Conceptualizing and Confronting Inequity: Approaches Within and New Directions for the “NNEST Movement”

Rethinking Nativeness: Toward a Dynamic Paradigm of (Non)Native Speakering

“…The poststructuralist orientation described by Rudolph et al (2015) provides significant inroads into rethinking individuals' identity negotiation as well as bridging efforts to increase equity across language education subfields (Brady, 2008;Rudolph & Yazan, in press). The lens of (non)native speakering that I propose below extends the poststructuralist orientation to consider the mechanisms that catalysed the historical emergence of native speakerist frames of understanding language and language users as well as how and why they are continuously reified and (re) produced through everyday discourse.…”

“…In response, Rudolph et al (2015) advocate for a poststructuralist view of nativeness, particularly in understanding teachers' and learners' identities and lived experiences. A poststructural view aligns with previous scholarship within the NNEST Movement in that it questions traditional notions of language ownership and linguistic or pedagogical legitimacy (Alptekin, 2002;Widdowson, 1994), accounts for the increasingly diverse users and uses of English around the world (Canagarajah, 2006), and emphasizes the contextualization of language use (Mahboob, 2010).…”

“…In the same vein, (non)native speakering also provides a dynamic, trans-contextual approach for considering how individuals can "do language" and perform identities in ways that resist constructed binaries (e.g., "them" vs. "us"; "native" vs. "nonnative"; "domestic" vs. "international") that reinforce monolingual language ideologies and their nation-state affiliation (see also Rudolph et al, 2015). One such example is the use of translingual pedagogies (Canagarajah, 2013), which encourage students to deploy different communicative resources in specific contexts for specific purposes, resisting a monolingual norm and instead advocating for more nuanced ways of thinking about language and language use outside of the traditional native-nonnative dichotomy.…”

“…The NNEST Movement has heavily problematized the idealization of the grammatical, communicative, and pedagogical abilities of so-called "Native English Speaking Teachers" (NESTs) in multiple subfields of applied linguistics, including SLA and TESOL (e.g., Braine, 2010;Larsen-Freeman, 2011;Rudolph et al, 2015;Varghese, 2006). The movement has explored the impact of these native speaker ideologies on the lived experiences and identity development of NNESTs around the world (e.g., Amin, 1997;Brutt-Griffler & Samimy, 2001;Reves & Medgyes, 1994;Park, 2012;Rudolph, 2012;Tang, 1997).…”

“…Despite the widespread problematization of the native speaker concept in applied linguistics (e.g., Braine, 2010;Graddol, 2006;Rampton, 1990;Rudolph, Selvi, & Yazan, 2015), native speaker ideologies continue to manifest in a wide range of professional contexts from oral proficiency standards (e.g., American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages [ACTFL], 2012) to job advertisements (e.g., Bonfiglio, 2010;Selvi, 2010). While this systematic preference for native speakers, termed native speakerism by Holliday (2006), may seem justified based on the "self-evident" grammatical authority of the native speaker (Wu, 2010), the abstract notion of nativeness unravels upon closer examination, & Rivers, 2013b; Park, 2012;Tang, 1997).…”