Non Native English Language

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Over the last centuries, English has become a popular and widely used language all around the world as a lingua franca because of colonisation, intellectual activities like movies and international sport competitions and its easiness compared to other European languages. Because of the fact that there have been increasing number of people wanting to learn English in order not to feel ‘alienated’, the need for English language teachers has also increased dramatically. As a result of this need, the ‘native/non-native’ dichotomy has occurred. There are no clear and credible statistics about the number of native English speaking teachers (hereafter it will be abbreviated as NESTs), yet it is estimated that the number of non-native English speaking …show more content…

However, through the distinction between NESTs and NNESTs, teachers’ own language and identity is made superior or inferior either deliberately or in an unintentional way. First of all, just by identifying teachers as natives and non-natives, people perpetuate linguistic imperialism that eventually leads to spreading of English dialects all over the world by native speaking teachers and then decentralizing people’s own languages as Braine said in 1999. For instance, Ricento (2009) brought a new and sensible perspective to this issue. He proposes that the term ‘lingua franca’ is a blind belief. It naturally makes a language more privileged and teachers spread this mind-set through English. In addition to this linguistic imperialism issue, there is also a culture issue which should be noted. Some people may argue that NESTs more familiarity of their culture helps students to learn language in authentic context and interact with native speakers. They might be right to some extent but it shouldn’t be neglected that they also help spreading their culture, literature and traditions. Due to the fact that learners take their teachers as their role models, it isn’t hard to be exposed to foreign cultures. To illustrate, even the methods of ELT proposed by scholars are designed by ‘Westernized cultures’ and that’s why some of them do not meet the needs of other countries’ specific and different contexts in classroom. Kumaravadivelu (2006) maintains that cultural subjectivity is constructed through language and therefore language teachers’ role in education and cultural awareness is crucial. In the light of this information, it can be argued in closing that classrooms and teachers may be means of linguistic and cultural imperialism, which affect the students in the end without

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