence can easily be interpreted as non-participation in a western classroom. Trainings that can raise teachers’ cultural awareness and provide concrete strategies for teachers to equalize participation among students will benefit both sides.

To be specific, a teacher can take more initiative to create an inviting environment in class. A longer waiting time can generate more participation. It’s also important that a student feels comfortable to articulate their ideas: when they have a stake in the class topic (so they can construct positive identities), when they like their classmates (community building), when they trust the teacher (e.g., the teacher showed interest/knowledge in their cultures), and when they are engaged in a variety of activities (debate, presentation, pair work, online discussion), they may be able to participate more. These strategies not only benefit multilingual students, but also native speaker students with different learning styles. In a training for instructors who have multilingual students in their classes, it will be useful to provide them with the students’ perspectives on their academic challenges, the students’ educational experience in their home countries, campus resources that support multilingual students, and those strategies for encouraging students to participate as mentioned above. Multimedia materials seem to work most effectively in such trainings. For instance, the Writing Center at Oregon State University has developed a video documentary Writing Across Borders (see Robertson, 2011) for instructors to help with international student writers. Drawing on interviews with students, the video describes vividly the cultural challenges students face as well as strategies teachers could use to help students improve.

You explained to me that your dissertation is about the identity development of four international English TAs teaching composition to a diverse group of international students.  You mentioned that one aspect of your project is showing the diversity of NNESTs’ experiences.  Would you like to share a story or two from your dissertation with us or talk more about the diversity of your participants’ experiences and what we can learn from them?

I took a situated view to identity: that instead of a static category, a teacher’s identity is multiple, changing, and in constant conflict (Butler, 1992; Weedon, 1987; Norton, 2000). A dichotomous view of NESTs versus NNESTs is limiting because it has reinforced the idea that an English teacher’s linguistic background is his/her only relevant identity. In my dissertation study of four international teaching assistants (ITAs) of College Composition, I have found that the ITAs’ identity development is related with their linguistic membership, but not determined by it. Although the four ITAs all have concerns about their foreignness including linguistic differences (e.g., ITAs have to pass a SPEAK test prior to teaching), their self-perceptions, teaching strategies, and positioning as legitimate and competent teachers are all very different due to their personal histories. One of the factors that influences their identity construction is their disciplinary backgrounds: rhetoric, literature, TESOL, or another field. For instance, one ITA had a PhD in Chemistry before she became a PhD student in English. She switched departments originally because her advisor in Chemistry asked her to improve her English for writing her dissertation. But after she has taken a few English classes, she fell in love with it. Compared with other ITAs in English, she was one of the few who had actually taken 100 level English classes in the U.S. Because of the interdisciplinary experience as a student and researcher, she often drew on her expertise in two different disciplines (science and humanities) in her Composition class: e.g. the class theme is centered around the social effects of science; she was able to explain explicitly genre differences in different disciplines as well as linguistic differences (e.g. Mandarin and English). While I am still in the data analysis process and trying to make sense of the personal stories, one thing I learned from the study is that despite of social constraints such as the prevalent “native-speaker fallacy” discourse and ITAs’ limited access to mainstream culture, the ITAs were able to draw on their diverse and rich cultural, linguistic and disciplinary knowledge in their teaching, which greatly benefit the increasingly diverse student population.

You’ve certainly been a successful graduate student, presenting a number of times at major conferences such as TESOL and publishing several articles.  What kind of advice could you give for other NNEST graduate students to have similarly successful graduate school experiences?

Thank you for the compliment. “Successful” is a “heavy” term to take on One important lesson I have learned in graduate school is that what we think of as “successful” scholars are humans as well. I used to look up to those scholars as if they were perfect superstars, who exceled in everything they do: publishing, giving public speeches, and changing people’s minds. What we do not see is the emotional and physical stress they as humans also have to deal with, especially when they have to work 24/7. Graduate school is about being a scholar, but it is also about being a happy human being. It is about learning to balance work and life (which is a life-long process, so don’t feel bad if you haven’t learned it yet as a graduate student). Many people think after graduate school they can have a life. So they put off things in order to meet the deadlines of papers/conferences/lesson planning. Soon you will learn there is no “end” of it. After coursework there is the general exam; after the exam there is the dissertation; after the dissertation there is job hunting; and after landing a job there is getting tenure…

Start having a life NOW.

If I have any advice to offer at this point, I’d like to emphasize the emotional aspect of your graduate school life, especially for NNESTs who tend to be marginalized in the English teaching profession. Don’t stress yourself out for being different, because you are and it’s wonderful to be different. Also, make friends with people you like, who have positive attitudes.  Have multiple mentors that support you in your department as well as other disciplines. If you are burned out, take a summer off to travel to a different place. Meanwhile, exercise, sleep, read non-academic books and love. Finally, don’t blame yourself for not being “successful.” Attempting graduate school as a NNEST is hard enough. Enjoy the challenges because you may not experience this again!

References 

Alvarez, L., Kolker, A., & Center for New American Media (1987). American tongues. New York, NY: The Center. Retrieved from http://video.pbs.org/video/1553932059/

Cummins, J. (2009). Multilingualism in the English-language classroom: Pedagogical considerations. TESOL Quarterly, 43(2), 317-321.

Case Study: The English Only Debate (2005). In P.A. Eschholz, A. F. Rosa, & V. P. Clark (Eds.) Language Awareness (pp.178-179). New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Lewis, G. (2005). An Open Letter to Diversity’s Victims. In P.A. Eschholz, A. F. Rosa, & V. P. Clark (Eds.) Language Awareness (pp. 196-199). New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.

Robertson, W. (2011). Writing across borders. Retrieved from http://cwl.oregonstate.edu/writing-across-borders

Tan, A. (2010). Mother tongue. In A. Gross, A. Dwyer, and A. Bawarshi (Eds.). Acts of Inquiry (pp. 711-717). New York, NY: Bedford/St.Martin’s Press.

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November 2011

Patricia Friedrich is an Associate Professor at Arizona State University having received her PhD from Purdue University. She is an author of non-fiction and fiction, with two books by Continuum – Language, Negotiation and Peace: the use of English in conflict resolution and Teaching Academic Writing (ed.). She has also published some 25 articles and book chapters in such periodicals as Harvard Business Review and World Englishes. She has co-edited a special issue of World Englishes about South America and two areas of the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics for Blackwell-Wiley. Her fiction work has appeared in several literary journals including Grey Sparrow, Eclectic Flash, Blue Guitar and The Linnet’s Wings. She is an editorial board member for several academic journals and now part of the editorial collective at Trivia. She teaches Critical Applied Linguistics, Composition and Sociolinguistics.

NNEST Blog November Interviewer: Isabela Villas Boas

1- Why did you decide to become an educator and what led you to engage in graduate studies in the U.S.?

I started teaching children when I was very young. My oldest memories of that time are of very eager faces, little minds that were curious about everything around them and ready to learn. Teaching and learning were not much different from playing, and I don’t think they ever need to be.

2-   Are you an “Accidental teacher” like many of us – who thought that teaching was a temporary job – or had you already chosen teaching as your career?
 
My mother has had a wonderful career as an ESL teacher. From a young age, I loved watching her teach, so I never thought of it as temporary. In fact, I am a firm advocate of the professionalization of teaching at all levels. I don’t think there is a problem at all with starting “accidentally” but to not honor the profession by remaining uncommitted to pedagogical innovation and amelioration and irresponsive to deep language knowledge is a problem. Respect for teachers has to start from within the field.

Like most young people, when I finished college I wanted to travel and learn from different experiences in different environments. I was thrilled that the opportunity to study and subsequently teach and conduct research in the US came my way, but I would have been equally happy to have these experiences in another country or back in Brazil if I were still learning from them and helping others learn in the process.

3- What sparked your interest in intercultural communication, English as a lingua franca, and English for peace?
 

I started studying intercultural communication more for personal reasons than anything else. I believe I am very susceptible to the climate and mood of the environment, and I wanted to understand how certain forms of conflict could be explained in better ways than “that person is being difficult.” It soon became obvious to me that although when we teach English and other languages we are trying to help students negotiate meaning across linguistic and cultural lines, we spend much more time teaching the formal features of languages than their social milieu. We tend to do this despite all the knowledge we might have gained from World Englishes, sociolinguistics and language pragmatics.

 My interest in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) comes from a firm belief in the merit of diversity and variation and great reverence for human beings’ ability to negotiate meaning in specific contexts using a variety of skills. The idea of language that puts many people in contact, like a lingua franca does, is very appealing to me.

Finally, English for peace brings it all together. The point in understanding intercultural communication, in trying to contextualize and negotiate meaning in specific situations as we do in ELF is to move toward a more pacific existence.

4- You are a non-native speaker of English in an American higher education context, researching and writing about English for intercultural communication and English as a lingua franca, having both native and non-native speakers as interlocutors. In Friedrich 2011 (in press), you mention the changing face of communicative competence in ELF situations, especially at the strategic level in its sociolinguistic aspect. Baker (2009) brings culture to the forefront of this discussion, arguing that the “linguistic and cultural forms expressed through ELF are likely to be hybrid, dynamic and continuously adapting to local needs, global influences, and the demands of communicating across cultures”(pg. 574). Can you describe how you deal with these dynamics and how ELF-as-a-function is resorted to in your daily interactions?

 I always chose to see my non-native status in a native environment as an asset rather than a liability. I consciously chose to do that early in my career, believing that others tend to see us in ways we ourselves hint at. Being a user of multiple languages allows me not only to interact with more people, but it also contributes in vital ways to the approach I use to construct and understand linguistic theory. I think my students also end up benefiting from a more varied set of examples, contexts and learning opportunities.

The concepts of purpose and audience, borrowed from Rhetoric and Composition, have everything to do with this paradigm and with the quote by Baker. One can only make decisions about linguistic forms, register, and appropriateness of utterances (to cite a few) in context. The ability to do so is paramount to successful ELF interactions.

5- Could you perhaps give one or two examples of concrete situations in which you felt your non-native status was an advantage, for the sake of illustration?
 
What I know about grammar, syntax and other aspects of linguistics comes at the cost of much work and study. I don’t know these things because they “sound right.” I know things because they are rule-governed (in the broader sense of the term). Such knowledge means that I can break the rules with a specific rhetorical purpose in mind, knowing that I am doing just that. When I explain concepts to my students (many of whom are native speakers of English), I can rely on that knowledge to show the beauty in realizing that language works as a system.

6- In Friedrich and Matsuda (2010), you propose that ELF should be conceptualized as a function, not a variety, since ELF is context and situation specific and its linguistic features cannot be described. In Friedrich, 2011 (in press), you propose some steps to be considered by teachers in dealing with ELF. In what teaching contexts and with what types of learners (age, proficiency level) do you think such discussions about ELF should be more heavily emphasized? How and to what extent should this approach be used with NNEST in expanding- circle contexts who don’t frequently interact with NS and haven’t themselves experienced communication in English with NNES from other nationalities?

 I believe there is no limit to the applicability of these ideas with regards to level of proficiency, age or even interactional patterns. Of course the more advanced a student gets, the greater the opportunities for implementation. But thinking of ELF as a function (the idea had already been hinted at by Berns and Canagarajah independently) is more than anything a change in paradigm. Culturally, the Western world has shown a preference for binary, neat divisions (left and right, advantages and disadvantages, NNS and NS). Adopting an ELF perspective means inserting users in a context where everyone needs to negotiate meaning without a hierarchical, binary division. This kind of attitude you can practice in any classroom, with any level of proficiency.

7- In an April, 2011 post in his widely read blog – An A-Z of ELT - Scott Thornbury mentioned the plenaries and talks on English as a Lingua Franca, Global English, and English as an International Language in the TESOL 2011 program, focusing primarily on Ramin Akbari’s talk and his claim that ELF is a case of “linguistics applied”. Thornbury concludes his post:
It is the learner, in the end, who must decide what code best serves his or her needs,   and  what is achievable in the available time and with the available resources. For most learners, the arguments as to what constitutes the global variety are academic. As an article in a recent TESOL Quarterly put it, “To learners in developing, resource-poor EFL settings especially, it matters very little who says tomahto and who says tomayto. Knowing the word tomato is achievement enough” (Bruthiaux, 2010, p. 368).

How would you respond to this comment in light of your research and practice?

 I was lucky enough to be a part of one of these plenary sessions, the one organized by Aya Matsuda, in which I had the privilege of presenting alongside Ryuko Kubota and Nobuyuki Hino too. I focused particularly on the cultural aspects of ELF. I was there to argue for greater “strategic level” emphasis in the classroom, which is in a way analogous to what Thornbury is saying in that post. We as users decide on form based on function and such aspects as time, familiarity with other participants of the interaction, goals of the interaction, etc. In that sense, ELF does not offer many certainties; there is no definitive form or utterance that will open all doors, no joke that will make everyone laugh, and no variety that will be completely intelligible in all contexts, but then again such is the nature of language itself. When we introduce an ELF perspective to our students, we are in a way making them feel more comfortable with uncertainty, unpredictability and variation, but at the same time, we are giving them the tools to help them do well in such situations. Even potentially underappreciated skills such as the ability to paraphrase, engage in circumlocution, ask for clarification, and guess from context are extremely useful in ELF situations, and we should make sure our students take those along in their toolkit wherever English may take them.

 As for the Bruthiaux quote, I feel a little more ambivalent toward it. It seems to underestimate the capacity of learners everywhere to go beyond limits – their own and their environments’. Who says what to whom matters not because we necessarily need to copy those forms but instead because an analysis of those forms and of the users’ motivations tells us who they are/might be in the world and thus helps us decide how we want to interact with them. In that sense, I don’t believe in a “global variety.” Provided one has a choice between tomayto, tomato and what other forms may come, I am fine.

8- What advice in dealing with ELF would you give to practicing teachers of English to speakers of other languages?

 It might seem that teachers need a complete overhaul of their practices and materials before they can deal with ELF in the classroom, but that is not the case. Every classroom activity, every material already has the potential to become part of an ELF pedagogy. What teachers need to do is look at those elements critically, asking important questions such as,

“What variation might there be to this form/utterance/interaction/habit?”
“How can I better present such variation to my students?”
“If we change the context of this particular interaction, what else will need to change?”
 “Who are the participants in this interaction? What do we know about them? How does this kind of information help us make decisions about what and how to say what we have to say?”
 “How do I as a teacher and person respond to difference and variation? How do my views of the above impact my teaching?”
 “What is the context in which my students are likely to use language? Can I emphasize those while also introducing other scenarios/varieties of language/vocabulary items/cultural orientations?”

This of course goes for both oral and written language. The trick is really to show students what they already do all the time but might not be conscious of. They adapt and make choices about language sometimes from minute to minute in their native languages – they change their register to speak to a boss, they incorporate slang to gain membership in a community of friends, they use ‘big words’ to impress a teacher and simplified vocabulary to talk to a small child. ELF situations should be one more set of language occurrences in which students make adaptations to be better understood by and better understand other people.

REFERENCES

Baker, Will. (2009). The cultures of English as a lingua franca. TESOL Quarterly, 43 (4), 567-592 (26).

Friedrich, Patricia (2011). ELF, Intercultural communication and the strategic aspect of communicative competence (in press).

Friedrich, Patricia and Matsuda, Aya (2010). When Five Words Are Not Enough: A Conceptual and Terminological Discussion of English as a Lingua Franca. International Multilingual Research Journal, 4 (1), 20-30.

Thornbury, Scott. (2011). E is for ELF. An A-Z of ELT, Web. April 03, 2011. http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/e-is-for-elf/

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October, 2011

Ali Fuad Selvi is a PhD candidate in the Second Language Education and Culture program at the University of Maryland, College Park where he serves as a graduate teaching and research assistant. He is also the current president of the WATESOL (Washington Area Teachers of English to the Speakers of Other Languages) NNEST Caucus. His research interests include the global spread of English, second language teacher education, World Englishes, and issues related to non-native English-speaking professionals in TESOL. His publications have appeared or are to appear in research-oriented journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Applied Linguistics, World Englishes, Language Teaching Research, and ELT Journal, as well as in practitioner-oriented venues such as Essential Teacher, NNEST Interest Section Newsletter, and WATESOL Newsletter. His dissertation research is a multifaceted exploration of how TESOL teacher education program components provide affordances and constraints in developing a knowledge base for native and non-native English-speaking teacher candidates to work effectively with English language learners in diverse teaching contexts.

NNEST blog October interviewer: Shu-Chun Tseng

1.     Could you tell us your linguistic, educational and professional background?

Let me start by thanking you for your invitation to be a part of the NNEST of the Month Blog. I am most certainly honored to be a part of this project, which is personally one of my most favorite bookmarks and an innovative utilization of technology for the exchange of ideas free from the constraints of time and space. I also feel very privileged to have the opportunity to share my experiences and perspectives with teachers and scholars who strive to provide better language teaching-learning opportunities for English language learners in the emerging global society of the 21^st century.

Reflecting upon my personal history, I realize that my linguistic, educational and professional backgrounds have included a very complex network of relations and have distinctively influenced my educational history, personal values, standpoint in the field of TESOL and professional goals today. I would like to highlight three important figures to better explicate my journey into TESOL.

The first of these important figures is my father, who held the position as the chief correspondent of a news agency in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Due to this relocation, I had the opportunity to live in Central Asia for about 4 years; there I had my first taste of a multilingual and multicultural social, educational and linguistic environment. The linguistic repertoire of this new context included four different languages, all of which acted like the gears of a perfectly-functioning machine. I was using Turkish with my family members and Turkish expats, Uzbek and Russian with friends and locals and as a subject at school, and English as the primary medium of instruction at school and as a “linguistic life vest” that I used to wear when communication was lost in any of the other three languages. This was certainly a very dramatic change in the role that languages and more specifically the English language played in my life. I used to feel that English, which is praised as the language which opens doors around the globe, was incapable of opening the door of my classrooms since language learning opportunities were by and large confined to walls of my classrooms. However, embracing the powerful role that English plays as a transcending and meaningful communicative tool planted the seeds of my initial interest in English language teaching. Thus, I embarked upon my journey into TESOL thanks to this opportunity of living in a multilingual/multicultural context, and also to the constant encouragement and support provided by my father who made all this possible. As a result, I obtained my bachelor’s (2004) and master’s (2007) degrees in English Language Teaching from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. I also had the opportunity to work as an intensive English program instructor at Atilim University and as a teaching and research assistant at METU.

The second prominent figure is Joshua Bear (known as Joshua “hoca”, which means “master” or “teacher”), a professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics at METU, who introduced me to many of  the current issues and controversies structured around the spread of English, ownership of English, English as an international language, native speakerism, linguistic imperialism, and professional, attitudinal and discriminatory issues related to non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) in our profession. As a graduate student who entered the program with the goal of deepening his understanding of second language acquisition theories and issues in pragmatics, I found myself immersed in and soon addicted to his thought-provoking and vision-enhancing graduate seminars and our extended conversations on problematizing and contextualizing issues embedded in the NNEST movement. Most notably and contrary to misconception, as a native-speaker (NS) of English he converted me to being a member of the NNEST movement. I have had the distinct opportunity to work under his supervision during the writing of my Master’s thesis (“A Multifactorial Sociolinguistic Analysis of Business Naming Practices in Turkey”), in which I investigated the reflection of the global spread of English in Turkish business discourse, and more specifically in business naming practices. Ultimately, with the encouragement and support I received from him, I joined the doctoral program at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) with the intention of bridging second language teacher education with TESOL while adopting the NNEST Lens (Mahboob, 2010) as my central professional framework.

The last but certainly not the least important figure is Brock Brady, a professor of TESOL, the past-president of TESOL, and EFL curriculum specialist in the Peace Corps, who has graciously been a constant source of support, motivation and mentoring. I feel privileged and blessed to have numerous opportunities to work and collaborate with him in several projects within the WATESOL (Washington Area TESOL Affiliate) NNEST Caucus, and to be a part of the change that we believe in. His exemplary leadership and immense expertise have always served as a wonderful example to us as emergent scholars, leaders and educators. Working with Professor Brady in the NNEST Caucus not only enabled me to benefit from his tireless dedication and excellent leadership but also to take concrete steps towards reconceptualizing the ideologically-fused and false NS-NNS dichotomy within TESOL (Moussu & Llurda, 2008). Only half a decade after its establishment, our WATESOL Caucus continues to increase its accomplishments in terms of increasing awareness, spreading activism, and encouraging advocacy for NNESTs. The future goals of the Caucus include but are not limited to expanding membership outreach efforts, supporting Caucus members to engage in research and publication efforts focusing on NNEST issues, building alternative ways to support the professional growth of NNESTs, and creating new possibilities for NEST-NNEST collaboration.

2.     Congratulations on receiving The Ruth Crymes TESOL Academies Fellowship in 2011. Please tell us about this award. How did winning this award affect you personally and professionally?

Thank you! I would like to take this opportunity to thank TESOL and the Award Committee for their generosity in supporting professionals in the field of TESOL.

I would first of all like to say that I was deeply impressed by the fact that The Ruth Crymes Fellowship Fund was established in memory of TESOL President (1979-1980) and TESOL Quarterly Editor Ruth Crymes, who was tragically killed in an airplane crash en route to the 1979 MEXTESOL Conference in Mexico City. This was a truly sad but a very profound example of how members of our profession are very eager to express their generosity and philanthropy. Thus, I feel it necessary to express my deep gratitude to Ruth Crymes and the donors of The Ruth Crymes Fellowship Fund for their vision and commitment. Second, I believe that the annual TESOL Conventions are pivotal in my professional development both as an English language teacher and as an emergent researcher. Although I constantly feel that it is difficult to be at four different presentations at almost the same time, I still feel that attending the presentations, workshops and meetings on a wide spectrum of topics in the field of TESOL and contributing to the convention by participating as a panel discussant, presenter, committee member and interest section leader are profoundly beneficial. Third, after each Convention, I usually get together with my colleagues and have extended discussions on ideas that we generate at the Convention, and find ways to maximize our professional gain. I also share documents, presentation notes, materials, books and resources with my fellow teachers and teacher educator colleagues outside the United States. Finally, I should add that TESOL Conventions are wonderful times to meet TESOLers from all around the world, and thus provide excellent networking opportunities. Although they are held in cities that you probably have never been to, you always feel like you are back home for a family reunion!

3.     As a graduate student, you have been very active in professional organizations like WATESOL and TESOL. Currently, you are serving as the president of the WATESOL NNEST Caucus and as a Member-at-large in the TESOL NNEST IS.

a. How did you prepare yourself for these leadership positions?

Let me elaborate on my notion of leadership, which will give more insights into how I personally prepare myself for various leadership tasks. I believe that any leadership task requires the utilization of a set of communicative, organizational, performative, and reflective skills that one can develop over time. My personal guiding torch throughout any leadership process is constant and dynamic reflection. I conceptualize reflection as a sine qua non element of leadership since it provides (a) a conscious attempt to understand your point of departure in terms of skills and abilities and acts as a needs analysis tool (“What skills do I need to become an effective leader?”), (b) a developmental trajectory throughout the leadership process (“How am I doing as a leader in terms of achieving my goals as a leader?”), and (c) a retrospective reflective tool which will eventually redefine your goals, projections for the future and personal development (“What lessons do I get out of this leadership process?”). A leadership process which includes personal reflection is complemented by seeking mentoring and guidance throughout the leadership process. This is instrumental because it contributes to your effectiveness as a leader, provides you with an external feedback and support mechanism, thereby facilitating your development as an emergent leader, and helping you develop an understanding of what mentoring should (or should not) be.

In order to learn how to lead, you should give yourself a chance! No matter what sort of leadership task you undertake, it makes sense to begin by taking small steps. This tremendously facilitates your socialization into greater leadership positions, which require more time, energy, and expertise. Seeking opportunities for and during leadership tasks is critical in one’s development as an emergent leader. Although counter examples exist, it is often the case that one should seek novel ways to take responsibility. Therefore, I believe that one should always remain vigilant, full of enthusiasm and be willing to collaborate with others and of course, be willing to take on more responsibility

b. Have you ever encountered any challenges while serving in these leadership positions?  If yes, how have you overcome them?

I have quickly become aware of the fact that challenges and leadership almost go hand in hand. Just like everything, there are various kinds of and different degrees of challenges. While some of them are superficial and therefore can be easily taken care of, others might jeopardize your ultimate goal, harm your effectiveness as a leader, have impact that persist for prolonged periods of times, and often lead to de-motivation or dropping out among team members. My personal rule of thumb to any sort of challenge is flexibility coupled with perseverance and utilization of a diverse network of resources.

Flexibility or adaptability is one of the unique characteristics of human beings and can be very instrumental when one is faced with challenges. Therefore, reorganizing tasks, redefining goals, revisiting the division of labor, maintaining willingness to devote extra time and energy, and seeking innovative ways are among many strategies that one can employ to overcome challenges. During this time, a leader should display perseverance and remain determined to achieve one’s ultimate goals.

In order to meet these challenges, it is very important to utilize a diverse network of resources to overcome challenges. Leaders collaborate with their team members and mentors, and develop other sources to undertake the changes necessary to achieve the ultimate goal. It is also imperative to develop an understanding that challenges will exist all the time and therefore one should seek various ways to meet them.

c. What advice would you give to NNES graduate students or novice teachers who are interested in pursuing leadership positions in professional organizations?

Here are my personal suggestions for graduate students and novice teachers who are interested in pursuing leadership positions in professional organizations:

Relax! – Most of the time NNES graduate students or novice teachers refrain from pursuing leadership positions merely because they find it a daunting task or feel that they might be underqualified to take. However, once they take the first step and begin this rewarding journey, they quickly realize that it is far less intimidating that it seemed and thereby develop a range of leadership skills. Give yourself a chance as a leader, and you will be very surprised by the results!

Everyone else is busy, too – Another widely heard reason preventing NNES graduate students or novice teachers from getting involved in leadership positions in professional organizations is the fact that they are busy, and they most certainly are. But here is the thing: everyone else is busy, too. If you are really interested in pursuing leadership positions, please carefully reconsider your schedule. There might be a little opening for this rewarding experience.

Make use of the opportunity – There might be a wide range of leadership tasks awaiting you and there is no such thing as a person for whom no position is appropriate. Carefully consider your personal and professional goals and make your move to undertake the one that is most appropriate for you. Some leadership tasks might seem inappropriate at first, but later you will find that you are perfect for this position.

Volunteer –The notion of leadership and service in our profession heavily relies on a volunteer workforce. It means that you need to demonstrate some initiative to make the first move. Once you express your genuine interest, you will be welcomed by many supporting mentors who will scaffold you throughout the process.

Ask others to volunteer –Twisting somebody’s arm, helping him or her to make the first move and scaffolding him or her afterwards is an excellent example of demonstrating leadership and mentoring. This will increase recruitment of new participants as team members, and contribute to the overall mission of our professional organization.

Keep your enthusiasm alive – There might be times when challenges seem insurmountable, or when you face unexpected negative reactions, which eventually deplete your enthusiasm. Think of such challenges as reality checks for your perseverance, determination, and enthusiasm as a leader, and try to stay on track!

Establish connections – Despite the fact that leadership is often conceived as a goal-oriented task, the process of becoming a leader is as important as the ultimate goal. During the course of your leadership training, you will develop a range of skills, develop resources, and establish connections, which might become very instrumental in case you face unexpected challenges.

Be proud of yourself – You should definitely be proud of yourself! Why? Because you invest time and energy and show dedication and commitment in undertaking responsibilities and thereby lead our profession in collaboration with others.

4.     You also have remarkable experience in contributing to academic publications such as ELT Journal, World Englishes, TESOL Quarterly, etc.  

a. What keeps you motivated to brainstorm new ideas and publish more and more articles?

What lies at the heart of my motivation to brainstorm new ideas and share them in scholarly venues is the power of academic voice which becomes a manifestation of my professional identity and goals as an emergent scholar. I acknowledge that unethical, unprofessional, and discriminatory practices in hiring and wage and workplace discrimination against NNESTs have long existed as bitter realities in the English language teaching profession. The “either/or” (NEST or NNEST) discourse within TESOL continues to polarize the field of English language teaching. Therefore, I believe that we need to take concrete steps towards establishing a more encompassing ‘both/and discourse’ (NEST and NNEST) that embraces the strengths and limitations of both teacher populations in various teaching settings (Selvi, 2011) and aims to establish a professional milieu that ‘welcome[s] ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity’ (Selvi, 2009, p.51). This sense of responsibility lies at the heart of my professional identity and is the main impetus for my writings. This view could also be perceived as implementing what Ahmar Mahboob calls the NNEST lens, “a fresh gaze at issues of theoretical, professional, and practical interest in TESOL and applied linguistics, which have traditionally been plagued with a monolingual bias (Kachru, 1994)” (Mahboob, 2010, p.). I believe that the NNEST lens has the potential for enabling members of the TESOL community to become more critical consumers of research.

b. What advice would you give to NNES graduate students or novice teachers who are interested in submitting a research paper for publication?

Publishing in scholarly venues is a rewarding process for any graduate student or novice teacher, and believe it or not, this holds true even your manuscript is rejected. Often times, authors are hesitant to participate in the whole process (preparation, submission, and publication) because it seems complicated, cumbersome, lengthy, and very competitive.

Although the publication process is often perceived as it is described by such adjectives that bear negative connotations, I would like to highlight some unique advantages available to graduate students who choose to participate. First and foremost, graduate coursework in TESOL or applied linguistics programs provides excellent opportunities to engage in deeper understanding of issues that might be of interest to students. Merging class requirements with developing a manuscript for publication is a very efficient way of making tremendous progress and is therefore a win-win situation for students. What is better than simultaneously devoting your time and energy to a manuscript dealing with a topic of your interest and getting a good grade at the end of the semester as well? In addition to fulfilling class requirements, you will have the opportunity to benefit from diverse internal feedback mechanisms embedded into the class such as feedback from your instructor, classmates and others beyond the class. The end of the semester might mean submitting a version of your paper for evaluation, but it often takes more time to brew a tasty manuscript. Therefore, seeking stylistic and content-related feedback and multiple revisions over a prolonged period of time might serve as a stepping stone towards a solid manuscript. Graduate students may even take these efforts to a next level by sharing their work in academic conferences and benefiting from extra feedback on their work.

In earlier stages of publication, it is quite likely that your audience is limited to the professor of the class you are taking and your colleagues in your class or workplace. In such cases, your work is targeted towards them and built upon a shared discourse with them. However, once you decide to share your work with a wider audience, as in the case of scholarly and/or practitioner venues, that means an important change in your target audience, which is now much broader in terms of depth and scope. Thus, determining audience is a key component in determining your own voice as the author and will be instrumental in adjusting the depth and scope of your content. Please refer to Matsuda (2003) for an excellent discussion of finding and developing your own voice as a graduate student.

Identifying a forum for your work is also an integral part of the process that involves determining your audience and finding your own voice. In light of your own personal and professional goals and the content of your work, you should carefully consider the options that are available to you including newsletters, research- or practitioner-oriented journals that are available in electronic or in print formats, and edited books. Since Egbert (2007) in his classification of the top seven journals in TESOL and Applied Linguistics estimated acceptance rates ranging from 8.5%-20%, a rule of thumb might be submitting your work to less competitive venues. This can help you gain expertise about the publication process, develop your voice and style as an author and boost your confidence as a scholar/teacher.

In Worstward Ho (1983), Irish playwright, novelist and poet Samuel Beckett eloquently utters one of my favorite and guiding quotes: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Failing better is one of the rules of the publishing game, but think it as a rule that you learn from, and a stepping stone towards perfection. Let us look at the process once again: You have written a piece, which you distilled through your own synthesis and edited multiple times in light of external reviews (your colleagues and professors).You have found a scholarly/practitioner venue that might be interested in your work. This is the critical moment. If you try and fail, you will fail with referee reports that clearly identify potential problems in your paper. This process will offer you a wonderful opportunity to improve your work, failing better each time until you get it accepted somewhere. However, if you do not try, it is true that you never fail, but it is also true that you never publish!

One personal macro strategy that I have developed over time is to think of the act of writing on NNEST issues as a way of raising awareness, building advocacy, and demonstrating activism. In other words, strategically engaging in academic work such as giving conference presentations and striving to publish writings on NNEST issues in scholarly and professional venues is in fact a very rewarding and motivating way to contribute to the expanding NNEST movement.

5.     As an NNES graduate student in the United States, what has been the most vivid memory (positive or negative) of your academic and professional practices?

Moving to the United States for my doctoral studies has also meant an intellectual transformation and has given me distinct opportunities to genuinely embrace the issues related to NNESTs and make my contribution to the ongoing movement. Perhaps the most memorable moment is when I first attended a WATESOL NNEST Caucus meeting at UMCP and met Caucus members including founding members of the Caucus, Professor Brock Brady and Gloria Park. Thinking retrospectively, I feel like being in the right place at the right time only matters if you are with the right people, and I was very fortunate to be with the right people. The process of moving from conceptualization towards realization was complemented by our collective efforts of NNEST empowerment and promotion of NEST-NNEST collaboration. Today, I feel a distinct pleasure to be a part of this wonderful community, which has helped me to grow personally, professionally and academically.

6.     Also, as an active NNES graduate student, what are the problems and issues that you would like to address about the needs and concerns of international students and NNES students? Why?

The “international students” is a very complex construct to define, as it is subject to a great variation in terms of linguistic, pragmatic, cultural and ethnic diversity. Just like many other indescribable constructs, the widespread discursal representations of the “international student” have been built greatly using stereotypes. The most common characteristics include that a reluctance to participate in class discussions, a strong preference for rote learning, and an apparent deficiency in terms of critical thinking skills. The hidden crux of this type of stereotyping is a shuttling between a deficit model and the discourse of othering. Thus, international students have been subject to the “us” and “them” dichotomizing, and are viewed as individuals who do not possess the qualities to succeed in the world of education.

As hundreds of thousands of NNES international students arrive in North American higher education institutions, they usually quickly find themselves immediately being challenged and measured against an idealized NS and United States-born student in terms of linguistic and cultural knowledge within the new academic and social setting. Use of this institutionalized deficit model by various stakeholders in institutions of higher education seriously impedes the transition of NNES international students into the new context and results in a series of psychological and sociocultural issues throughout their studies; it often leads to conflicts between domestic students or within-group marginalization.

The very first step in addressing this problem is to develop a collective sense of understanding that all stakeholders (instructional faculty, administration, student services, and students) have a responsibility to address the needs and concerns of international students. This notion of shared accountability will serve as the foundation for top-down and bottom-up practices ensuring the academic and social transition of international students. It is certainly important to define what we understand by “shared accountability”, which leads us to the following question: How do we conceptualize this student population? To be fixed? To be assimilated? To be improved? To be scaffolded? Perhaps, the critical issue here is to establish (and promote) a widespread understanding that “different” does not mean “lacking”; it means only “different”. The fact is that NNES international students might have different strengths, different needs, different concerns, and different skills. Only when all the stakeholders share this view and share the need to be accountable can they collectively work on finding novel and organic ways to promote student adjustment into the existing academic framework. Based on my personal experience, observations, and readings, I identify three main areas which have potential for the enhancement of international student development:

(1) Facilitating their adaptation to the new educational context and academic discourses.

This refers to both institutional and personal ways of understanding, reformulating, and working towards meeting the needs and expectations of the new educational context and academic discourse. Some strategies might include adopting/adapting an internationalized curriculum, making the course content, academic experience and assessment procedures more accessible, taking extra steps to learn more about the educational context and the intricacies of the academic discourse, and conceptualizing plagiarism as an educative tool.

(2) Enhancing their socio-cultural adjustment

This refers to viewing international students as whole individuals and acknowledging the vitality of their sociocultural adjustment as a critical component in their academic lives. It gives us a unique and perfect opportunity to develop a sense of the importance of intercultural competence for both international and domestic students.

(3) Continued efforts to develop one’s English language proficiency

This refers to the conceptualization that language learning is a lifelong enterprise and might require ongoing effort to develop or fine tune one’s communicative competence for various context-specific tasks such as engaging in small talk, teaching an undergraduate lesson, or writing an academic paper/conference proposal for submission.

Terry Doyle, ESL Instructor at City College of San Francisco (Questions 7-9)

7.     In your article entitled “A Call to Graduate Students to Reshape the Field of English Language Teaching” you describe professional practices based on three A’s, “Awareness, Advocacy, and Activism.”  I totally agree with you that such practices are very useful for NNES graduate students in MA TESOL programs.  I am an ESL teacher in a community college, but I work with at least one and often two or three student teachers who are often international students (and therefore “non-native”). I find that they sometimes are not so familiar with the literature on non-native teacher issues, and also they sometimes feel a reluctance to show an interest in such issues maybe because they want to assimilate into the TESOL profession. This self-awareness step would seem to be antecedent to your three A’s. Can you suggest ways to make this kind of person aware of practices that favor native-English-speaking (NES) teachers or ignore NNES teachers and why knowing about these practices is important?  Have you encountered this type of person?

Excellent question, Terry! I think you have just pointed out one of the greatest challenges for the NNEST movement which stems from great misconceptions. How do we promote self-awareness among TESOLers regarding the issues related to NNESTs?

I acknowledge the fact that any kind of transformation of a group starts with individuals who represent the core of that group. Therefore, self-awareness is absolutely antecedent to the three A’s I discuss (Awareness, Advocacy, and Activism), and serves as a foundation for the later stages of raising awareness, engaging in advocacy and demonstrating activism (Selvi, 2009). However, we are confronted with a second layer of complexity: many TESOLers (NS and NNS, in EFL and ESL contexts) have a very narrow understanding of and interest in the issues related to NNESTs and the NNEST movement per se. This poses the greatest challenge for the future of the NNEST movement. I have encountered many graduate students and teachers who have lack of interest in the NNEST movement thinking that this movement is “exclusive to NNESTs”, “ancillary to everyday teaching practices”, “often self-defensive”, and “all about discrimination”. In this plethora of misconceptions, NNES graduate students in TESOL can be the originators of a ripple effect, if they strongly believe that they can play a key role in promoting self-awareness and self-advocacy among TESOLers by establishing personal connections with fellow students in professional associations and online platforms and informing them what the NNEST movement is about.

Why is this important? We live in a world where non-native speakers of English are estimated to outnumber their native-speaking counterparts by three to one (Crystal 2003) , the ownership of English is shared by all its speakers, regardless of their ‘nativeness’ (Widdowson, 1994), and 80% of English language teachers worldwide are projected to be NNESTs (Canagarajah, 2005). Nevertheless, in the same world, the presence of ‘native speakerism’ (Holliday, 2005) leads to ‘unprofessional favoritism in institutions, publishing houses, and government agencies’ (Medgyes, 2001, p. 433), and results in unfair employment discrimination (Selvi, 2010). Therefore, the need to go beyond the NS as a standard in English language learning and teaching is more relevant than ever (Braine, 2010). Our collective efforts should be geared more towards highlighting the unique characteristics of our profession: all-encompassing boundaries that welcome ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity, and the promotion of collaboration among NESTs and NNESTs by legitimate participation of both parties.

8.     How can people like me (an NES ESL teacher) begin to help people in our profession such as applied linguists and MA TESOL program professors and also ESL teachers like colleagues in my college to become more aware of practices that favor native-English-speaking (NES) teachers or ignore NNES teachers?

The issue of reluctance regarding the NNEST movement is unfortunately evident among many professionals such as professors teaching in MATESOL programs and ESL teachers. Nevertheless, I believe that our individual academic contexts provide an array of opportunities to promote awareness of issues related to NNESTs. Based my experience, I would definitely suggest  starting by establishing close ties with faculty members and teachers whom you know individually as people and whom you think are open-minded on such issues. Personal connections would allow for long-standing intellectual conversations around these issues and have better chances to lead to a positive change. The medium of interaction very much depends on the individuals but the vast continuum can range from having a conversation over a cup of coffee (or tea) to sharing readings and audiovisual materials, to collaborative practices such as co-teaching/co-authoring/co-presenting about these issues. No matter what degree of interaction you might have, the importance of working with faculty and teachers is indispensable. Most importantly, this will help your voice of advocacy find a broader audience and might lead to more institutionalized influences for your colleagues’ future students.

A friendly reminder: As once happened to a very good NES colleague of mine, when you introduce your ideas and other writings on the NNEST movement to your colleagues, you might encounter a puzzled face and find yourself in a situation where you have to answer the question based on a great misconception: “Why do you bother yourself with the NNEST movement? You are not even one of them!”

9.     I also read your article entitled “All teachers are equal, but some teachers are more equal than others: Trend analysis of job advertisements in English language teaching” with great interest. I have served on my college’s ESL department’s hiring committee three times. I am wondering if analyzing the job announcements of ESL departments would also reveal underlying discrimination against NNEST applicants.  I know that in our field NES teachers and other professionals use various ways to maintain their power and the unfair advantage of NES applicants to obtain employment in not so obvious ways. I wonder whether job announcements might be one such area.

I decided to investigate job announcements in TESOL based upon the realization that while research investigating the market value of native speakers in TESOL was scarce, anecdotal accounts of hiring, wage and workplace discrimination was abundant. I believed that this would reveal important insights about the current status of professionalism in TESOL and draw a road map for the future of our profession. Sadly, the analysis of the advertisements empirically validated impressions of an undemocratic and unethical employment landscape in the English language teaching profession. Moreover, it revealed the multifaceted nature of discriminatory hiring practices, emphasized asymmetric credibility between NESTs and NNESTs, demonstrated institutionalization of discrimination, and consequently echoed the need for reconfiguring the profession.

There are two insightful points in your question. The first one concerns the viability of analyzing the job announcements of ESL departments. From this point of view, it would certainly be meaningful to cross-investigate the issue in other realms of the profession such as ESL departments, faculty recruitment in higher education and even in other content areas where NNES apply as teachers. The second, and more important, is that you acknowledge that “our professionals use various ways to maintain their power and the unfair advantage of NES applications to obtain employment in not so obvious ways”. There have been a number of institutionalized efforts to overcome widespread discriminatory practices such as the two position statements by TESOL (1992, 2006). It is certainly wonderful (and make us feel hopeful for the future) that TESOL, the global association for English language teaching professionals, acknowledges NNESTs as legitimate professionals in the field of ELT and values professionalism over any inherent characteristic such as race, gender, race, or nativeness. However, I have recently realized that some private language teaching companies have two different ads, one published in TESOL’s Online Career Center free of any discriminatory remarks and another one on their company website which requires native English pronunciation as a job qualification for application. This discrepancy is indeed a very sad example of what I call “creative manifestations of discrimination” and require us, the TESOL community, to “creatively” act against it. Personally speaking, I believe that we still have a long path towards a discrimination-free profession acting in accordance with internationally-recognized professional standards and human rights.

References

Beckett, S. (1983). Worstward Ho. London: John Calder.

Braine, G. (2010). Nonnative speaker English teachers: Research, pedagogy, and professional growth. New York: Routledge.

Canagarajah, A. S. (2005). Reclaiming the local in language policy and practice. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Crystal. D. (2003).The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Egbert, J. (2007). Quality analysis of journals in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. TESOL Quarterly. 41 (1), pp.157-171.

Holliday, A. (2005). The struggle to teach English as an international language. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Mahboob, A. (2010). The NNEST lens: Non native English speakers in TESOL. Cambridge Scholars Press.

Matsuda, P. K. (2003). Coming to voice: Publishing as a graduate student. In C. P. Casanave& S. Vandrick (Eds.), Writing for publication: Behind the scenes in language education (pp. 39-51). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Medgyes, P. (2001). When the teacher is a non-native speaker. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a second or foreign language (pp. 429-442). London: Heinle & Heinle.

Moussu, L., & Llurda, E. (2008). Non-native English-speaking English language teachers: History and research. Language Teaching, 41(3), 315–348.

Selvi, A. F. (2011). The non-native speaker teacher. ELT Journal, 65(2), 187-189.

Selvi, A.F. (2010). ‘All teachers are equal, but some teachers are more equal than others’: Trend analysis of job advertisements in English language teaching. WATESOL NNEST Caucus Annual Review, 1, 156-181. Retrieved from http://sites.google.com/site/watesolnnestcaucus/caucus-annual-review

Selvi, A.F. (2009). A call to graduate students to reshape the field of English language teaching. Essential Teacher. 6 (3-4), 49-51.

Widdowson, H. G. (1994). The ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 28(2), 377-389.

Diigo

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September 2011

Christine Hélot is a professor of English at the University of Strasbourg (France) and a teacher educator at the IUFM of Alsace. She has been researching the field of bilingualism and bilingual education since she obtained her PhD from Trinity college, Dublin (Ireland) in 1988. Her thesis was entitled: “Child Bilingualism : a linguistic and sociolinguistic study” and was carried out in the context of Franco-Irish families bringing up their children with two or three languages. In 2005 she obtained her « Habilitation for the direction of research » from the University of Strasbourg . This research looked at the way schools in France can support bilingualism developed in the home context. It was published in 2007 as Du bilinguisme en famille au plurilinguisme à l’école, by L’Harmattan in Paris.

September Interviewer: Ana Solano-Campos 

1. Dr. Hélot, how and why did you get interested in languages and language learning?

I started learning English at secondary school in France at the age of 11. I cannot resist sharing with you an unforgettable anecdote: I failed my first English test because I did not understand the difference between this and these and that and those. I went home crying with a mark of 0 out of 20. Fortunately, my mother consoled me and convinced me I would do better on the next test. And strangely enough from then on, I always had excellent marks in English and it quickly became my best subject at school.

I often wonder what attracted me so much to the English language. I think retrospectively that this new language opened a door for me, a wide door onto an unknown world I wanted to discover and English was going to be my passport. Then when I was 18, my penpal from San Diego came to visit me in Paris and she had a great idea: she would ask her parents to help me find a job in California. Within a few weeks I had a plane ticket to Los Angeles and was going to work as an au pair for a year in a beautiful town by the beach.

That year changed my life, as not only did I learn to speak English fluently, but I looked after a little girl with Down Syndrome whom I helped to walk and talk. I think I took such an interest in her development that it gave me a desire to teach and a fascination for the way young children learn. I learned that one should never give up on children, however limited their abilities might seem. I understood the importance of taking into account each child’s special needs, emotional as well as cognitive and that in a secure and loving environment children always achieve far more than they might be expected to. Looking back today I believe the relationship I developed with her over that year taught me lessons for life, lessons going far beyond any competence in the English language.

After a year, I went back to Paris to study and the obvious choice for me was English. I got a BA in two years and then went on to do two MAs, one to teach English as a foreign language and the other to teach French as a foreign language. I thought the two MAs would give me better chances of employment.

Indeed it helped me when I went to Ireland two years later and I found work teaching French in two Dublin universities. I soon got a permanent job in one of these universities and was appointed head of the Language Centre. And clearly that is when my interest in sociolinguistics was born: I was meant to develop language laboratory courses for the Irish language, for French and for German. I took a course in Irish, discovered the different geographical varieties of the language and organized interviews with native speakers. It was then when I understood languages are not just abstract entities studied by linguists, but that speakers have special relationships to their languages and all kinds of attitudes to “foreign” languages they know or do not know.

I ran the Language Centre and taught applied linguistics courses in various language departments for 17 years while also doing a PhD thesis on bilingualism in the family context. I knew many Franco/Irish families and they were all having babies and wondering how to manage their two or three languages. They were all somewhat worried that bilingualism might cause some delay in their children’s language acquisition so I decided to carry out a study that would investigate their many questions. I also did a case study of family trilingualism to analyze how families cope with three different languages.

In 1990, I went back to France and chose to live in Alsace, a border area with Germany and a bilingual region (French/Alsatian; Alsatian is a German variety). I got a post in the Teacher Education department of the University of Strasbourg as an English Professor and I was meant to develop the teaching of English at primary level.

2. In “Language Awareness and/or Language Learning in French Primary Schools Today” you and Andrea Young address French language policies and their impact on linguistic/sociocultural pluralism. In what ways has educational reform in France influenced the way children in French schools view languages and language learning in primary schools?

Foreign language teaching at primary level in France was implemented nationally from the beginning of the 1990’s starting first at age 9 then, 8 and since 2002, foreign languages have been fully integrated in the National Curriculum and teaching starts at age 7. The Ministry of education statistics show that 90% of children study English at primary, but the interesting point about language policies in France is that in fact 8 languages can be taught at the primary level: English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Mandarin and Arabic. The Ministry of Education has also published pedagogical guidelines for all these languages, but unfortunately English remains the dominant choice of parents. While I perfectly understand their preference for English, this reduces the possibility for other languages to be taught. And this focus on English at the primary level continues at secondary school and at university thus de facto constraining the diversification policy. The situation in France as regards this dominance in English is no different from other European countries where too many learners also think English is enough to get by in the world. However, European policies do insist that two languages other than the mother tongue should be taught during obligatory schooling, and this is a policy which has long been in existence in France. Spanish is the favorite second language of French high school students, but again many other languages are present in the curriculum but not necessarily offered in many schools.

As to how children view language learning at primary, based on what I have seen in many classrooms, I can say that they enjoy language learning very much, whether it is English or German (as in Alsace). The teaching approach is based on games and songs and on the whole involves the children more actively than other school subjects. Unfortunately, the approach becomes more traditional at secondary school and many learners quickly lose their early motivation. Indeed, I think it is a real pedagogical question: how to get young students to have fun learning a foreign language, but also to understand that it demands a certain effort to acquire vocabulary, for example, and to discover a whole new way of structuring sentences or of doing things with language. Of course some teachers manage it very well and there is a large choice of pedagogical materials available today, not to mention Internet resources, etc.

I should add that in France, primary teachers were at first reluctant to teach foreign languages, because mainstream teachers did not feel confident enough about their linguistic competence nor had they the necessary training. While a foreign language is now fully part of teacher education programs, many primary teachers still feel insecure teaching a language they feel they have not mastered sufficiently. The Ministry of Education decided from the start that it should not be specialist teachers of English going into primary schools, but that regular teachers should take on this new responsibility.

3. In your research you discuss/tackle “language hierarchies”, “ignored bilingualism,” “Language Awareness (LA)” and “the hegemony of French”. Can you elaborate on these concepts?

When I write about language hierarchies in the French education system, I want to point at the dominant place of the French language in the curriculum – which is normal of course – but there are also very strong values associated to our national language and it is not uncommon for people and teachers to have all sorts of attitudes that express either some belief that our language is superior to other languages or a kind of fear it might be in danger in the face of the spread of English. I believe it is the combination of these two attitudes that prevents the teaching profession at large to truly believe in the value of learning foreign languages. This is why I talk about the hegemony of the French language: it is not only the language of schooling, it holds such symbolic power in the minds of most French people, it is what cemented the Nation, it is what makes us citizens of the Republic and it is the job of teachers to promote these values in school.

This means that in our curriculum a large number of hours are allocated to the formal study of the French language, while foreign languages only have a 2 to 3 hour slot per week. Foreign languages do have more space than regional languages (such as Breton, Corsican, Catalan, Creole, Basque, etc.), which remain elective subjects, but which –however- can be taught in bilingual programs. And then at the very bottom of the upside down pyramid (as I represent this hierarchy) one finds the languages of immigration/immigrants (Arabic, Turkish, Polish etc.): these languages remain on the margins of the curriculum, taught mostly after school hours and by native teachers who are paid by their own government.

Yet many students in our classrooms today speak these languages at home. And because they learn French at school and speak a different language in their community, I strongly argue for these children to be called bilingual, or emergent bilinguals (term used by Garcia & Kleifgen, 2010). But for a lot of teachers still, these children are considered as having problems with the school language and their knowledge in their first language is not recognized. This is what I call the ignored bilingualism of children with a migration background.

I should stress here that I’m not blaming teachers who have been educated to insist on the importance of the French language, and who are not necessarily aware of the role of language ideologies on attitudes. There are still not enough teacher education courses in France dealing with the increasing diversity of languages and cultures in our classrooms or with anti-racist education.

4. In what ways is LA different from “language learning”? 

Language awareness (LA) is a term which was first used by Hawkins (1987) in the UK to refer to a new approach in language education that would integrate the learning of the school language, of foreign languages and of the languages spoken by students in their community. It is an interesting pedagogical approach because its aims were to build bridges between these different languages and introduce children to the way language functions as well as to an understanding of linguistic diversity.

Language awareness projects as they have developed in different countries in Europe and Canada propose a first introduction to many languages which students might not have heard before, to different writing systems and encourage them to compare their own language(s) to those of others. One of the great advantages of this model is that teachers do not have to be fluent speakers of many languages to carry out LA activities; they just need to know some facts about various languages and where to find the relevant information or to ask expert speakers of that given language to help them. Language awareness activities are particularly well suited to young learners, I believe, because it gives them a taste of diversity, a taste for languages rather than enclosing them in a sole language like English from the start of schooling.

In the research I carried out with my colleague Andrea Young in a primary school in Alsace (Hélot 2007, Hélot and Young 2006), when we asked the children who had followed a three year program of LA activities what language (in the singular) they wanted to study at secondary school, they quoted a great variety of languages including sign language. They all gave two of three languages rather than just one, and English and German hardly appeared. They gave very clearly motivated reasons for their choice, either wanting to study a language because it was the language of their mother, or their grand-parents, or because it was a useful language like sign language, or because their curiosity had been aroused by a particular culture and they wanted to know more.

5. How does LA combat linguistic racism?

I believe LA activities can combat linguistic racism because their first objective is to give equal value to all languages. This means that any language can be the source of LA activities, dominant languages or minority languages, languages in danger and local varieties, including of course the school language; but the school language is not given more status than other languages. And giving equal values to all languages of course means giving equal recognition to the speakers of these languages.

Furthermore, LA activities offer a perfect opportunity to work with the family languages of bilingual students. Without stigmatizing speakers of other languages and remaining aware of the dangers of tokenism, the appearance of inclusion of minority groups by incorporating a person who would represent that group, LA activities can use the languages present in the classroom alongside other languages to learn different writing systems, different word order, as well as different cultural practices. It gives bilingual speakers a chance of being experts in their classroom, of having their languages valued by their peers and their teachers and of seeing their bilingual competence recognized. LA activities make students aware of the wealth of languages in the world and of the necessity to protect this diversity. Isn’t it strange that our curriculum includes the study of diversity in the natural world, of the world population and not of the languages people speak?

Language awareness as an approach works more on attitudes towards languages rather than on aptitude, and it can be considered as a first education to multilingualism based on the linguistic resources present in a classroom. The evaluation of the European project EVLANG (Genelot 2001) has shown that students must be exposed to these kinds of activities for a substantial amount of time (more than 40 hours in total) for positive attitudes to develop. It also showed that multilingual students were the most receptive students and low achievers benefitted most from this kind of approach.

However, it remains to be proved that LA activities have a positive impact on the learning of the school language or of foreign languages – a question often asked – but there is no doubt that it awakens young children’s sensitivity to language and help bilingual students to value their home language and feel their identity is no longer stigmatized at school. And finally LA activities are closely related to the aims of intercultural education (learning about others and about values such as tolerance and solidarity), since languages are the expression of different cultures

6. Why is the diversification proposed by the French education system not enough to fight the hegemony of English? And to that matter the hegemony of other languages such as Spanish and French?

Basically, the diversification offered in language education in France is impressive, but it is difficult to implement at the school level because a wider choice of languages in a school implies more teachers and perhaps smaller classes, which cost more money. Although there is a very strong social pressure on the French government to improve the teaching of foreign languages, and endless debates in the media on how ineffective this teaching is, basically foreign languages are not very high on the agenda of the Ministry of Education. French and Mathematics are much more important subjects if a student wants to pass the highly competitive exams which will allow her to go to a grande école. (Grandes écoles are third level institutions which are much more prestigious than universities; they train the future elite of the nation). For example, entry into such schools only requires one foreign language, when one would think that in our globalised world more than one foreign language is necessary.

7. You worked extensively with The Didenheim School Project in the province of Alsace. What lessons were learned from this project? What are the next steps?

The Didenheim project (see Hélot and Young, 2006) started in 2000 in a small school in the South of Alsace where two teachers wanted to tackle problems of racism between the pupils. They decided that rather than stressing differences, they should transform the linguistic and cultural diversity of the children into a learning resource for all the students in the school. Not knowing the languages spoken in many of their pupils’homes, they decided to invite parents to come into the school and to present their language and culture to the children in the first three grades. Over three years the children encountered 18 different languages and their cultures, including French sign language.

Although the teachers had never heard of language awareness approaches before, they in fact reinvented this model of language education and a marked change in attitudes developed as a result. The teachers understood better the bilingualism of their students and the importance of their home languages for their identity. The students became very curious about all the languages that were presented to them and last but not least the relationship between the parents and the teachers improved markedly.  As myself and my colleague Andrea young analyzed in various publications, a phenomenon of empowerment developed at different levels but was most visible with parents and students of migrant background.  The children became proud of their home languages and their bilingual competence and the parents realized their could bring some knowledge into a school and participate in building tolerance and respect in an educational environment.

The main lessons learnt from the Didenheim project is that it is possible to involve parents in the pedagogical activities of a primary school, including parents of migration background who do not necessarily speak French fluently. This is important because it is another point which should be explained about the French education system. The relationship between parents and teachers tends to be one of mistrust: teachers often blame parents for bad parenthood, and parents blame teachers for too many strikes, or not enough homework, etc.

The young student teachers I work with are for the most part afraid of parents and do not know how to deal with them. On the other hand, parents who have not had much schooling, or who do not speak French very well tend to shy away from teachers and schools. The Didenheim project was really innovative on that level. It lasted three years at the start and really permitted a strong and trustful relationship between many parents and the three teachers involved. The video film I made with my colleague Andrea Young clearly shows to student teachers how it is possible to build such a relationship by giving parents a real place in the classroom and a chance to share their knowledge with the students and the teachers.

The project is continuing today, but only in the first grade because from second grade on, German as a foreign language has to be taught and teachers find it hard to deal with a very ambitious curriculum over four days (there is no school in France on Wednesday nor Saturday). However the project has had a huge impact in many places in the world where the documentary film “Raconte-moi ta langue/Tell me how you talk” made by Mariette Feltin in 2008 is often shown at conferences where researchers, educators and teachers discuss multilingual classrooms and how to deal with the growing variety of languages spoken by students.

Rather than a model, I always explain that the Didenheim project is an example of pedagogical possibilities, of teachers negotiating their own language policies at the classroom level rather than waiting for top-down policies to address these issues, and of a form of engagement in defending one’s own educational values. As Ofelia Garcia (2009) writes, because of increasing global cross-border dynamics, bilingual education is the only way to educate the children of the 21st century, but very few children are lucky enough to attend bilingual programs. Thus, I believe the least we can do is to recognize and value the plurilingual repertoires of many of our students and make sure they don’t become monolingual again at school!

I would like to add that LA activities on their own are definitely not enough for bilingual students to maintain and develop their first language, biliteracy activities should also be part of the curriculum. Yet, LA is a first door that can be opened, or a first breach in school systems like in France which were built on the ideology of one language/one nation.

8. Are educators ready for approaches that acknowledge and encourage multilingualism? What would take to prepare them for such approaches? What are the implications of LA approach to teacher education?

I believe it is difficult for most educators to embrace and understand the extent of the mobility and migration processes at work in our contemporary societies. Since public schools were created at the end of the 19^th century the main objective of education has been to make students literate in the national language of the state and up to a certain point to learn one and at best two foreign languages. Taking into account the various languages of multilingual students is not an easy task particularly when teachers do not know the languages involved, not even how they are called. Very little pedagogical materials are available to support students’ L1s, so it is a matter first and foremost of believing in the value of teaching and learning through different languages, and then of finding ways to accommodate one’s students’ needs.

I believe it is the real challenge of education in the 21^st century. As far as teacher education is concerned, the issue of diversity should not only concern LA activities but should be dealt with across all the subjects in the curriculum, and by allowing bilingual students to use their first language for making sense of what is expected of them. It is not so difficult to educate teachers to include LA activities in their teaching; it is more difficult to get them to change their representations towards minority languages, for example, and to convince them of the weight of ideologies in preventing the opening of spaces for multilingual education. What I try and do in my classes (Hélot, 2011) is to show teachers that it is possible to work with languages one does not know and that the teaching of literacy must be rethought from a multilingual point of view. I work a lot with children’s literature and show them how to use books in translation, dual language, bilingual and multilingual books. Today, these materials are produced in many different languages and can address the needs of bilingual students. They also give excellent examples of writing activities which can be carried out in French as well as in the students’ languages. In other words teachers need not fear the languages of their students, but rather open to their students’ competence and help them to invest their identity in their learning through using all their languages. (See Cummins, 2006 for more elaborate discussion on this point).

9. What can teachers and communities do to incorporate LA programs in their schools? Where can they start?

I believe it is very easy to incorporate LA in a school, and I have seen many original projects throughout primary schools in the world (for examples across Europe see Kenner & Hickey, 2008). Once teachers decide to open to their classroom to other languages they have many possibilities: They can use their students’ knowledge of languages, they can invite parents or speakers of different languages / different language varieties in their classroom. Children should be given the opportunity to listen to the new languages, to see them written and to learn a few words so they experiment themselves with the new sounds and rhythm. They can read bilingual books if they exist or be asked to write stories in the school language incorporating some of the new words they have learned, and teachers can design metalinguistic activities where various languages are compared and analyzed.

At present in our teacher education department, we invite speakers from different countries to speak on language education and their language is declared language of the month. We then display labels in as many places as possible on the campus to make our students aware of the varieties of linguistic systems. The library also offers a special selection of books in or about that language. The labels work as a sort of linguistic landscape, which engages the students in discussions about languages and their diversity. Language awareness activities can also take place outside of the school: for example students can be asked to carry out a photographic survey on the languages used in their environment on shop fronts, advertising, graffiti, etc. (See Dagenais et al, 2009 for a more detailed description of such a project in Canada)

A final point 

To conclude, I would like to say that I feel the same thrill today as when I was eighteen at hearing English spoken in all its extraordinary varieties. I prefer reading novels in English than in French and I loved listening to the Queen’s accent when she addressed the Irish people inDublin recently. But I was also impressed that she made an effort to say a few words in Irish. Looking back on my academic career, I am very aware that English has served me well. I have published far more in English than in French and I can attend conferences all over the world. I can also make friends all over the world. There is no doubt that being competent in English is a form of cultural capital, but over the years the English language has become part of my identity and not just my professional identity. For it is also a language I sometimes share with my three children who are all plurilingual.

Yet, English is definitely not enough, and there is nothing I like more than seeing my students in awe at different writing systems such a Georgian, Armenian, Korean, Laotian, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandarin, Amharic, Inuktituk, etc. I have a rich collection of Le Petit Prince books in many different languages which I use to show them the wealth of the world’s languages and to convince them that this diversity needs to be protected at all costs. As I said at the beginning of this interview, languages exist only through their speakers, thus students’ plurilingual competences should be supported and valued at school and all children should be able to learn through their first language(s) alongside the school language.

Thanks Dr. Hélot for sharing with us!

References 

Cummins, J. (2006). Identity Texts: the imaginative construction of self through multiliteracies pedagogy. In Ofelia Garcia & al (Eds.) Imagining Multilingual Schools. Languages in Education and Glocalisation (pp. 51-68). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Dagenais, D. [need names of other authors].(2009) Linguistic Landscare and Language Awareness.  In E.Shohamy, & D.Gorter (Eds.) Linguistic Landscape. Expanding the scenery (pp. 253-269). London, UK:  Blackwell.

Feltin, M. (2008) Raconte-moi ta langue/Tell me how you talk. 52‘ documentary film about the Didenheim project (Alsace, France) produced by La Curieuse, Paris. www.racontemoitalangue.net

Garcia, O. (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21^st Century. A Global Perspective.  Chichester, UK: Blackwell.

Genelot, S. (2001) Evaluation quantitative du cursus EVLANG. Rapport de   recherché du programme EVLANG :http://jaling.ecml.at

Hawkins, E. (1987). Awareness of Language. An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hélot, C., & Young, A. (2006) Imagining Multilingual Education  in France: a language and cultural awareness project at primary level. In Garcia, O. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. and Torres Guzman, M. E.(Eds.) Imagining Multilingual Schools, (pp. 69-90).Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Hélot, C. (2007) Du bilinguisme en famille au plurilinguisme à l’école.  Paris: L’ Harmattan.

Hélot, C. (2007). Awareness Raising and Multilingualism in Primary  Education. In J. Cenoz, & N. Hornberger(Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Second Edition, Volume 6: Knowledge about Language. (p : 371-384). Berlin: Springer.

Hélot, C. (2011) Children’s literature in the Multilingual Classroom. Developing multilingual literacy acquisition.In C. Hélot & M. O’Laoire (Eds.) Language policy for the Multilingual Classroom. Pedagogy of the possible. (pp. 42-64). Brighton, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Kenner, C., & Hickey, T. (Eds.) (2008) Multilingual EuropeDiversity and Learning.  Stoke on Trent, UK: Trentham Books.

Diigo

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 August 2011

LAXMAN GNAWALI, MA (Nepal) and M ED (UK), is Associate Professor of ELT at Kathmandu University and Former Senior Vice President of NELTA. He is a dedicated EFL professional with wide experience in teaching English to primary, secondary and tertiary level learners and also in training primary and secondary level teachers of English in Nepal. He leads and facilitates degree and short-term teacher-training and trainer training programs in the field of ELT in Nepal. He has written EFL school textbooks for younger learners and special education learners in Nepal and co-authored an English language improvement course for English teachers of South and South East Asia. He has contributed papers on teacher training and teacher development to national and international collections. He has presented papers at a number of international ELT conferences in the South and East Asia region. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD, doing research on EFL teacher professional development through teacher networking.

NNEST Blog August Interviewer: Isabela Villas Boas

1. Why did you decide to become an educator? Please talk a little about your Englishlanguage-learning and English-language-teaching trajectory.

I think I became an educator because perhaps this was the only profession I had seeneducated people would take in my village. The question why I became an English teacher is related to my heart. When I was a school student, I was fascinated by the people who spoke English. I used to imagine myself speaking to people in English. So, when I was in college, I enrolled in the Education stream and chose English as my major. This was my first step towards the English teaching profession. When the stipend I received from the college was not enough to support my living and college expenses, I sounded out if somebody knew about a vacant teaching position. Luckily, one of my classmates was a school principal of his own private school and he offered me a position at his school. I went to college in the morning and taught during the day. I was doing my BA at this time. And this was the time when I improved my English language proficiency.

Though the trajectory above sounds linear, I underwent a winding path of English learning and teaching. The school I went to up to Grade 10 was a Sanskrit school. Though English was one of nine subjects we had to study, most students did badly in English as the focus was on Sanskrit. For me, written tests did not bother me much, but speaking was a problem. I could hardly say a sentence in this foreign language. At the college, I secured good marks on written tests but speaking did not improve. My first job at the private school brought a turn. The school was an English only zone. We had a rule: if anyone was found speaking in Nepali and not in English, he/she had to take all teachers to a restaurant after the school was over. A school teachers’ salary and a restaurant bill would not go together, so everyone used English whatever the quality. The result was that everybody’s fluency in English improved. After completing my BA in English Literature and with good English language proficiency, I moved to Kathmandu for an MA. Due to political ups and downs, the University calendar was disturbed and it took four years for me to complete a two -year Masters. Besides my study during this period, I taught at a school to support myself.

After my Masters, which I finished in 1991, I went to my home village to teach at a higher secondary school. But my aim was to become a University teacher, so one year later I returned to Kathmandu and started working as a Lecturer at Kathmandu University. In 2000 the Hornby Trust gave me an opportunity for a degree programme in the UK. I was placed in the College of St. Mark and St. John (Marjon), Plymouth (now University College Plymouth St. Mark St. John) where I did M Ed in TTELT (Teacher Training for ELT). This was the time when I improved my speaking mainly in terms of the stress pattern. Since my return in 2001, I have been working as an English teacher educator at the School of Education, Kathmandu University. I teach M Ed students Study Skills and Academic Writing, ELT Methodology, Curriculum Design and Materials Development, Teacher Development for ELT, and Classroom Research. Apart from course delivery, tutorials and counselling, I supervise dissertation research. Outside the University, I have co-authored a school textbook series, Symphony: An English Course, and conducted teacher training throughout the country. I also work as a simultaneous interpreter between English and Nepali during high profile workshops and seminars. The last two activities have helped me to explore different nuances of English.

2 – You are the Acting President of NELTA (Nepal English Language Teacher Association). How and why did you get involved with your country’s teachers’ association and what have you learned through this experience?

I first attended the annual conference of NELTA in 1996. I felt that if I joined NELTA I would learn, so I took membership and started attending and delivering workshops it organized mainly in Kathmandu. In fact, the opportunity I received to study in the UK came to me because I was an active member and this scholarship was given to only active NELTA members. Since my return from the UK, I have been heavily involved in the NELTA activities and I would like to quote from my Presidential Speech I delivered in the last Conference to say what I have learnt being part of NELTA:

In Sanskrit, there is a saying ‘Sanghe shaktih kalau yuge’ which means organization holds the key to strength in modern times. Here the word organisation means association and network. Being on a network makes a crucial difference in one’s career and professional attitude. With the help of network, one not only develops and rises, but also snowballs strength to help others to move on. The members help the network to grow. This is true to NELTA. At NELTA, there has been a literal give and take. NELTA is what Emilie Durkheim calls organic bonding which acts as a tool to help the individuals grow in the profession, self-actualise and be recognized in a broader circle. It helps them realise their full potentials. NELTA provides its members with opportunities to realise their potentials and with those realised potentials, the members explore newer avenues for NELTA to grow into a bigger platform. Mike Solly rightly put at the end of his presentation in an ELTeCS meeting in Sri Lanka a few years ago:
Tell me and I will… Forget
Show me and I will. …Remember
Involve me and I will…Understand
Network me and I will. …Grow (and help others to grow)
This is not just a theory now. It is a reality.

3 – Could you please provide some examples of teacher development initiatives that NELTA helps promote and explain how these initiatives have contributed to the improvement of English Language Teaching in your country?

NELTA promotes teacher development for ELT through its own initiatives and also in collaboration with other organizations. It organizes annual conferences which are attended by over 1000 teachers. Short-term teacher trainings are a regular phenomenon for teachers of different parts of the country. NELTA members receive free personal copies the NELTA Journal and the English Teaching Forum on a regular basis. Most branches have a resource centre with books on ELT. Exposure visits to other countries mainly to attend workshops and conferences are regular opportunities for Nepalese English teachers. NELTA also gets Hornby scholarships for its members to do a Masters course in ELT in the UK. TEFL International provides scholarships each year for its certification courses.

These opportunities have been instrumental to develop ELT situation in the country. At least in the urban areas English teaching has visibly improved. We now have trainers who can travel to different parts of the country to run training. Until a few years back we used to depend on textbooks from India. Now there is a competition within the country among textbook writers and publishers. Nepalese ELT practitioners have started contributing to the International journals which is a significant sign of development.

4 – Many websites such as: http://www.projects-abroad.co.uk/volunteer-projects/teaching/nepal/ and http://www.transitionsabroad.com/listings /work/esl/articles/workinasia.shtml

offer teaching positions to native-English-speaking teachers with little training and experience. Is it because there’s a lack of qualified teachers in your country or do you feel that NEST have better opportunities than NNEST with the same experience?

Though there are enough NNEST in Nepal, there is still a feeling among the stakeholders that NEST are better because they speak proper English. So, it’s not uncommon to see individuals from the UK or USA working at some schools. However, the number of expatriate teachers who receive salaries for work is very small. Those NEST who come as volunteers do not replace NNEST. They come for a short time and help regular teachers in their classroom teaching. So, the advertisements the NGOs place are actually responded by people who want to gather some experience of working in a country like Nepal.

5 – In your Presidential Address given at the 16th NELTA International Conference in March (http://neltachoutari.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/presidential-address-sixteenth-nelta-international-conference/) , you mentioned a survey of ELT in Nepal, in which NELTA working with the National Planning Commission, the Ministry of Education, the British Council and the US Embassy. Why was there a need for such survey and what type of information does NELTA hope to obtain from it? Do you have any preliminary information about the number of NEST and NNEST in your country and if there is a difference in their salary and teaching status, for example?

The survey I mentioned has been proposed in order to develop a common data bank and reference document on the ELT situation in Nepal. The first survey was conducted in 1984 and now the information from that report is obsolete. So, this second survey is expected to document updated data on the major aspects such as teachers, students, teaching learning materials, testing, trainers and training etc. Though I do not have an exact number of NEST and NNEST, I can now say that the number of NEST is very small. Only a very small number of NEST who are showcased to boost the business of the private schools receive higher salaries. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that Nepal is not a market for those who are looking for a lucrative teaching job. The opportunities are limited to the British Council Teaching Centre, Lincoln School, the British School, Kathmandu International Study Centre and other schools, specially set up for children of the expatriates.

6 – As a teacher educator, how do you balance global and local tendencies towards ELT in general and teacher development, in particular?

Our ELT practices are directly and indirectly guided by the international development in ELT and also in teacher development. We always try to read the latest books and research reports from the BANA countries (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and North America) thinking that there must be something out there. This is because very little has been published within the country. So, more than balancing, we try to import knowledge from outside. Yet, I have one particular issue related to the idea of balancing. The international trend is that the trainings and workshops should be participant centered, and participants should be encouraged to contribute; in the language classes, learners should be given a chance to speak and work on their own. But here in Nepal, many teachers expect the trainer to deliver content-rich lectures; otherwise, they think the trainer did not work, just fooled around. The same goes in the ELT classrooms. Teachers who have been trained in the participant centered environment try to organize activities and get students to carry out tasks. The result is that parents complain to the head teachers that the English teachers has fun in the classroom and does not actually teach. In such situations we try to take a middle path.

7 – What message would you like to leave to your ELT colleagues from all around the world?

Colleagues, if we are on a network, we can grow and help others grow. So, let’s join a network. If there is no network where we are, let’s start one and “learn and let learn” because together we can make things possible.

Diigo

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