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

Abstract

The "NNEST Movement" has been instrumental in documenting the privilege of native speakers, the marginalization of their nonnative counterparts, and the factors that may influence an individual falling into one category or another. More recently, scholars have adopted a poststructuralist orientation toward language and identity that resists dichotomized framings of language and language users. This article extends the poststructuralist orientation to consider how and why such abstract idealizations of native and nonnative speakers-what I term (non)native speakered subjectivities-emerged historically and are continuously reified and (re)produced through everyday discourse. Throughout this discussion, I weave illustrative examples from a participant in a semester-long ethnographic study that took place in a graduate teacher education program. In the conclusion, I consider implications for future theorizations of (non)native speakering as well as possibilities for increasing equity in the field of ELT.

Black teachers of English in South Korea: Constructing identities as a native English speaker and English language teaching professional

“…Acts of exclusion and oppression have led to a number of post‐structuralist discourses, such as the NNEST Movement, that call for both NESs and NNESs to form an alliance “establishing professionalism, teacher education, and equity in hiring and workplace settings” (Selvi, , p. 596). There is also a post‐native‐speakerism discourse in favor of discarding the term NES as illegitimate and irrelevant, because the term has historically, and in some cases currently, privileged NESs as most suitable to teach the English language, despite professional credentials (Aneja, ; Houghton et al, ; Rudolph, Selvi, & Yazan, ; Yazan & Rudolph, ). The overarching goal of such current movements within ELT are made in an attempt to eradicate inequity within ELT and faulty beliefs of NES superiority on the basis of language alone.…”

NESTs Versus NNESTs Politics: From the Perspective of English-major Students in China

“…In the past few decades, a plethora of scholarship in applied linguistics has been engaged with the nativeness versus nonnativeness politics, unearthing the sociopolitical myth of the native speaker (NS) construct (Aneja, 2016;Doerr, 2009) and exposing the specter of colonialism and its attendant NS supremacy in English language teaching (ELT) (Kumaravadivelu, 2016;Pennycook, 1998). Inspired and accompanied by these critical studies, Nonnative English Speaker Teachers (NNESTs) Movement (Braine, 2010), was launched in the late 1990s, aiming to set up an ELT world in which all teachers of English are equal irrespective of their first language (L1) backgrounds.…”

Beyond and within the NS/NNS discourses: English teaching in the Saudi PYPs

“…As a result, a great amount of research has considered the impact of the NS/NNS dichotomy on NNS teachers (Llurda, 2005;Mahboob, 2010;Rudolph, 2018) and NNS preservice teachers (Aneja, 2016a(Aneja, , 2016b(Aneja, , 2017. Selvi argued that the movement is inclusive of NESTs, is democratic, and addresses myths such as separate competencies and skill levels for NESTs and NNESTs, learners' preferences for their educators, and standardisation (benchmarking) of language and linguistic objectives (Selvi, 2014).…”

“…Furthermore, given the fact that English has become the world's lingua franca and multilingualism has become the norm in the global society, the NEST/NNEST dichotomy needs to be reconceptualised by taking into account the multiple identities of the diverse population of Moreover, previous studies have been largely critiqued as being insufficiently theorised and confined to defining the qualities of each group without considering the experiences of the individual members of these groups and the influential factors in their context (Aneja, 2016a(Aneja, , 2016bRivers, 2017). Recent scholarship (e. g., Aneja, 2017;Pablo, 2011), however, has started to shed light on the negotiation of teachers' personal, social and professional identities without holding presupposed identity framings, and to explore the impact of this negotiation on their professional advancement and pedagogical approaches.…”

“…The topic of identity has been under scrutiny within the NNEST movement, and many scholars have advocated for a poststructuralist view of identity as multiple, complex, and dynamic to reconceptualise the identities of English teachers (e.g. Aneja, 2016aAneja, , 2016bRudolph et al, 2015). However, this poststructuralist approach is missing from much of the literature (Selvi, 2016) and its application has been largely limited to tertiary-level preservice English-teaching programs (e.g.…”