In the 1990s, the focus of research consisted in the characteristics of NEST and NNEST. In the comparison of NEST and NNEST, Canagarajah (1999) stated that NESTs could be excellent English teacher in EFL learning context because of their unique cultural information, while NNESTs were suitable for ESL context because of their multicultural experiences.
A large number of studies, however, pointed out that using the dichotomy to examine NS and NNS teacher was inappropriate. The literatures were divided into three parts. The first part discussed the legitimacy of the dichotomy of native speaker or non-native speaker and raised the worry about language imperialism and
nationalistic view about language learning. (Nayar, 1994). The second part of research focused on World Englishes and the indigenization of language. Some researchers considered English as a lingua franca and addressed the importance of learning the
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English varieties (Modiano, 2005). The third part of literatures proposed that the contextualization should be taken into the considerations (Higgins, 2003). Although the major researchers argued against the native and non-native dichotomy, some researchers considered that the distinction still existed. The distinctions were reflected in both group of teachers’ self-perceptions. In Moussu’s (2006) study, the results manifested that most NNESTs agreed they understand students’ learning difficulties and their needs. However, they considered that they had foreign accent and they lacked knowledge of idioms and cultural references. On the contrary, NESTs appeared to be more confident in their language skills.
Whether the native and nonnative dichotomy is proper remains open to debate, while previous studies enabled to gain an insight into how NEST and NNEST positively influenced students’ English ability. To further discuss the issue, three strands of literature are presented in this section. The first strand describes NESTs’
perception and self-image concerning their teaching; and it was followed by a brief review of students’ perception of both NEST and NNEST. The third strand of studies focused on the students’ progress in terms of their speaking under the teaching of NEST and NNESTs.
In the following section, research concerning teachers’ perception towards their teaching would be reviewed.
2.1.1 Teachers’ Perception towards Their Teaching
The distinction of native and non-native teacher have been discussed for a long time. However, the debates about the controversial issues have been inconsistent, for instance, defining a native speaker, proposing the advantages, and disadvantages of teachers based on their first language. Nevertheless, Medgyes (1999) reminded us that professional considerations of teacher should be the focus rather than disputing about
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the birth or mother tongue. Medgyes (1999) assumed that the gap of language competence between NESTs and non-NESTs might give rise to different teaching styles. To validate the presumption, 220 NESTs and non-NESTs among ten countries have been surveyed through the questionnaire. The most common difficulties and uncertainties that non-NEST encountered were the aspects of language use, including pronunciation, fluency, idiomatic English. Over a half of respondents agreed that different teaching styles existed between the NESTs and non-NESTs, while the
differences were left unanswered in this study. Á rva and Medgyes revisited the claims in The Non-native Teacher (Medgyes, 1999) and examined the unanswered questions by comparing the interviews with NESTs and non-NESTs with their video-recorded lessons. Some assumptions were confirmed in this follow-up study such as the fact that Native were good listeners and showed high interest in students’ opinions. During the class, they expressed in a more economical way and succeeded in getting students to speak up. The main issue in this study was that researcher found the discrepancy between the “perceived behavior” and “actual behavior.” To sum up, there might be a mismatch between the teachers’ perception and their actual teaching in the class.
2.1.2 Students’ Perceptions towards NEST
In the book of The Non-native Teacher, Medgyes (1999) claimed that the non-native teacher could hardly achieved non-native teacher’s language competence, but their chances to be successful language teacher are equal. However, their different levels of language competences might result in the discrepancies in teaching styles (Á rva &
Medgyes, 2000; Medgyes, 1999; Seidlhofer, 1999). In Medyges’ (1999) study, the data were collected merely from questionnaire surveys and interviews of two groups of instructors, while students’ perceptions were not investigated. In order to
understand whether students’ perceptions or attitudes toward NEST correspond to
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teacher’s perception of themselves, Benke and Medgyes’s (2005) then carried out another study to answer the question. They surveyed 422 Hungarian learners with lower intermediate level of proficiency, who had had more than one-year experiences of being taught by native and non-native teachers. The result of the study suggested that the NNESTs tended to assign a lot of homework and correct errors more often.
The NESTs, instead, put the primary focus on speaking skills and they were happy to improvise during the class. They were also more interested in students’ opinions and more capable of getting their students to speak up. As shown in the questionnaires, more than a half of the students claimed that native speaker teacher can teach speaking skills and conversation more efficiently. Similar finding can be found in research conducted by Storey et al. (2001), which indicated that local English teacher tended to use textbook-based teaching and set more homework for students.
Contrastively, the classes of native English teacher was more activity-based. During the activities, more chances to use English were given to complete the task due to the need of communication. In addition to having more chances to speak in classes, learners also expressed positive comments on Native speaker teacher. In Barratt and Kontra’s (2000) study, they surveyed students and native speaker teachers’ colleges and asked them to free write their positive and negative comments on NEST. Students gave positive comments on teacher’s authenticity. For example, student reported that NEST helped them understand the subtle differences of language usage. Secondly, they were encouraged to use more English because NESTs were unable to speak leaners’ mother tongue. Some students felt more motivated to speak up and some even regarded it as a good chance to force themselves to communicate using target
language.
In summary, English learners generally agreed that NESTs not only provided
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them with wider vocabulary, authentic pronunciation but also gave much more information about culture (Benke & Medgyes, 2005; Kontra, 2000; Storey et al., 2001). They also suggested that NESTs granted them more opportunities to communicate in English in class compared to non-native speaking counterparts (Benke & Medgyes, 2005). While these findings lead to the assumption that NESTs could be more suitable teachers of English in terms of speaking, little empirical evidence was revealed to establish a direct correlation between learners’ perceptions and their actual performance in English speaking. In other word, whether there was a discrepancy between learners’ teacher preference and the genuine improvement of their speaking ability has not been given the attention it needs. As relatively little is known about the improvement of learners after receiving instruction from NESTs, studies which addressed this area should be reviewed.
2.1.3 NEST’s Impacts on Students’ Speaking Competence
In the previous section, literatures of NEST program, administration,
bureaucratic complications with foreign teachers, and learners’ perceptions have been discussed. There remains a need for analyzing foreign educators’ actual impact on students’ speaking performance, which could be revealed through assessments on speaking ability. In this section, the work on how and what can students benefit from native English speaking teacher was thus reviewed.
In terms of speaking performance, a few studies shed light on NESTs’ influence on learners’ improvement in pronunciation (e.g., Levis, Sonsaat, Link, & Barriuso, 2016; Li & Zhang, 2016). Levis, Sonsaat, Link, and Barriuso (2016) investigated whether students’ performance and improvements of pronunciation may be affected by their English teachers’ first language status. The participants at similar proficiency level, which referred to the pronunciation in English, were recruited from a
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community university, ten of whom were assigned to NEST’s class and eight to NNEST’s class. The participants’ then received a pretest before their seven-week pronunciation lessons taught by either NEST or NNEST. After the lessons, they received a posttest. The content of pretest and posttest consisted of sentence reading tasks and narrative tasks. Their performance was rated by college students from introductory linguistics and writing classes. Their results indicated that the rating of two groups’ accentedness and comprehensibility had no significant difference;
namely, both groups’ performance improved in the posttest. The researchers concluded that the impact on students’ improvement of accentedness and
comprehensibility did not vary according to teachers’ language backgrounds. Students could still acquire correct pronunciation from NNESTs, who comprised a majority of pronunciation instructors and understood the procedure and challenges of English learning (Levis, Sonsaat, Link, & Barriuso, 2016).
The findings of Li and Zhang’s (2016) research also coincided with their study, and they further proposed that NEST enabled Chinese English learners to improve significantly in pronunciation while NEST did not. Their experiment involved two phases, in which 30 undergraduates received pronunciation instruction from NEST for two months and were then taught by NNEST for the same span. A pretest was
administered on the participants before all the lessons, and a middle test was applied in after the first two months (NEST); the posttest was conducted after the second part of the lessons (NNEST) ended, and the test scores were analyzed through one-way ANOVA. Their results revealed that in the first phase, NEST’s instruction of pronunciation failed to significantly enhance students’ accentedness and
comprehensibility; the second phase, unexpectedly, NNEST significantly increased students’ scores on accentedness and comprehensibility. A final conclusion was drawn
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that NNEST’s instruction on pronunciation was preferable in their context, which might result from the fact that NEST’s teaching might not be intelligible to the students in the program (Li & Zhang, 2016). In brief, although students might show preference for NEST to be their teacher (Li & Zhang, 2016), the overall improvement of their pronunciation suggested the suitability of NNEST to teach pronunciation.
To sum up, due to the scarcity of research in this area, whether NESTs and NNESTs influenced students’ improvement differently was still elusive. A few researchers (Levis, Sonsaat, Link, & Barriuso, 2016; Li & Zhang, 2016) tapped into NESTs’ influence on students’ pronunciation and claimed that they may not be more suitable than non-native counterparts simply owing to their first language status. The noteworthy part of their study, nonetheless, is that students still showed preference for NEST without hesitation in the interview, and whether their preference motivated learners to learn English and improve their speaking skills can be an object of study.
Furthermore, the quantitative approach of their studies, in which scores of students’
interviews and narrative tasks were calculated, might not thoroughly reflect the slight progress of learners’ speaking ability. The above reasons implied that a qualitative analysis could be designed to provide insight into this issue. In this light, the purpose of this exploratory research is to examine learners’ improvement in terms of their English speaking performance under the instruction of NESTs, and both quantitative and qualitative methods would be adopted. The results could lead to a better
understanding of the genuine effectiveness of incorporating NESTs in Taiwanese junior high school EFL context.
2.2 Speaking Fluency