KHALID AHMAD SIDDIQ

INDIANA STATE UNIVERSITY

Attitudes of Students toward Native and Nonnative Speaking

Teachers

STARTER!

“One of the reasons why teaching is such an exhausting trade is that we repeatedly have to open ourselves up in front of large groups of people in the knowledge that we might be challenged, criticized, proved wrong, laughed at, talked about, dislike, or even despised. That applies to all teachers. The threat to personal security experienced by someone teaching ‘communicatively’ a language which they themselves have learned at school must be many times greater.” (Edge, 1988, p. 156)

Introduction

Who is Native speaker? Native speaker has been defined in past literature in

terms of the “birth and growing up” (Edge, 1988, p. 154) a child, the language learning sequence, whatever language learned “first… as a mother tongue” (Edge, 1988, p. 154). The notion of language learning sequence and birth place (Edge, 1988; Cook, 1999; Bloomfield, 1933) has been acknowledged so far.

Who is Nonnative speaker? Non-native speakers are considered as a deficient,

noncreative, and an inefficient language users by students, parents and society (Butler, 2007; Liu, 1999).

Continued…

Native Speaking Teachers Native speaking teachers had been considered a “good model” for

language learners across the world to date (Todd & Pojanapunya, 2009, p. 24; Medgyes, 1994, p. 51; Tajino & Tajino, 2000, p. 3; Edge, 1988, p. 153).

The advantages associated with the native speaking teachers are as follows: (a) good language model, (b) encourager to speak in the target language, (c) more lenient and friendly, and (d) easy to reach out (Barratt & Kontra, 2000; Moussu, 2010; Walkinshaw &

Duong, 2012).

Non-native Speaking Teachers Non-native speaking teachers according to Phillipson (1992) had been

believed to be “second-class citizens” (as cited in Ping & Ma, 2012, p. 280) in the field of language teaching.

However, Auerbach (1993) in support of non-native speaking teachers argues that “it is not just the experience [of NNST] as a language learner, but the experience of sharing the struggles as a newcomer that is critical” to language teaching profession (p. 26).

This Study

Often it has been pointed out that students’ judgment of their teachers is based on their teachers’ pronunciation, accent, race, or ethnicity. However, this study not only considers those aspects, but it also focuses on the teachers’ teaching methodology, teachers’ behavior, and teachers’ style of teaching in order to distinguish the major causes of the biased labels of native and non-native speaking teachers.

Methodology

Participants 4 teachers 62 students

Data Collection (adapted from Choi, 2007) Questionnaire (for students) Interviews (with teachers)

Data Analysis Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA)

Data Collection

Questionnaire was divided in 4 sections Section 1: The importance of Teaching Methodology Section 2: Race and Ethnicity Factors Section 3: Satisfaction with the Classroom Instruction Section 4: Dissatisfaction with the Classroom

Instruction

Partial Students’ Results

df Mean Square F Sig.

Section 1 Between GroupsWithin GroupsTotal

16061

119.1423.69

5.03

.03

Section 2 Between GroupsWithin GroupsTotal

16061

1.1011.44

.10 .76

Section 3 Between GroupsWithin GroupsTotal

16061

.135.51

.02 .88

Section 4 Between GroupsWithin GroupsTotal

16061

13.145.99

2.20

.14

ANOVA by Level

Partial Students’ Results (Cont’d)

df Mean Square F Sig.

Section 1 Between GroupsWithin GroupsTotal

16061

142.6223.29

6.12

.02

Section 2 Between GroupsWithin GroupsTotal

16061

1.2711.44

.11 .74

Section 3 Between GroupsWithin GroupsTotal

16061

1.175.50

.21 .65

Section 4 Between GroupsWithin GroupsTotal

16061

1.576.18

.25 .62

ANOVA by Gender

Partial Students’ Results (Cont’d)

MANOVA

Tests of Between-Subjects Effects

Source Dependent Variable

Type III Sum of Squares

df Mean Square

F Sig.

StudyTime Section1 22.856 1 22.856 1.014 .318Section2 .455 1 .455 .038 .846Section3 6.678 1 6.678 1.175 .283Section4 6.870 1 6.870 1.123 .294

Level Section1 80.183 1 80.183 3.558 .065Section2 .093 1 .093 .008 .930Section3 1.587 1 1.587 .279 .599Section4 11.789 1 11.789 1.926 .171

Gender Section1 73.882 1 73.882 3.278 .076Section2 1.117 1 1.117 .093 .762Section3 1.047 1 1.047 .184 .670Section4 1.152 1 1.152 .188 .666

Expected grade

Section1 41.428 1 41.428 1.838 .181Section2 .234 1 .234 .020 .889Section3 8.409 1 8.409 1.479 .229Section4 .415 1 .415 .068 .796

Instructor Section1 .720 1 .720 .032 .859Section2 12.511 1 12.511 1.041 .312Section3 2.774 1 2.774 .488 .488Section4 5.574 1 5.574 .911 .344

Reason Section1 18.095 1 18.095 .803 .374Section2 8.452 1 8.452 .704 .405Section3 .768 1 .768 .135 .715Section4 8.383 1 8.383 1.370 .247

Partial Results Teachers (Cont’d)

Teacher 1: “it hurts my ear when I hear people mispronouncing the words.”

Teacher 2: “I did not do very well in class as I expected because I was so much busy.”

Teacher 3: “I actually don’t care about the labels [native and nonnative], but it bothers me when it gets so important in job announcements.”

Conclusion

As pointed out by Barratt and Kontra (2000), Auerbach (1993) and Medgyes (1994), native speaking teachers faces many challenges because of their lack of knowledge about the local culture, the native language, teaching strategies, the language learning processes, and unawareness of interlanguage challenges on the students’ side Students’ do not show very significant attitudes if they have been taught well. Teachers’ teaching style and behavior can highly effect students

attitudes. Native teachers believe that they are good source of “culture and

language.” Nonnative teachers count themselves to be more sentimentally

close to the students.

Thank You!

References

Auerbach, E. R. (1993), Reexamining English Only in the ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 27: 9–32. doi: 10.2307/3586949 Liu, J. (1999).

Nonnative-english-speaking professionals in tesol. TESOL Quarterly, 33(1), 85-102. Retrieved from http//www.jstor.org/stable/3588192 Barratt, L., & Kontra, E. H. (2000). Native-English-Speaking Teachers in Cultures other than their own. TESOL Journal, 9(3), 19-23. Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York: H. Holt and Company.Butler, Y. G. (2007). How are nonnative-English-speaking teachers perceived by young learners? . TESOL Quarterly , 41(4), 731-755. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40264404Choi, S. J. (2007). The experiences of non-native English speaking teachers

and their professional identity constructions in an ESL context. ProQuest.Cook, V. (1999). Going beyond the native speaker in language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 33(2), 185-209. Retrieved from http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=4C758D664A5FDE7A2D30

References (Continued…)

Edge, J. (1988). Natives, speakers, and models. JALT Journal, 9(2), 153-157. Retrieved from http://jalt-publications.org/jj/archive/Medgyes, P. (1992). Native or non-native: who's worth more?. ELT Journal, 46(4), 340-349.Todd, R. W., & Pojanapunya, P. (2009). Implicit attitudes towards native and non- native speaker teachers. System, 37(1), 23-33. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2008.08.002Tajino, A., & Tajino, Y. (2000). Native and Non-native: What can they offer? Lessons from Team-Teaching in japan. ELT Journal, 54(1), 3-11. Retrieved from http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/54/1/3.full.pdf htmlMoussu, L. (2010). Influence of Teacher-Contact Time and Other Variables on ESL Students' Attitudes towards Native-and Nonnative-English-Speaking Teachers. TESOL Quarterly, 44(4), 746-768. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27896762 Walkinshaw, I., & Duong, O. T. H. (2012). Native- and Non-native Speaking English Teachers in Vietnam: Weighing the benefits. TESL-EJ, 16(3), 1-17. Retrieved from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume16/ej63/ej63a1/