It’s time discrimination was shown the door, says English teacher Meri Maroutian

The Italian Ministry of Education claims that English as a mother tongue can only be claimed by a person who has completed secondary education in an English-speaking country, and this is a requirement that many public and private schools adopt when hiring an English teacher to join their institution.

This goes against EU laws, specifically Article 21 of its Charter of Fundamental Rights, which states that, “Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.”

There is no other occupation that sees a Ministry of Education favour the location of a course of studies, such as a high-school diploma from the UK or the US, rather than a completed course of studies, ie, a BA or an MA, or experience as a teacher who has perfected and honed their skill with costly, structured and externally assessed Cambridge exams, such as a DELTA.

The issue of native speakerism perpetuated by governments is often swept under the rug and not just in Italy. The South Korean Language Assistant scheme acknowledges native speakers only; while in Spain, holders of a Spanish passport are not eligible. As stated on the British Council website, “UK undergraduates required to take a year abroad as part of their studies are prioritised for posts”.

Similar examples such as these are the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET), which explicitly states that having language teaching experience and qualifications are not part of the eligibility criteria, and the majority of participants are assistant language teachers from the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, as can be seen by the statistics that have been generously made public on the official website. What is clear from all these examples is that nationality plays a huge part in qualifying and that ultimately a passport is deemed far more valuable than education in these ‘teacher’ programmes.

To give yet another blatant example, the British Council itself has an English Assistants programme, all set up and ready, where all you would need to do is self-assess your English productive and receptive skills to a C2 on the CEFR. The ad for this programme is clearly directed towards 18-year-old undergraduates with UK passports who are willing to travel overseas to gain life experience and discover their career paths. The only other criteria remotely related to an actual teaching programme would be to “hold the minimum academic standard of UK A-level or equivalent”.

“Under skills and qualifications on a job application, we often find the 
term native speaker ”

Basically this is a paid holiday which is promoted with a rather worrying nod to an unrelated field. For instance, this paraphrased statement is a good example: “You can use your time abroad to start a small business and even make an appearance on TV”. What is even more mind boggling is the idea that becoming a TV star is just as easy as becoming a language assistant. What this explicitly says is that native speakers can get teaching jobs without a teaching qualification or even a degree.

This programme has been running for over a century and is the epitome of the privileged status that some, definitely not all, native speakers still hide behind when they advertise themselves as skilled professionals of the language they have been speaking since childhood and therefore consider themselves better at than anyone, including those who have achieved a degree in English literature, language or linguistics. The result is that under skills and qualifications on a job application, we often find the term ‘native speaker’. If you don’t take my word for it, you can browse through some public CVs on LinkedIn. The one positive thing about the British Council Language Assistants scheme is that it does not discriminate on grounds of ethnicity.

Because not all native speakers are equal – in East Asia, job adverts for language teachers often state ‘Caucasians only’, directing our attention to how race is perceived in ELT. Language schools consider white teachers ‘more native’ than, say, a black candidate from the US, and this is the same reason why teacher candidates are often asked impertinent questions such as, “Where are you really from?”, or “Where are you originally from?”, as though we were still looking at nationalities through the lens of colour. The topic of racial discrimination, alongside other forms of discrimination within the ELT industry, is a broad one and one which I will not and cannot attempt to cover in this space in its entirety. There’s a lot to reflect on when addressing native speakerism. It is still unclear why the field of education is still lagging in terms of, well, educating. Is there a catch?

Do private language schools and international schools really benefit from looking for native speakers who are so small a minority that they cannot satisfy the high demand for English teachers?

Is the ELT industry still benefitting from the courses and certificates it provides the non-native counterpart, with the illusion that they will be given extra credit for working so hard?

The situation as of now is that we witness unequal salaries among colleagues in Southeast Asia with those who have Anglo-Saxon names. Foreign English teachers are asked to conceal their identities and change their names to American and British sounding ones, as these seem to be the language models that embody ‘superior’ Anglo-Saxon culture which, seemingly, is appreciated by all. As someone who has tried her best to even come close to the native speaker aura, and as someone who has doubted her own skills and therefore invested endless amounts of time, money and effort, I have come to the conclusion that we will never be perceived as better or equal, unless the following things take place:

a) we educate from bottom-up (our students, their demanding parents, our friends and community, everyone), and of course their governments;

b) call out malpractices in every country in the EU that still does not comply with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, Art 21;

c) coin a new term for someone with excellent language skills. ‘Qualified teacher’ is simply not enough, because the changes of terminology in the CEFR have not cancelled out the problem in its entirety.

Recently I was directed towards buying a new study in applied linguistics – The Changing Face of the Native Speaker – but while being extremely curious as to the new findings and ideas, I could not help but reflect on the number of people who would be willing to engage with it since its price is currently set at a little above €120 in its digital version. In saying that, without having read a single word, I do not doubt the massive effort that was brought to the table by its contributors. In fact, I applaud them. However, this valuable information and knowledge needs to be translated into massive action if we really want its contents to be effective. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this type of ‘read’ should be hand-delivered to our doorsteps, for free, if we want to change the industry of education and people’s mindset towards the importance of the role of an English teacher, as opposed to someone coming from an Inner Circle country as defined by Braj Kachru (1985), ie, the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Kachru’s concentric circles represent the distribution of English across the globe. The Inner Circle represents those countries where English is the primary language, while the Outer Circle and Expanding Circle depict those countries with British colonial ties and those where English is taught as a foreign language in education, respectively.

We must understand that the Inner Circle countries are not the sole providers of the correctness of the English language and we must stop them from advertising themselves as the sole providers of English services. To quote Widdowson, “How English develops in the world is no business whatever of native speakers in the United States, United Kingdom or anywhere else. It is not a possession which they lease out to others, while still retaining the freehold. Other people actually own it”.

Many linguists and scholars have addressed the ongoing biases present in the ELT industry by stating how non-native teachers (NESTs) can actually provide an excellent model for students (Medgyes, 2001), or how non-NESTs are continually disempowered by such ideologies that ultimately influence their collective consciousness and identity formation, while favouring the colonial construct of nativeness in the ELT profession (Brutt-Griffer and Sammy, 1999). Some argue that a multilingual teacher is qualitatively different and incomparably more qualified than a monolingual teacher (Cook, 1999). However, the battle against the negative perceptions that non-native teachers attract is still ongoing.

The uncomfortable conversation about the implicit racism in education for preferring certain nationalities over others, particular accents over others, needs to be addressed more openly and broadly. The consequence of decades of discrediting the reputation of excellent teachers has had an enormous impact on the teaching industry and, among other things, has deprived qualified professionals of opportunities in the workplace, while flaunting native speaker ads and salaries they will never have.

Even though I am as glad as the next person to see minor shifts and inclusivity in student textbooks, I still do not see how a talk on how English is now a global language or a reading text on English as a lingua franca can mend what has been perpetuated for so long and is still preventing us from actual growth on a human level.

REFERENCE

• Cook, V (1999), ‘Going beyond the Native Speaker in Language Teaching’, TESOL Quarterly, 33(2), 185–209.
• Brutt-Griffler, J and Samimy, K (1999), ‘Revisiting the Colonial in the Postcolonial: Critical Praxis for Nonnative-English- Speaking Teachers in a TESOL Program’, TESOL Quarterly, 33: 413-431.
• Medgyes, P (2001), ‘When the teacher is a non-native speaker’, Teaching pronunciation, 429-442.
• Slavkov, N; Melo-Pfeiffer, S and Kerschhofer- Puhalo, N (2021), ‘The Changing Face of the “Native Speaker”: Perspectives from Multilingualism and Globalization’, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Meri Maroutian is a DELTA qualified teacher based in Parma, Italy. As an Armenian who has lived and studied mostly in Malaysia, America and Italy, Meri has become increasingly aware of the social injustices reserved for those who are forever perceived as foreigners or non-native speakers of any given language. At the age of 14, she spoke four languages and was illiterate in her own mother-tongue, and is now a bilingual speaker of Italian and English.