Native and non-native teachers in classroom

checklist provided by : Elham Zarfsaz

20.12.2010

Arva, V., and Medgyes, P.,2009, 'Native and nonnative teacher in

the classroom', International Journal of Educational Research,vol
28,pp.355-372
available online at www.elsevier.com/locate/system

Research study approach: Qualitative

Research Problem:
Recent approaches pay more attention to learning process (learner centeredness) and little to teachers.
(teaching process). With the increasing need for English language teachers due to globalization and
need use of English as a lingua franca, number of native speakers is increasing. The articles discusses
the issue of the native versus non-native English speaker teacher to find out about the differences in
teaching behavior between native and non native teachers and compares their stated behavior with their
actual behavior.

Research Question:
The article aims to answer the following research questions:
What are the differences in teaching behavior between NEST's and non-NESTs?
To what extent are these differences ascribable to the participants' language background?
What else may cause the difference?
How do the participants' stated behavior and actual behavior differ?

Participants:
Five native speaker teachers, five non-native speaker teacher, 139 students.

Collecting Data:

NESTS:
Five natives, the three men and two female all British came to hungry on a two year contract. All of
them had BA/BEA degree or a teaching certificate, but they were poorly qualified as EFL teachers.
They were all monolingual. Two of them were experienced teachers others were not. To compensate
the gaps in their professional training they intended some in service training courses.

Non-NESTS:
Four female and one male non native teacher from Hungary. All were qualified and experienced
teachers. Twelve of them regularly attended conferences and in service training courses. one even run
workshops. Two of them spoke no foreign languages other than English. Three were intermediate level
users of Russian and German.

Five schools involved were all secondary grammar schools in Budapest. Two well-stablished schools in
city center. Three were up and coming schools in the outskirts.

• 139 students aged between 15 and 17, 9-11 grades.

• % 58 girls , 42% boys
• group sizes ranged between 10 and 18
• average of 14 students per group
• two bilingual group had 20 English lesson per week
• one group was at beginer
• three at pre-intermediate
• two at intermediate
• four at upper-intermediate

After the lesson every teacher sat for 30 to 45 minute-long guided interview.

English for natives

Language of interview
Bulgarian for non-natives

Data analysis:

First the follow up interviews were analyzed. After the self report examined the result compared.
Finally, the recorded lessons were scrutinized with the purpose of finding points of convergence and
divergence between stated and actual behavior.

Instruments:

course books: Standard Contemporary course book

Native teachers: the teaching load averaged 20 lessons a week, the teacher also had a few hours to
teach outside their school.

Nonnative teachers: their weekly teaching varying between 16 and 26 lessons. Two of them had no
extra duties. Three were teaching another five, 16, 20 lessons in private language schools and
companies privately.
Findings:
The main purpose of this study was to examine the claims made about nonnative teacher. The study
tried to find the differences of the behavior with regard to NEST and non-NESTS. Summary of the
results have been shown in the table below.

Limitations:

In addition to budgetary and time constrains the number of Native English teacher available in
secondary school was very limited and also because of the very limited size of the sample the findings
are tentative and need to be repeated.

Suggestions for further investigation:

It would be useful to survey countries where, unlike in Hungary, (1) EFL backpackers are not welcome;
(2) they may be employed with taking some in-service training; (3) there is a standard system for
native/non-native collaboration and so on.