The Ideologies Underpinning Nativeness: Theoretical Insights on Discursive Practices in TESOL
Submitted by:
Alya Alshammari
Abstract:
Defining English language teachers based on their native status perpetuates the discourses of native-speakerism (Holliday, 2006) and the NS fallacy (Philipson, 1992) and these discourses are entrenched in TESOL for decades and need to be unpacked and problematized. Even though the NS/NNS binary seems to be linguistically-driven, it heavily implies judgments on race, colour, nationality, accent, and look. These judgments result in discriminatory practices in terms of professional existence, recognition and empowerment (Alshammari, 2021, 2022). The deficit utilisation of these terms has been discouraged in this paper as they fail to explain the complexity of the teachers’ identities. This paper provides critical insight into the categorisation between native (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) and explains how distinction is made between the two categories of English in general, and how each category is associated with different characteristics, creating an opposition and a dichotomy between NS and NNS. The paper offers suggestions for stakeholders to be aware of the discourses at play and their impact on the TESOL profession and educators. It reflects on the experiences of English teachers from different cultural backgrounds in the Saudi context.