Nonnative Speaking Teachers of English as a Foreign Language
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NONNATIVE SPEAKING TEACHERS OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
INTRODUCTION
With the global expansion of English as an international language (see Block, Language Education and Globalization, Volume 1), another expansion is taking place, that of teaching and learning English as a foreign language (EFL). In terms of the numbers of both students and teachers, EFL may well be the most widespread form of teaching and learning English because it embraces all those cases where English is taught and learned outside the inner circle countries where it is an ordinary means of communication and taught as a second language (Kachru and Nelson, 1996). EFL is taught in both outer circle countries such as India where English has a long history of institutionalized functions, and in expanding circle countries such as China where it is widely studied for specific purposes (Kachru and Nelson, 1996). In both of these latter kinds of contexts, the demand for EFL teaching is ever growing. The expansion of EFL raises two questions: (i) what are the differences between the contexts in which English is taught as a foreign language (EFL) and as a second language (ESL)? and (ii) since the number of native-speaker professional EFL teachers is insufficient to meet the demand the world over, in what ways can nonnative-speaker (NNS) EFL teachers (sharing the L1 of their students) contribute most meaningfully to the profession and be as effective as their native-speaker colleagues? In this chapter, I will compare EFL and ESL contexts and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of nonnative EFL teachers. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S : D E F I N I N G A N D D I F F E R E N T I AT I N G E S L A N D E F L C O N T E X T S
The answer to the second question in this chapter—how NNS EFL teachers can be most effective—largely depends on the answer to the first question, in which ways ESL and EFL teaching are different. Some people would argue that a qualified NS EFL teacher will always be in a better position than his/her NNS colleague of equal qualification—simply because the language and culture that s/he teaches to his/her students will N. Van Deusen-Scholl and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 4: Second and Foreign Language Education, 309–321. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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O L E G TA R N O P O L S K Y
always be, or at least “look”, more “authentically native”. However, it is useful to explore the NNS EFL teachers’ strengths and weaknesses. It should be noted that EFL (or ESL) teaching is not always monolithic and requiring one approach. A lot of “mixed” cases are quite common. For instance, some speakers of Chinese who live and work in a Chinese community in a big US city may not need communication in English on everyday basis. So when such a group of Chinesespeakers start classes of English within their own community, teaching should be closer to EFL than to ESL since it takes place in a singlelanguage subculture. On the contrary, teaching English in Germany to a linguistically dive
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