Revisiting the Colonial in the Postcolonial: Critical Praxis for Nonnative-English-Speaking Teachers in a TESOL Program

As usual, I do enjoy reading Revisiting the Colonial in the Postcolonial: Critical Praxis for Nonnative-English-Speaking Teachers in a TESOL Program. How do we objectively assess the postions of Native speaker teacher and non-native-speaker teachers in an EFL context has been confusing me for many years.

The writers didn’t bother to compare who is doing better.Comparing actually makes little sense, because native speakers, non-native speakers are good at doing different things. And I am so glad that the course helped the graduate students raise their awareness that they could play as professionals in TESOL.

As a non-native-speaker, I still struggle with my identity in the EFL context. I sometimes feel that I am not a qualified teacher for students, because I cannot understand very well about what native speakers are talking about, feeling inferior and blaming myself for not studying hard enough in English. Students in my home country, China, are also obsessed with the idea that only native speaker teacher is the perfect teacher in the classroom. I, somehow, agree with them in the respect of teaching spoken English. I really don’t know many ESL people who can achieve native speaker language competence. Thus, I think native speaker teacher can do better than then non-native-speaker teacher. However, when it comes to the grammar , reading, or writing, because too many skills need to be taught in these sections, I believe that non-native-speaker can help students learn faster. Also, I want to stress another point which the writer didn’t specify. It also depends on the students’ proficiency level, if the students are at low beginning level, I think he/she needs a non-native-speaker teacher who can speak his/her mother tongue to guide him/her through. When it comes to higher level, native-speaker-teacher will suit their needs better in spoken English. These are the ideas that are rooted in my mind for many years.

After reading this article, I start to rethink the issue that linguistic proficiency is indeed vital for non-native-speaker teachers. However, as mentioned in the book(pp.150) “Language is not always a matter of external behavior, but it pertains to the very intimate sense of self.” We need to be keenly aware of our identity in the EFL classroom.