The attachment to Native Speaker norms and accents is widespread and it almost seems like nothing can be done to limit the damage amongst learners, the millions of learners, who blame their shortcomings of achieving linguistic proficiency on their English teachers’ non-standard/non-native, accents.
For two and a half years now, I have been actively studying and speaking on this matter, and still I find myself in the deep-end as I learn about the subtle nuances this topic reserves from articles, case studies and books that can, in some minor way, help non-native English speaking teachers find a solution to discriminatory practices in hiring and treatment. If I didn’t firmly believe that change is still possible, I would not be writing this blogpost right now.
Here’s what brought it on
Scrolling through instagram, I came across a funny reel made by an Italian actress – or so her description says – where she pretends to have taken her Italian students on a school trip abroad to help them with their English. She speaks to her students in both Italian and English fluently, and warns them to really pay attention and try to speak English. It’s really quite comical, until it’s not.
Here are some of the comments on the reel.
I would have loved a teacher who could speak English with the right accent.
You bet! Mine was from Calabria (Italian region), I’ve said it all! *mocking the pronunciation of “good food”
I had an English teacher who taught in ‘Pugliese’ (another southern Italian region)
Mine had a ‘Valdarno’ accent (region along the Arno river valley south of Florence)
She can’t be Italian, she can really speak English.
It’s a shame that Italian teachers who teach English don’t speak as well…
I must say I was quite surprised by the amount of comments and likes on each of these comments by the general public, because social media does a good job at showing us just that, the public opinion on English teachers with a foreign, in this case local, accent!
After I had left my own informative (I’d like to think so) comment, which has gotten 2 likes since yesterday, I went on Chat GPT for some answers. Surely more people should be aware that a native speaker accent does NOT in any way guarantee knowledge or skill for teaching a language, nor does it prove itself a valid stimulus for second language acquisition…
Could these people honestly have used their critical thinking to come to the conclusion that their mishaps for not learning English as a Foreign Language were all due to their teachers’ regional/local accents?!
New findings – Chat GPT needs an update
I asked Chat GPT to give me some examples of websites that included a variety of accents to teach English globally. Specifically these were the prompts:
- What are some resources English teachers can use to get their students to listen to authentic English, spoken in a variety of accents? – Result: A lot of BBC and general Youtube and News channels. Maybe not the right prompt…so I continued with the following.
- Please suggest better sources, such as YouGlish – Eureka! I finally got something more specific.
From the results to this second question I recognised Elllo (fair enough suggestion) and some others which I knew for a fact included only native speaker talk. So I asked Chat GPT to specifically ‘exclude any websites that advertise native speakers as a model’.
I was left with the following:
RhinoSpike: a language learning tool that connects you with native speakers! (YIKES)
ESL-lab: Interviews with native speakers…
(double yikes)
British Council – Learn English Listening:
The British Council provides a range of listening activities, including podcasts and videos, with diverse accents and topics suitable for different proficiency levels.
Almost a shame that it mentions: STANDARD speech
What happened to intelligibility and EFL?
I stumbled upon this book published in 2009 called English as a Lingua Franca: Studies and Findings, edited by Anna Maurenen and Elina Ranta. I’d love to leave a quote here by Jennifer Jenkins from p.15 which confirmed my intuition about why so many people were not seeing the big picture about the process of learning English and blaming their teachers’ foreign accents for their insuccess.
Key to some abbreviations: NNSs = Non Native Speakers, NSs = Native Speakers, ELF = English as a Lingua Franca
Responses to the LFC (and to ELF in general) from both NNSs and NSs often seemed to
involve strong attitudes towards NNS English. And it was not at all clear
to me whether the negative attitudes were themselves the result or cause of
the misinterpretations. In particular, the kinds of language being used by
people who responded negatively implied the existence of deep-seated
attitudes towards issues such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ English, and especially
English accents, a belief that NNS English accents are innately inferior,
and a conviction—whether conscious or not—that in some sense, NSs of
English had special rights over the language, even when it was being used
in international contexts, simply because they spoke it first.
I recommend this resource, even in its sample form I’ve linked here, to all non-native English language teachers. If by any chance you don’t have the time, I’m leaving these quotes here for you to have a quick read.
Since RP is not necessarily the easiest or most appropriate accent of British
English for foreigners to learn, the choice of RP as a model is difficult to
justify. It would be better for everyone if linguists, phoneticians, and
teachers overcame their fascination with the accent of an élite minority and
concerned themselves more with the speech of the majority of the
population. (Macaulay 1988, 115)
and at the very beginning:
…despite the widespread acceptance of the extensive role of English as an
international lingua franca and its increasing number of functions in this
respect, there is still an almost equally widespread resistance to this lingua
franca’s forms. Given the well-established sociolinguistic fact that
languages are shaped by their users, and that nowadays “native speakers
are in a minority for [English] language use” (Brumfit 2001, 116), it
would make sense for English language teaching to move away from its
almost exclusive focus on native varieties of English. This suggestion
always meets, however, with strong resistance from many quarters, and
this is particularly so in the case of accent. The result is that two particular
native speaker English accents, Received Pronunciation (RP) and General
American (GA), continue to command special status around the English speaking world including international/lingua franca communication contexts where sociolinguistic common sense indicates that they are inappropriate and irrelevant.
In the case of RP, the continued promotion of native speaker (NS)
English accents has become even more untenable over the past few
decades, during which the use of this already minority British accent, has
declined even further…
Conclusion
I may be stupid or naive for thinking that this type of bite-size information can help save the ELT industry from stooping so low as to discriminate against non-native professionals. Especially when the privileged minority of NS users are adamant about keeping their power and using the native speakerism ideology as their unique selling point to the masses.
I do think that by acting collectively and not letting even these seemingly trivial social media comments slide right past us, we can defeat misinformation around the topic and instruct our students, friends and consumers to be more aware of marketing strategies which are not serving them and, why not, make them a tiny bit more aware of their own responsibilities in their language learning process.
P.S. if you would like to hop on board with raising awareness around this issue, please consider getting in touch with me through e-mail or by completing a speaker proposal form for the next online global summit.
If that still sounds too big for you, I am also looking for 12 resource people for mini CPD trainings for multilingual teachers. More details can be found by clicking right here.