ISSUES OF NATIVE SPEAKER IN TEACHING ENGLISH

Issues of native speaker in teaching English

Issues of native speaker in teaching English as an international language

The purpose of this paper is to explore the issues of native speakers in teaching English as an International Language. There are many issues, which are prevailing, in native speakers in teaching English, like most of the native speakers are not qualified EFL/ESL teachers, and most of them are young college graduates who do not have any experience teaching children English. In the classroom, they spend most of time playing games with the pupils and not have a rationale for it. In addition, many native speaker teachers believe they are superior to local teachers and do not cooperate well with them. Furthermore, most native speaker teachers stay for only one year and local teachers, and students have to adjust themselves to new expatriate teachers every year. Moreover, local teachers have more time, and energy teaching and cooperating with expatriate teachers and they earn much less than the expatriate teachers; local teachers are treated like interpreters, and finally, many of the homeroom teachers who team-teach with expatriate teachers have deficient English language ability, therefore, cannot communicate well with expatriate teachers. When we sum up, the local teachers' morale, it came up with extremely low in regard, to team-teaching with expatriate teachers.

Alptekin (1993) points out the fact that most EFL textbook writers are native speakers, usually from the United States or United Kingdom. These writers “think and compose chiefly through culture-specific schemata” and “consciously or unconsciously transmit the views, values, belief, attitudes, and feelings of their own English-speaking society”. Even many EFL textbooks written by local EFL educators are loaded with cultures of English-speaking countries. This is supported by the research by Yen (2000), as cited in Chang (2004), that in the EFL textbooks, in most of the country, most (76%) of the cultural content is related to British-American culture.

Matsuda (2003) also points out that in Japan, “English is still being taught as an inner-circle language, almost exclusively on American or British English, and textbooks with characters and cultural topics from the English-speaking countries of the inner circle”. Since most contemporary textbooks are loaded with cultures of these English-speaking countries, without proper cultural content knowledge, Non-native English teachers will encounter difficulties using the textbooks. It is essential for the EFL service teacher education programs to incorporate culture courses into their curriculum. The prospective English teachers need to have basic cultural knowledge in order to become both competent users of English and competent English teachers who are able to make effective use of contemporary textbooks when they teach the language.

As Lafayette (1993, 245) says, “Culture must become an integral part of second-language learning and teaching”. Lafayette (1993, 246) continues: The development of country's future teachers cannot be left to chance. We need teachers who are fluent in the language they teach; teachers who understand and who are sensitive to both the students' culture and that of the target ...