Can Non-Native Speakers Teach a Foreign Language Well?

In this Foreign Language Annals article, Amy Thompson and Amy Fioramonte (University of South Florida) report on their interviews with teachers of Spanish who are not native speakers. These teachers are often treated as second-class citizens by colleagues and students. Thompson and Fioramonte interviewed a number of university teaching assistants, hoping they would “reveal their experiences as both language learners and teachers by reflecting on their past and present experiences and imagining their future selves as teachers.” This article focuses on three of the interviewees who taught Spanish and had diverse language backgrounds; one was Russian, one Thai (with Chinese parents), and one English (she grew up in Canada and the U.S.). These themes emerged from the interviews:

• Everyone makes mistakes – “Interestingly, all of the participants commented that making mistakes was acceptable, whether on the part of the student or on the part of the teacher,” say Thompson and Fioramonte. One of them said, “I don’t have to know everything. It’s not my job as a teacher [laugh] to know everything. It’s my job as a teacher to direct them to the information that they need to get.” 

• Pronunciation – The interviewees said that speaking like a native was important to them and to their students, and speaking with a thick non-native accent makes a teacher of Spanish less credible and effective. But is pronunciation the most important indicator of a teacher’s competence? ask Thompson and Fioramonte. They believe it’s superficial compared to knowledge of the language and culture and teaching skill. In addition, native speakers also make mistakes and some speak with non-normative accents. 

• Teaching advanced classes – All the interviewees said they were reluctant to teach upper-level Spanish courses because of their perceived inadequacies. That’s a shame, say Thompson and Fioramonte: “It is probable that these three participants would, in fact, be able to teach higher levels of Spanish, but their self-perceived limitations are preventing them from doing so… Thus, the theme of not being able to teach higher levels of Spanish potentially comes from a combination of three factors: self-deprecation or lack of self-confidence, prior language learning experiences, and the expectations of the students and supervisors in their current teaching positions.” 

What conclusions flow from these interviews? Thompson and Fioramonte believe the field needs to move beyond negative stereotypes of non-native speakers and focus on the more important issues of knowledge of the language and teaching competence. “Language students should strive to be competent users of the language, rather than try to achieve the unattainable ‘native-speaker’ status,” they say. Non-native speakers can be excellent role models in that process. Thompson and Fioramonte conclude by saying that “bilingualism and multilingualism of language teachers should be highly valued and emphasized, as bilingual and multilingual individuals have a heightened metalinguistic awareness when compared to monolingual teachers…”

“Nonnative Speaker Teachers of Spanish: Insights from Novice Teachers” by Amy Thompson and Amy Fioramonte in Foreign Language Annals, Winter 2012 (Vol. 45, #4, p. 564-579),

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1944-9720.2013.01210.x... 

From the Marshall Memo #475