Native-Speakerism in Online EFL/ ESL Teacher Job Vacancies: The Dissonance between Theory and Practice

Abstract

While the discussions about native-speakerism damage to the ELT profession and local cultures have prevailed for so long, many countries around the globe still hold cultural disbelief in the contribution of non-native speakers. This study aimed to explore EFL/ESL teachers’ qualifications deemed necessary for online teaching across the globe through the content analysis of the job vacancies posted online. To this aim, a corpus of 2000 online posts describing EFL/ ESL teacher vacancies from different countries were analyzed using concordance analysis and word count. The word counts were then categorized for the main themes they illustrated. The findings indicated that in addition to the words characterizing the teachers’ personality, required degrees and certificates, years of teaching experience, and words describing the details of the position, words denoting or explicitly indicating the preference for native teachers were of the highest frequency. Analysis of the contexts in which the word “native” was employed demonstrated that native teachers with British or American accents were remarkably given higher preference over non-native teachers. The results were then discussed with reference to teacher requirements for online teaching and with respect to the commonplace association of the inner-circle countries with native speakers of English. It was concluded that while native-non-native speaker division seems to have been solved as an ideology, in practice native-speaker fallacy, linguistic imperialism, and standardization still dominates the ELT profession. As a result, the decision to use English is seen more of a socio-political decision than a pedagogic one. Finally, the implications for theorists and the ELT community were discussed.