Native English Speaker doesn’t mean Good English Teacher

Maxim Zhurbey
Sep 1, 2018 · 2 min read

I noticed that schools are obsessed with hiring native speakers for English teaching positions.

If you’re hiring native speakers, you mainly want someone from these countries: USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. If you want your students to communicate with citizens of these countries in the future, you want to prepare them for being able to pick up some cultural differences, slang and accents. That’s reasonable. Although all of these countries are different from each other.

But if you want to prepare them for communicating with citizens of other 190 countries situated in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia, you don’t really need that. What you need is to teach them standardized grammar, vocabulary and clear pronunciation. And every person who has mastered these things can teach them.

What I’m trying to say is that non-native English teachers who are fluent in English, use grammar appropriately, and have clear pronunciation are not worse in teaching English than native speakers. Moreover, I believe sometimes they can even be better teachers because someone who has learned something can be more successful in helping others to learn it.

I understand that this thought is quite provoking. I’m not a Native Speaker so I’m not sure if I’m being biased here. This idea is not aiming at native speakers, many of them are great teachers.

I’m not saying that I’m completely right on this one, maybe I’m missing something. Please let me know.

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