The Native English Speaker Phenomenon in China
2017-01-06
In my previous blog entitled ["Native Teachers Wanted..." What do you mean?], I was trying to explain how unclear it is when school administrators, educators, recruiters and so called teachers' agents use the phrase on thousands of job ads online, ignorantly or knowingly blurring the actual meaning of what they intend to say. This shortsightedness sprang from the original popular trend of "native English speaking ESL teachers" being needed to teach in local schools in China just like in all other countries where English is not spoken as a first language. It is the most popular requirement would-be English teachers in China have to meet, overshadowing other requirements concerning working experience, training, education, age, etc. The popularity of this phenomenon has also made it the most controversial in the ESL industry. In this blog I will try to expose some of those controversies as objectively as I can, using the question and answer technique so that persons commenting on this blog can easily refer to specific questions.1. So who is a Native English Speaker? Common sense tells us that this is a person whose mother tongue is English.
2. So what's mother tongue? One's native language. (According to the dictionary Merriam-Webster).
3. Can a person have two or more mother tongues or native languages? Yes. (My personal opinion).
4. Do you get your mother tongue from your parents or from the environment in which you grow up? From both. (My personal opinion).
5. So if one's parents are from a country where English is not a first language but the person is born and educated in a country where English is a first language, is that child a native English speaker? It will depend on some other factors... (My personal opinion).
6. if just one of my parents is a native English speaker living in a country where English is not a first language, then I am born and educated in that country, am I a native English speaker? It will depend on some other factors... (My personal opinion).
7. Do immigrants in countries where English is used as a first language qualify as native English speakers? No, in most cases. (My personal opinion).
8. Can native English speakers be identified racially? No. (A simple survey a colleague and I carried out in Shanghai in 2012 proved this answer very wrong. Here is what we did in case somebody wants to repeat the survey. We wrote a CV for a dummy teacher. We made sure most of the requirements usually asked were met. Then we got two head shot pictures online, one, a black American and the other a white American. We added the two pictures to 20 copies of the same CV each. Then we got online and applied for as many ESL job ads as we could using the CV we had made. My friend had the CV with the head shot of the black American while I had the other. With the white guy's head shot on the CV I got 18 positive replies, 3 promises to get back and 1 sorry the position is taken. With the other CV with the black guy's head shot my friend got 2positive replies calling for interview, 7 replies saying only native English speakers were needed and 13emails got no replies. Our little survey was just to find out whether recruiters really do read through CVs or they just take a look at applicants' pictures usually at the top of the CV. We got served. So, some people in China attribute native English speaking to a physical looks and worse still, race, an addition to the controversy we are exploring. Now back to the series of questions.
9. You are from Italy but did your university studies in England majoring in English and finally got a certificate to teach English. Are you a native English speaker? No. You are a near-native English speaker. (My personal opinion).
10. You are a British citizen, born and raised in China in the Chinese education system. Are you a native English speaker? It's hard to say. (My personal opinion).
These 10questions above including the short story expose the controversies around the following phrase commonly found on ESL job ads in China: "Our school is looking for native English speakers..."
Dear recruiters, usually you get 1 or 2 applicants because 30 to 50 others are wondering whether they qualify as native English speakers or not. Among those 30 to 50 hesitant applicants you might have the best teacher that fits the position you have. Globalization will only get better with more and more people interacting and physical racial traces getting almost eliminated. The number of speakers of English as a second language has already outnumbered that of speakers of English as a first language. It will get more and more difficult to find the native English speaker that used to be decades ago.
Pay more attention to other requirements that qualify a person to teach English as a second language. Remember, being a native English speaker doesn't qualify a person automatically to teach English especially to learners of English as a second language.
Like mentioned in the previous blog, if you are looking for ESL teachers to teach in your school, the right way to phrase it is: "We are looking for native English speaking ESL teachers for..." NOT "We are looking for English speakers" or worse "We are looking for native speakers" or worse still "We are looking for natives."
Regards and happy New Year 2017
Denis.
Yes. I know you are right. If you ever see me making such mistakes, please tell me. I know that I make such mistakes from time to time myself. Thank you.
well said, I am afraid i can't take all your opions. but it make sense in some ways
I had four languages at high school, and none of my teachers ever taught us the pronunciation of any word with the help of the IPT symbols.
If you in Finland are familiar with it that goes a long way to show what advantages attach to the use of IPT.
I think, however, most native English teachers are handicapped by another disadvantage: they are monolingual. Monolinguals cannot easily identify with learners of a second language. Either they shower too much empathy on their pupils, or they set too strict standards. The multilingual teacher gets a feeling that guides him in teaching. Many N American teachers just accept poor English from their pupils because they subscribe to the idea that the learner makes an effort and that alone deserves recognition. They fail to understand that Chinglish has proliferated precisely because some teachers don't mind when the English gets mangled. A foreign English teacher should take extra pain to ensure that the pupil's message - in writing or spoken - accurately reflects what that pupil's actual thoughts are. But since nearly every Chinese translates while speaking, there is a high incidence of miscommunications.
Seneca: "What foreign teacher knows that "mu:n" really is "moon"?
This notion about phonetic alphabet (or lack of knowledge of) certainly applies specifically to native English speakers, who never had to study to speak English themselves.
At least in my home country in Europe, English was taught this same way, and I think same applies for many non-English speaking countries. Coming from this background, non-native English teachers would have the advantage of knowing IPA that their students will also be using.
Not being a teacher myself, I don't know how English teachers are educated - but I would be surprised if IPA was not part of education of every qualified language teacher?
To MichaelM and Liononthehunt:
the wires seemd to be crossed when I was replying to your posts. But you probably have figured out whom I was replying to...
I have always loved teaching in China; it has given me virtual wings to kind of fly over the rough ground. Why? The pupils and students seldom had a teacher who struggled as much understanding them as they struggle understanding him: this brings both sides closer to each other on occasion. Chinese pupils also are less obnoxious to a teacher than youths in the West may be. They are used to more hardships and complain much less.
Nevertheless, there are things that are a little challenging to some international teachers: the Chinese pupils are not just used to Chinese as a comfort zone; they are taught in a way that makes the use of Mandarin in their class a must. Foreign teachers therefore can work only with some effect that helps the majority of their pupils. As soon as the teacher uses a word that their Chinese English teacher has never taught them they get lost in the translation (almost literally). Then an annoying murmur sets in, private conversations in Chinese that distract and absorb a lot of energy.
The lot of the international teacher could be much easier if Chinese English teachers used English as the medium of instruction. Let me be categorical about this: in the whole world it is common to teach the target language by using it as extensively as possible. There should be less and less bilinguality and no translation any more for high-school pupils. The translations put the learners back in their comfort zone, so they never really grow into the use of English. The purpose of learning English should be to become bilingual, not to become translator. Bilingualism is when you can think and communicate in any of two languages without interference from the other tongue.
I am more than puzzled by the requirement you mentioned. However, in my first teaching position (I taught English literature there) there was a U.S. American teacher of 7 or eight years who two years later was asked to leave because, as the college "explained" the gtovernment did not allow a foreign staff member to continue for more than ten years.
Let us be frank here: the Chiense government does not wish to see foreign English teachers charve out a career in a sensitive environment such as an institution of higher learning. We are "agents of change".
"I have ... foreigners seeking... and I am sick to find out that not only do their English pronunciations sound dubiously strange, their writings are also a grammatical mess..."
That is indeed true, and do you know that many a native speaker's written English is "dubiously strange" too? Many N Americans do not know the correct singular or plural forms of "bacterium", "phenomenon", write "would of" when they should write "would have".
"Accents" continued by Seneca:
I just commented on the CHINESE-accented English and how it gets perpetuated. We get used to some Chinese accent but Chinese don't get used to their own accdent when speaking English. I just showed why and how, and that this is a serious hindrance to the progress of their English.
Here I want to show another point:
The Chinese accent has many features or properties that language teachers need to be aware of but often are not. Foreign teachers in particular should care about this: your Chinese pupils can decipher the international phonetic symbols; you probably cannot. To be able to read IPT symbols is a big advantage. Your learners can actually read how to pronounce new English words in their own bilingual dictionaries. What foreign teacher knows that "mu:n" really is "moon"?
However, the Chinese pupils will get their pronunciation of "mu:n" from their Chinese English teacher. And most likely, this teacher will mispronounce this single word as "mun". The difference between "mun" and "mu:n" is significant: it is one of vowel length.
There are dozens or hundreds of words with a short "a", "e", "i", "o", or "u" competing with an equal number of similar words that have a long "a:", "e:", "o:", or "u:": Fill versus feel; hill versus heel; too versus to; mast versus must, and so on.
If the pupil doesn't learn to enunciate a long vowel differently from a short vowel, his accent will be confusing.
English vowels are more confusing to Chiense than Italian or German vowels because English A, E, I, O, U are pronounced in between 3 and many more different ways. Most can be pronounced as a monophtongue: a: in "after", but also as a diphtong: ei in "ape". Once again, these variations in the pronunciation of a single letter are a somehwat unique characteristic of the English language and not common to other Indoeuropean languages.
Therefore I posit that foreign English teachers be required to familiarise themselves with the IPT.
Chinese speakers of English often mispronounce vowels that are either long (i: in "beak") or a diphtong (AI in "bike") The "bike" often sounds like "back", "to ride a bike" therefore is enunciated as "to ra:d a back"
Perhaps if Chinese pupils could be taught to memorise poems and then to repeat limericks they could learn to speak English with more competence... But to achieve that, their teachers - international and national - need to have more competence too.
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