During the IATEFL conference in Manchester, we caught up with Silvana Richardson to discuss how the ELT industry can best address the challenges facing non-native speaker teachers.
So if we move away from the assumption that someone taking a teacher training qualification is a native-speaker, and recognise that more than 90% of teachers are not native speakers, what else changes? What else do we need to change in the qualifications to recognise what you can achieve with L1 in the classroom? These are the sorts of things that native speakers take for granted, because they happen without them having had to think about them?
Exactly, whereas as a learner and user of English as a second language, you have to keep working on them; you have to keep noticing, and keep learning.
It was suggested that maybe native speakers shouldn’t be teaching without having learned another language, so that they have that perspective. Would you agree?
Absolutely. Can you teach English as a foreign language without being minimally proficient in a foreign language? Yes, you can. But I think going through the process of learning a foreign language is a very useful exercise in empathy. Moreover, when you become bilingual or multilingual, your thought processes do actually change, and it’s not just that your first language informs your second or third, but your second also has an impact on your first. As a result, you become au fait with all those processes that your students have got to go through, and you’ve got an understanding of what’s useful and what isn’t, which is very helpful when it comes to teaching a foreign language.
For more information on this topic, read our concluding part of our interview: Moving away from the idea of the non-native speaker.