*Guofang Li, Ph.D.
Abstract:
The majority of the world’s English language teachers receive training in institutions and work in classrooms outside the Inner Circle countries where English is not the first language. Despite the fact that many of them have the right educational qualifications and are effective teachers, they are often considered “inadequate” to teach the language and/or culture of the target language due to their non-native English speaker status. To work against such discriminatory practices and ideology in the field and to fully capitalize their cultural and linguistic capital, this article proposes that English teachers in these countries must teach with a new mindset: from teaching English as a foreign language to English as an International language. This new mindset means teaching English with a different goal, a different selection of materials, and a different set of classroom strategies that value local languages and cultures.
Introduction: What is EIL and Why Teach with a Different Mindset?
As a non-native English speaking professor teaching in the Department of Language and Literacy Education in a top Western university in a multilingual city, I/we have received many requests for recommendations of native English speaking teachers to teach in non-Western settings. In a doctoral level qualitative research methods course I taught at the University of British Columbia in Spring 2018, my students and I designed a class project that focused on studying the issue of native-speakerism (the belief that the ideal teacher of English is a native speaker) in language teacher job advertisements around the world, particularly in Asia. Not surprisingly, our preliminary search confirmed that the majority of the language teacher advertisements in what Kacharu’s (1992) Outer and Expanding Circle countries overtly stated the requirement of “native English speakers.” This preliminary finding confirmed what Mahboob and Ruth (2013) found in their analysis of TESOL job advertisements in East Asia and the Middle East: The field of TESOL is not an equitable space and there is a persistent discrimination and prejudice against English teachers who are not “native speakers” from the Inner Circle countries, despite the fact that these teachers are the majority of the English language teaching force in these regions with good educational qualifications and many of them are effective teachers.
Teaching EIL with Expanded Objectives
Teaching EIL, therefore, must include the teaching of local English varieties, make use of learners’ local cultures (rather than the target language cultures), and focus on cross-cultural comprehensibility among diverse learners. With these expanded objectives, teaching EIL requires teachers to use different materials and approaches that go beyond teaching grammar and enabling students to acquire native-like accents.
Teaching EIL with Different Materials
Traditionally, commercial English textbooks with easy-to-comprehend simplified English to teach EFL learners the target vocabulary and grammar have been used for EFL instruction. While these textbooks have some obvious advantages such as being tailored to learners’ language ability and demonstrating a systematical progression of English language knowledge, they are not representative of real English used in day-to-day interactions in multilingual and multicultural contexts (Li & Zhou, 2018). As a result, many learners lack sociopragmatic competence and inability to express or interpret implied linguistic or cultural meanings despite many years of studying.
Teaching from an EIL mindset requires teachers to bring the sociolinguistic complexity of English in today’s world into their classroom (Matsuda, 2012). Therefore, rather than using one scripted textbook that focuses on learning one Standard English, teachers must use authentic materials that reflect diverse varieties of English including those standard forms and local varieties; and such use of authentic materials must be infused in a variety of instructional purposes such as listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocabulary, and grammar teaching. Today with the increasing access to the digital technologies and the Internet, it becomes less difficult to use these kinds of materials, though consideration must be given to level-, age-, and cultural-appropriateness of the materials (see Li & Zhou, 2018), as well as the implicit bias and hidden curriculum that may be present in these materials (see Li & Fincham, 2018). By bringing in these authentic materials in different language varieties, teachers can help students develop knowledge and awareness of diversities in English varieties and cultures.
Teaching EIL with Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Different materials also require different pedagogical approaches. Since one of the objectives of teaching EIL is to facilitate intercultural communication, enabling learners to communicate their own identity, culture, politics, and religion becomes more important than merely learning the culture of the target language as facts and knowledge. Therefore, teaching from an EIL perspective enables teachers to give local English varieties, cultures, and learners’ cultural identities a prominent role in English learning, alongside the study of the Standard English in instruction (Li, 2017). This inclusive approach capitalizes on the funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) of both the teachers and the students who are familiar with their own cultures, languages, and resources in their local communities. It can radically eliminate the anxiety that many teachers experience when they try to teach the target culture that they do not know, and the anxiety and lack of motivation experienced by students who often do not see the relevance of the materials to their everyday lives (see Atay, 2008).
Pedagogically, it means that teachers must strategically invite students to use their first language in the English classroom, teach them contrastive techniques to differentiate between their own vernacular and the Standard English, and carefully select authentic materials that are relevant to students’ cultural knowledge and everyday life. That is, rather than seeing students’ and their own first languages and cultures as a hindrance to the target language learning, EIL teachers must treat students’ first languages and cultures as assets for their target language learning and design lessons that make full use of these assets in teaching. Ample research has demonstrated that this asset-based approach to second language learning is more successful than those deficit-oriented approaches that exclude students’ first languages and cultures in the English classroom (e.g., Ellis, 1994; Lin, 2013; Sah, 2017; Siegel, 1999).
Concluding Remarks
In a world that is increasingly super-diverse in languages and cultures, language teachers from non-Western countries cannot afford to engage in “auto-colonization” (McKay, 2004, p. 14) or unconscious acceptance/imposition of the “native-speakerism” that has had significant impact on their own teacher identity and teaching practices every day. I encourage teachers to
critically reflect on their language teaching practices in their classrooms and take transformative actions that by exposing students to other varieties through carefully selected materials and designed activities, affirming the language and cultural knowledge that students bring in a diverse classroom, and teaching skills that prepare them for a global future.
| To Summarize
The teaching of English as an international language rather than as a foreign language implies… · A change in the ultimate goals of English teaching: full competence rather than ‘native-like’ mastery · Acknowledgment of the place of the fully-competent user of English as the model · A change in criteria for selection of language to be taught · A change in criteria for the content of materials |
References
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(Guofang Li is a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Transnational/Global Perspectives of Language and Literacy Education of Children and Youth at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her recent research interests include immigrant children’s bi-literacy development, new literacies studies, language teaching technology, TESOL teacher education, and language policy and practice in globalized contexts.)
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