Higher Education Internationalization and English Language Instruction by Xiangying Huo

Author:Xiangying Huo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030605995
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.3.3 Hiring Challenges

Native speakers exhibit superiority to non-native speakers in job hunting (Kramsch, 1997; Methitham, 2011; Ren, 2018; Ruecker & Ives, 2015). Many hiring units uphold the “birthright mentality,” asserting that anyone who speaks English as a first language can teach English and that non-native speakers are ineligible notwithstanding their competencies (Walelign, 1986, p. 40). Canagarajah (1999) interprets that linguistic hegemony prevails in the language teaching profession, comparing this phenomenon to protectionism in business. That is, where few jobs are available, NS teachers act as “language guardians” (Hewings & Tagg, 2012, p. 313) to protect their access to the profession by seeking to define linguistic competence in terms of Center-associated proficiency.

According to Rajagopalan (2005, p. 294), native speaker status is “a key selling point” in English as a foreign language teaching market since it is believed that employing native speakers of English will boost student recruitment. Ostensibly, students’ perceptions and “preferences” have been counted as the causes of the employment of NS teachers rather than NNS instructors at various institutions (Llurda, 2005, p. 6); yet, Moussu (2006) highlights that the overwhelming preference for employing native speakers reflects politics, triggered by monetary profits (Rajagopalan, 2005). With globalization, English language teaching has become a “profit-making multinational industry” (Canagarajah, 1999, p. 87) and a globally “marketable” enterprise, including teaching positions, pedagogies, and guiding rules. The “ever-expanding and increasingly competitive language market” is controlled by the powerful to guarantee their “trade privilege” (Rajagopalan, 2005, p. 284). Native speaking teachers help language instruction providers to reap profits and privilege (Pennycook, 1998), while non-native speaking teachers have to “struggle to teach English as an international language” (Holliday, 2005, p. 9).

This market orientation has become “a justification for discriminatory hiring practice” (Rajagopalan, 2005, p. 294). As in the commoditized education, students are turned into “consumers” instead of “critical citizens” (Phillipson, 2009, p. 5), Rajagopalan (2005) establishes that the expensive investment that schools have spent in these native teachers drives students to expect to have native speakers instead of non-native speaking teachers. In addition, Derwing and Munro (2005) analyze that school staff members do not think that ESL students can bear with “less than ideal teaching” as their tuition is costly (p. 188). Thomas (1999), as an Indian instructor teaching English at a Community College in the United States, encountered many challenges in her ESOL (English as a Second or Other language) teaching trajectory. She finds that instructors who are non-native speakers of the target language are marginalized as outsiders within the ELT profession. In the TESOL conference that Thomas attended, one of the attendees remarked, “One thing that we do when we recruit, is that we tell students that they will only be taught by NSs. After all these students don’t come so far to be taught by someone who doesn’t speak English” (p. 6–7). This attendee’s statement was interpreted by Thomas’s students as “disappointed” when they first saw Thomas as their English teacher because of her non-nativeness (p. 9). Students responded to Thomas’s teaching evaluation question “What did you dislike?” in this way: “We need native speaker teacher.

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