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[piglet]

http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20130501000556
This article is referring to South Korea. Is the same applicable to the Middle Kingdom?

[MK]

Korea (and Japan before it) had large centralized programs which attempted to place a native English speaker in every school.  With the economic downturn and the realization that these programs don't actually  achieve much, numbers have been cut.

China never had quite such a coherent and centralized program, but there have been similar articles questioning the usefulness/necessity of native speakers here recently too.

What I believe will happen is that market demand will continue to be there, but instead of blindly foisting native speakers on every primary and middle school, we'll see more demand in training centers and for specialist courses e.g. at uni level.

As the article points out, there are some roles that local teachers just can't fill (yet).

[old34]

Thanks for that article, Piglet. There's a lot of good stuff there aside from the headline issue of declining NET headcounts and the budget/demand aspect: issues such as improved/improving Korean teachers' competence (both teaching competence and their own English competence), poor curriculum, and utilizing NETs.

[elzoog]

This is pretty much to be expected.   After all, someone actually living in a country doesn't have issues of culture shock, getting a work visa, and so forth.   Also, such a person is more likely to have family in the particular town he lives in and know all of the students (and their families) personally.  If the NET screws up, he can just move on.  If the guy actually living here screws up, then his reputation is on the line.

That's why, if the local has a pretty high skill at English, it makes more sense to hire the local than to hire the NET.   With the massive amounts of investment various countries are making into learning English, the likelihood that a local will learn English in the foreseeable future is high.

The fact that these things are already affecting NETs means that we will probably see more cuts in NETs in the future.  This is kind of bad news since I really don't want to go back to the United States but probably not much I can do about it.

[gonzo]

i started a thread over at The Greasy Spoon last year based on this issue, which is a sub-topic in my MA. There are strong arguments and a lot of support for the NNEST case, but I was howled down by most, who saw me threatening their livelihood. What really came through though was cultural and even racial arrogance, as well as the insecurity of many who know they lack any knowledge or understanding of the job they've been hired for.
Anyway, that debate saw me banned.....again. But so was my main antagonist, an ill-informed long-term windbag called Lobster.

[gzwriter]

A person who has gone through the well-defined process of learning the foreign language, as opposed to the native speaker of that foreign language who learned it by osmosis, if that person is also a native speaker of the language of the students, not to mention from that culture, *that* person is inherently more qualified to be helpful to students than the native speaker of the target language. The only rub is if the student and teacher come from a culture or education system that creates obstacles to teaching, such as one that is against self-reliance and against skill building, then those become impediments that are greater than the inherent advantages described above, although it's not perfectly clear how much the foreign teacher can overcome them either, but at least he's aware of them.

Anyway, I agree that generally the non-native speaker has significant advantages, especially over the untrained or partially trained native speaker, i.e. the typical foreign English teacher in China.

[gzwriter]

But so was my main antagonist, an ill-informed long-term windbag called Lobster.

I've never been over there, but I keep reading these stories of getting banned just for arguing with someone. Hilarious!

[gonzo]

A person who has gone through the well-defined process of learning the foreign language, as opposed to the native speaker of that foreign language who learned it by osmosis, if that person is also a native speaker of the language of the students, not to mention from that culture, *that* person is inherently more qualified to be helpful to students than the native speaker of the target language. The only rub is if the student and teacher come from a culture or education system that creates obstacles to teaching, such as one that is against self-reliance and against skill building, then those become impediments that are greater than the inherent advantages described above, although it's not perfectly clear how much the foreign teacher can overcome them either, but at least he's aware of them.

Anyway, I agree that generally the non-native speaker has significant advantages, especially over the untrained or partially trained native speaker, i.e. the typical foreign English teacher in China.

You've summarised "in a nutshell", as our students would insist on saying, the NN arguments very nicely gzwriter. Having worked with many NNETs, and now being their classmate in Australian post grad courses, the problem they face is the pressure from students and employers to get successful results in the Gao Kao, CET 4 or whatever, which have nothing to do with communicative language teaching. These young, sincere teachers find this incredibly frustrating. At least we NESTs are expected to do all sorts of weird things, like having realistic conversations!

[bobrage]

Anyway, that debate saw me banned.....again.

You know you're doing something right when ...

Gz sums it up very well but I'd like to add that intercultural competence runs both ways and that English majors need to have a grasp of how to bridge the gaps which exist between languages and culutres.  Having a qualified NET teaching some classes gives students the opportunity to experience some of the cultural differences which they normally only read about - which also produces the interesting question of whether NETs have a mandate to push Western education practices within a system which isn't set up to reward them or whether we serve students best by bowing to the system and the context in which we work (or perhaps "kowtowing" would be a better word).

I address this issue in class sometimes and the general feeling amongst my students is that they value a more diverse and skills based approach, are aware that it doesn't fit in with the TME4 and 8 but prefer to spend time on it anyway because they recognise its value and because they hate spending all their time looking at tests.  I consider that to be a pretty good mandate for throwing the old textbook (which we won't be using next year) out of the window for half my course and getting the students involved in other things. 

I certainly don't see the point in NET teachers for most CET students in most instiutions though.  There can be a case for Tourism majors having NET led classes or a wider range of students at the Project 211 univerisities (due to a mixture of ability and likely utility) but at a run of the mill college I don't think putting a monolingual teacher in a room with a bunch of accountants is going to achieve very much for either party.

There I go assuming that NETs are all monolingual.

To bring it back on topic though - I clearly believe that NETs have a specific utility and so I would therfore argue that fewer NETs but of better quality would be a very positive move in any CHC.

[dragonsaver]

Within the English language are many many references to things we learn as children.  I am not specifically talking about idioms because they change frequently with each new generation.

However, if a student is reading an English book or watching an English / Western movie there are frequently references to ideas and fables and expressions that are unique to our culture.  The majority of NNETs are not familiar with these references and wouldn't think to explain them.  OR even understand them.

I am sure ETR has to explain these during his literature course.  

Even though we are teaching English conversation or writing or whatever we have been tasked to do, understanding the nuances imbedded within our language helps the student to comprehend our language better.

[gonzo]

Even though we are teaching English conversation or writing or whatever we have been tasked to do, understanding the nuances imbedded within our language helps the student to comprehend our language better.

Only if the student is learning the language to use it in an English speaking country. And even then acquaintance with, say, NZ idioms won't help a student in Bermuda. An extreme example i know, but you get the idea.
Chinese need to speak English with Koreans, Indians, Russians etc. Knowing the latest bit of NY jargon, or what Family Guy is up to is pretty irrelevant. Distracting and confusing, yes.
Factually, most English transactions take place between NN speakers. We natives have lost ownership.

[The Local Dialect]

I think DD was not thinking only of idioms or regional slang, but of a certain kind of cultural literacy. One doesn't have to be a native speaker, but being a native of a Western country helps tremendously.

An example -- I'm teaching a summer British Literature course for my graduating 12th graders. Right now we're reading Beowulf. Pretty early on in Beowulf there are biblical allusions to Cain and Abel. Now, while not everyone raised in the Western world is going to know the intricacies of the Bible, passing familiarity with the basic stories of the Bible are a part of cultural literacy. Most relatively well educated Western students will read those lines and, if they don't know the exact significance, will still be able to say "ah, those names sound familiar, I think that's a reference to the Bible." Most Chinese students will say "why is the author suddenly talking about these Cain and Abel characters and what do they have to do with anything?"

A well educated Chinese person or a Korean or an Indian can have this kind of Western cultural literacy, but it is usually aquired through years of study, rather than being something they absorbed through immersion in the target culture.

[MK]

I don't understand what my friends and colleagues from the U.S. are on about half the time, but we get there

But the future of English is supposedly removed even from these more general 'Western' cultural literacies.

An English “defined functionally by its use in intercultural communication rather than formally by its reference to native-speaker norms”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_lingua_franca

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_lingua_franca#.22Neutrality.22_of_ELF

However, I might argue that English as it is currently taught in the majority of institutions in China still does not encourage anybody to communicate with anybody!

[BrandeX]

For comparison/reference, in the USA my 2nd language as a student was Spanish. Over the course of the years I had 3 teachers, each a native speaker. I also had half of a year of French my senior year, my teacher was from Quebec.

[A-Train]

Anyway, I agree that generally the non-native speaker has significant advantages, especially over the untrained or partially trained native speaker, i.e. the typical foreign English teacher in China.

Definitely. Just because you know something, doesn't mean you can teach it. My experience as a student and as a teacher with colleagues who have teaching jobs because they've done research screams out this fact. Most people would agree with this, yet it goes unappreciated by teaching institutions.

At my uni, we're divided into "English Language" teachers and "Subject" teachers.  As if teaching a language is not a subject. WTF?