“…While this treatment of NESTs may be an extension of the broader literature on perceptions (and therefore sound "intuitive" for some), it does not do any justice to understanding the tensions, complexities, and contradictions embedded in the literature. First and foremost, while some studies reported a clear preference for NESTs over NNESTs (e.g., Alseweed, 2012;Karakaş et al, 2016;Rao, 2010;Tsou & Chen, 2019), others reported no significant differences (e.g., Aslan & Thompson, 2017;Chun, 2014;Guerra, 2017;Han et al, 2016;Inbar-Lourie & Donitsa-Schmidt, 2020;Lipovsky & Mahboob, 2010;Wang & Fang, 2020), even an inability to differentiate between Role models for pronunciation and language use (Sung, 2011;Walkinshaw & Oanh, 2014) Role models for learning English (Colmenero & Lasagabaster, 2020) Thorough understanding and better explanation of cultural issues (Huang, 2019) Share and use learners' L1 and culture and the cultures that they are most likely to engage with (Braine, 2010) More comfortable with communicative and idiomatic materials focusing on culture (Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2005) Better at explaining grammar and difficult points (Walkinshaw & Oanh, 2014) Not relying heavily on the coursebook (Benke & Medgyes, 2005) and more lenient attitudes towards grading and error correction (Barratt & Kontra, 2000) Using their past learning experiences to understand students' learning needs, difficulties, abilities, and habits and provide appropriate learning-teaching strategies (Ma, 2012a;Tatar & Yıldız, 2010) Authentic language input in class (Chun, 2014) and encouraging interactive speaking environments for the students (Sung, 2014) Good communication and close rapport with students (Ma, 2012b) Good command of procedural knowledge (Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2005) Good command of declarative knowledge and metacognitive language awareness (Árva & Medgyes, 2000) Famil...…”