TEFL Blog
Posted in The ELT Industry
How unqualified native speakers are degrading the ELT industry
There’s an almost arrogant assumption among native English speakers that their maternal language is a golden ticket into the TEFL industry.
In the last decade, as the demand for native speakers grew, so did the relative ease with which an inner-circle speaker could waltz into any academy, worldwide, and get employed.
Unfortunately, this same, privileged stigma still exists among many ELT hopefuls who leverage their native status as means to bypass expensive TEFL courses. It’s an issue that’s been rising in contention for the past five years, and one that leads to issues in both equity and training standards.
You see: there are two angles in the debate against native speaker privilege in the TEFL world.
One; the quality of teaching is being degraded, both by the unqualified employees, and by the employers desperate for the prestige that comes with having a native speaker on their books.
Two; the disparity between non-native speakers, tertiary qualified with years of experience and an inside-out understanding of English, being treated as second-class citizens against their native counterparts.
Search the internet for the latter and you’ll find any number of case studies detailing discrimination against non-natives, in favour of their often lesser-qualified peers.
TEFL Equity Advocates was set up last year to combat the workplace void between native and non-native speakers. In its extensive research, the organisation has found that 70 per cent of TEFL job ads advertised worldwide listed ‘nativeness’ as a mandatory requirement.
“Discrimination of non-native teachers has been the skeleton in the TEFL cupboard for decades”, says founder, Marek Kiczkowiak, on their website, “Schools have sold courses by marketing native speakers as the only way to learn a language.”
And there are a number of statistics to back these claims up.
A study from the Cooperativa de Serveis Lingüístics de Barcelona last year found that over 40 per cent of non-native speaking respondents had faced discrimination at some point in their TEFL careers.
According to their results, non-native speakers on average make six euros less than their counterparts, but are more likely to have a university-level qualification.
Researcher George Chilton sums up the report by saying that their findings were strong evidence of systematic discrimination in the industry.
ELT consultant Adrian Tenant writes about a conversation he had with a Korean English teacher in the TEFL Equity Advocates blog.
“His institution was employing a number of unqualified native speakers to teach (mostly ‘conversation’ classes) and these ‘teachers’ were being paid twice as much as the local (Korean) teachers, who had had 5 years’ training!” he writes.
“Unfortunately, there still seems to be the feeling that ‘nativeness’ and the type of passport held… is a prerequisite for many positions around the world.”
It’s not, however, just bad news for the non-native teachers among us.
By working unqualified, native speaking teachers are essentially shooting themselves in the foot.
A quick search of TEFL job forums unearths a number of advertisements in far-off locations, full of hyperbole like ‘exotic’, ‘getaway’ and ‘adventure’, with dubious contracting details and often very sub-standard pay.
Using euphemisms such as ‘assistant’ and ‘internship’, these academies are doing three things:
- a) Enticing native speakers under the guise of a temporary, working holiday
- b) Downplaying the nature of the role, therefore bypassing local work visa restrictions and;
- c) Degrading the industry by saturating it with unqualified teachers, and thus driving salaries down
It really is a double edged sword; uncertified native speakers are increasingly devalued, as students are less willing to pay a premium for conversational-style classes, yet – at the same time, fully-qualified non-native teachers are being passed up for those with less expertise.
So, where does the buck stop?
With a stronger upholding of industry standards, it seems.
It’s a hard but arguable truth that non-native speakers will continue to require university level degrees to prove their proficiency – yet that should by no means put them below passport-holders from English-speaking nations.
The native speakers, on the other hand, owe it to the industry, and to themselves, to get an internationally recognisable certificate (such as the Cambridge CELTA), in order to maintain both quality and pay.
In our modern day, where English has cemented itself as the lingua franca, the lines between inner- and outer-circle countries; native and non-native speakers, have been blurred.
‘Fluency’, after all, is a relative concept.
TEFL BLOG