On 26 and 27 January 2016, at the American University in Cairo (AUC), the 20th NileTESOL annual international conference was held. I was fortunate to be able to attend, through the support of TESOL International Association’s Affiliate Speaker Program, in which airfares and other costs are covered by the association, while the national affiliate takes care of local accommodations and meals.

The 2 days of talks, presentations, and other events were concluded with a colloquium on English as a global language. As the conference program book explained,

In keeping with NileTESOL’s theme of “Communicate, Collaborate, Create”, this interactive panel attempts to explore how all speakers of English use the language to communicate and collaborate with one another, as well as how all speakers of the language play a role in the co-creation of varieties of English. (p.7)

The panel was made up of the plenary speakers: Gerry Gebhard, from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA; Nadia Touba, an education consultant in Egypt; Liying Cheng, from Queen’s University, Canada, standing in for Barry O’Sullivan, from the British Council; Heba Fathelbab, from AUC; and myself. The colloquium moderators were Elizabeth Arrigoni and Mai Magdy, and the discussant was TESOL International Association Past President (2013–2014) and one of the founding members of NileTESOL, Deena Boraie. Two of the main questions the panelists were asked to consider and respond to were: “If English no longer ‘belongs’ to the L1 speakers, why do preferences for British or American varieties still persist? And in the field of TESOL, why do preferences for ‘native speaker’ teachers still persist?” (p.7). As the last of the five panelists, I referred to the presentations of the four previous panelists, in relation to which, I presented some of the following points:

1.      In 1985, Paikeday announced, in the title of his book, The Native Speaker is Dead!, which was subtitled “An Informal Discussion of a Linguistic Myth With Noam Chomsky and Other Linguists, Philosophers, Psychologists, and Lexicographers.” In spite of this pronouncement, more than 40 years ago, we are still having this discussion. Why is that? In his review of Paikeday’s book, Meara (1986) noted that “In discussions of language teaching …‘native speaker judgements of grammaticality’ form the basic raw data of linguistic analyses” (p.957). Are we still using such outdated standards of correctness? And if so, why?

2.      One reason for this longevity is the long history of this particular myth, which appears to go way back, to at least the 1830s, to Professor Ticknor, who was then at Harvard University. His talk, entitled “Lecture on the Best Methods of Teaching the Living Languages,” was given to the American Institute on 24 August 1832—more than 160 years before the founding of the NNEST movement within the TESOL association, by Braine and others, and more than 180 years ago now. In his talk, Ticknor stated that people “who have the opportunity to, should learn the living language they wish to possess, as it is learned by those to whom it is native [emphasis added]” (1937, p.19).

3.      Ticknor’s talk was followed by a number of other talks given in the 1800s, which proposed the same idea. Professor Thomas, then at Columbia University, gave a talk to the Michigan Schoolmaster’s Club in 1886, in which he said that, in relation to learning a foreign language “to learn to speak it at all well demands long association with those who speak it as their native tongue [emphasis added]” (1893, p.19). Almost a century after Thomas’ talk, influential writers in the field, such as Stern (1983), were still taking the same position: “The native speaker’s ‘competence’ or ‘proficiency’ or ‘knowledge of the language’ is a necessary point of reference [emphasis added] for the second language proficiency concept used in language teaching” (p.341).

4.      But that long history is not the only reason for the longevity of this particular myth. Understandably, the attention—and the concomitant tension—has been firmly focused, for the last 30 years, on the Ns in “NSE,” “NNSE,” “NEST,” and “NNEST”—“(non)native speaker of English” and “(non)native-English-speaking teacher,” respectively. However, this focus on the N—what I referred to, in the NileTESOL colloquium, as “the other N-word”—has been part of the problem, because, in focusing on the N, we missed the tremendous impact of the S. I have, then, used—and encouraged others to use—“native user” rather than “native speaker,” when possible, to help dislodge the fixation on speaking.

5.      The relationship between the S and the N, which appears to have gone largely or completely unnoticed in our field, lies in the communicative language teaching (CLT) movement, which, as the name implies, became more than a methodology, entering the realms of a set of almost quasi-religious or evangelical beliefs. For example, as Block noted in 2004, that there seemed to be “an implicit hyperglobalism which envisaged the entire world learning English via one dominant methodology [CLT] and one particular type of pedagogical material” (p. 76). One of the many limitations of CLT is the way it privileged—accidentally or otherwise—one modality, speaking, over all the other language modalities. And in privileging one modality over the others, so was one type of language user, similarly and at the same time, privileged. (See Mahboob’s work for more on the NSE/NNSE divide/debate)

6.      Heba Fathelbab’s presentation on the NileTESOL panel reported on some research she has carried out on learners’ perceptions of “nativeness” based on physical appearance, rather than linguistic competence. This reminded me of a 2009 interview I gave, in which I talked about “The Aryan Super Race Model of ELT,” which was related to some of the questions we are still asking today, including: “Why is it that in some places still all you need to be an English teacher is to be tall, blonde-haired and blue-eyed and you’re in? And how much longer will we need to wait before the Native Speaker Myth finally dies its long-overdue and inevitable death?” Maybe I was wrong, as we are, sadly, apparently, still awaiting its demise.

7.      In relation to Liying Cheng’s comments on the panel about language assessment, I reiterated a point that I have made before, which is that in ELT, the “native speaker norm” is a contradiction in terms. This relates to Graddol’s work (DeMarco, 2010), in which he describes NSEs as “irrelevant,” which has always seemed a little harsh to me, as NSEs still have a place in language education, as long as they are trained and qualified to be language teachers. But Graddol’s enormous data sets did show that approximately 75% of all of the English produced in the world at that time, around 2010, was used by one NSE communicating with another NSE, and that figure has probably gone up, beyond 75%, since then. This is what makes the “native speaker norm” a contradiction in terms, in ELT, so it is essential that we stop using that as a “point of reference” (Stern, 1983) for anything in ELT anymore.

8.      The next point I made was in relation to Nadia Touba’s comments on the panel, which is part of my recasting of English sayings, in this case, “familiarity breeds contempt,” which I believe can be re-presented, with deliberate grammatical incorrectness, as “familiarity breeds content,” as we often gravitate to what we know, and find comfort in what is familiar. This may be one reason why, in spite of three decades of work challenging the position of unqualified and untrained native-user language teachers over that of qualified, experienced, highly proficient, nonnative-user language teachers, we still find ourselves drawn to the mythical, magical unicorn-like creature of the Native Speaker. Or, perhaps the myth of the Native Speaker really is dead, as Paikeday pronounced, back in 1985—except that it has now become a fairytale…

9.      My penultimate point, which related to the panel presentations by Fathelbab, Cheng, and Touba, was the recasting of EAP. Instead of EAP standing for English for academic purposes, I suggested that three of the recurring themes of their three presentations were: expectations, assumptions, and perceptions, in relation to the misguided and uninformed preferences of learners, and other stakeholders, such as parents, for NESTs, who are expected, assumed, and perceived to be better than NNESTs.

10.  My last point related to my experiences as the director of the ELT Unit at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where some of the local Cantonese instructors complained about my policy of not only hiring NNESTs as instructors, but also asking them to teach English language pronunciation classes. Ironically, most of the NESTs were fine with that, but not some of the local instructors, one of the most senior of whom asked me, one day, “How can you do this? How can we be taken seriously as an ELT Unit if we do this? Don’t you know that the students will sound foreign, if they have a Hong Kong teacher for pronunciation classes?” This, coming from a senior-level local language teacher, with decades of experience teaching English, left me speechless. But it did alert me to the fact that, in the NEST-NNEST debate, we must be careful not be our own worst enemy.

Dr. Andy Curtis is the 50th president of TESOL International Association. He received his MA in applied linguistics and English language teaching, and his PhD in international education, from the University of York in England. From 2007 to 2011, he was the director of the English Language Teaching Unit at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a professor in the Faculty of Education there. Prior to 2007, he was the executive director of the School of English at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, and a professor at the School for International Training in Vermont, USA. Andy has published numerous articles, book chapters, and books, and been invited to work with teachers in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as North, South, and Central America. He is based in Ontario, Canada, from where he works as an independent consultant for language teaching organizations worldwide.