Discrimination Against Non-native English Speakers in the English Language Teaching Profession: Evidence from Internship Advertisements1

چکیده مقاله

Despite the non-native English-speaking teachers’ (NNESTs) movement, the literature documents widespread discrimination against NNESTs particularly in hiring discourse in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. The present study aims to shed light on another aspect of this discrimination in EFL internship advertisements by investigating the ideal interns’ qualifications and requirements as well as the characteristics of internship locations and fringe benefits attributed to the internship positions. To this aim, 13 international advertisements were chosen as the corpus of the study from the Premier TEFL website and were thematically analyzed. The results pointed to the native speaker fallacy in internship advertisements as all the programs required the candidates to be native speakers of innercircle English-speaking countries or hold academic degrees from these locations. Additionally, a variety of selling strategies and marketing tactics such as the description of landscapes and outdoor activities along with a diversity of fringe benefits were utilized to attract native speakers. The results are discussed in the light of native speaker dominance in the profession and the ways to fight against this legacy. Finally, the paper ended with the implications the study has for various stakeholders including native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) and NNESTs themselves.