Do Native English Speaking Tesol Teachers Need To Relearn English?

Abstract

The English language has undergone immense changes throughout the 20 th and the beginning of the 21 st century. For various sociocultural and economic reasons, it has expanded beyond its inner circle of native speakers and has become a Lingua Franca, a means of communication between different people with different native languages. Today, more people speak English as a second or foreign language than those who speak it as their first language. Due to its spread and interaction with different cultures, the English language serving as a Lingua Franca takes on different forms and undergoes various changes. It has also become a language that is taught throughout the world and native English-speaking TESOL teachers can be found in many countries. These teachers are a unique population to be researched in order to understand the sociolinguistic changes that are happening to English. They are native speakers, who live in a foreign country. Their uniqueness lies in the fact that they are language teachers and therefore possess linguistic awareness. This article is a part of an ongoing research project that focuses on the effect of the local culture on the ESOL teacher. The article lays the theoretical basis for one of the research questions regarding the linguistic changes that native speaking ESOL teachers undergo while assimilating in a different culture.

Teaching English in multilingual Israel: Who teaches whom and how. A review of recent research 2014–2020

“…This is indeed important since EFL teachers in Israel come from a variety of educational and cultural backgrounds. A series of articles published by Badrian (2018Badrian ( , 2019Badrian & Ben Horine, 2019) focus on native-speaking teachers of English (NEST) in Israel. In a study published in Hebrew in the Ohalo College online journal, Badrian and Ben Horine (2019) discuss the unique features of NESTs in settings where English is an important but not dominant language.…”

“…These articles (Badrian, 2018(Badrian, , 2019Badrian & Ben Horine, 2019) enable us to conclude that English teachers, native and non-native alike, are deeply aware of the distinctive features of the current multilingual situation; namely, the dynamic interfusion of languages in multilingual learners, teachers, and their environment. It transpires from the research data that the teachers understand only too well the extent to which teaching English is inseparable from the experience of learning or knowing other languages, the presence of other languages in the closer and wider environment.…”

“…The question is not so much about teachers as about which English should be taught to students. The answer is that the very situation of teaching a foreign language to learners from various cultural backgrounds creates, by default, an ELF situation both for the teachers and for their learners (Badrian, 2018(Badrian, , 2019 and, therefore, leads to accommodating ELF within the TESOL practice (2018, p. 284).…”