Nativespeakerism and english teachers’pedagogical discourses

Abstract

Abstract The native speaker fallacy elicits both support and resistance within ELT settings. Nativespeakerism (NS) seems to create alienation and resistance mechanisms towards teachers’ and institutions’ pedagogical discourses in an informal teaching setting. The goal of this project is to understand teachers’ pedagogical discourses regarding NS within an EFL setting, to identify NS aspects within EFL teachers’ and institutions’ pedagogical discourses and to analyze relations of power derived from that dichotomy. This qualitative descriptive investigation took the critical perspective (Merriam, 2009) and the post-structuralist approach (Kincheloe, 2008) as frameworks of reference. The theoretical framework discusses the most relevant theory that backed up this qualitative investigation. In addition to, participants involved in this research were 3 English teachers from an EFL teaching setting, and the instruments were semi-structured interviews used to collect teachers’ pedagogical discourses regarding NS, and Grounded Theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) was the data analysis approach applied to systematize data. To illustrate, two findings contracted in this study were: first, the way mainstream pedagogical discourses impact in the same way to teachers and institutions; and second, how non-native teachers develop pedagogical positionings regarding the native speaker privileges and upon NS. Finally, findings displayed as conclusions that inner-circle countries are set as norm-providing models with an ELT industry exported to the expanding circle countries which turn only into non-dependent countries or consumers. Key Words: Nativespeakerism, teachers, institutions, pedagogical discourses, alienation, resistance, self-positioning.