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Are professional English teachers who are also native english speakers better than a native speaker calling themselves a "teacher"?
I studied teaching for 6 years. I learned methods for explaining and then methods for helping students remember the class.
Is English teaching just a fun travel life for any native with a 3 month certificate, or is it a profession like being a dentist?
Closing Statement from steven ira
in murcia most think that a native is better.its hard for a murcian english teacher to ask for 35 e an hour.a bilingual highly trained english speaker is what people look for. Inglesgarantizado is my school and we have 3 spanish girls who teach kids from the maristas and san pablo colegios.They are great teachers but i wouldnt use them for 1a1 conversation.
Feyisayo Anjorin 50+
In my days in film school, we learnt the IPA (international phonetics alphabeth), which helps as actors to speak English in British, Australian, Canadian, American, New Zealand, Irish and South African accents.
Among native speakers there are regional accents and slangs.
A professional English teacher would have a broader perspective of English as a global language and would know what to focus on while teaching.
Fritzie Reisner 100+
Different countries or even accrediting institutions may certify people as language teachers who are not fluent in the language at hand. If the professional teacher's English is not grammatically and idiomatically correct, I don't think knowing the names of grammatical forms is a compensating body of fact.
A native speaker whose English is correct may with three months of training be of greater service to students than a teacher with more training whose English is not at all fluent.
Lejan . 30+
In terms of pronunciation your ears may detect better than 'ours' who comes from where in Europe.
steven ira
Lejan . 30+
And I agree with you not to focus to much on the 'memorizing' part. For languages it also helps to teach about so called 'false friends', which are words who sound alike in a foreign and the native language, yet have another meaning. The German word 'Frieden' which means 'peace' yet sounds pretty much like 'freedom' which means 'freedom' and not 'peace' is a 'false friend' for example. To know where the pitfalls are does help.
Could you please explain to me what 'You Had Better' means? I don't know what it stands for and maybe 'I Have Better' when I do...
Lejan . 30+
Language is no tooth surgery, yet to often it gets tought as painful as such.
Today we can adjust any modern text processing program on a computer on 'auto' spell- and grammar checking. Accurately enough for any 'not native' conversation in the English language. But those settings won't improve our verbal skills, won't they?
For writing we usually have more time at hand to be more focused, whereas in a verbal conversation we have to go on 'auto pilot' and to 'feel' a language more than to 'think' about it. Thinking blocks, feeling flows. And who really cares if I I used 'past present' instead of 'past perfect' or however this 'grammar stuff' is called.
Learning by doing is, what a native with a 3 month certificate can provide. Learning by doing is how all of us learned our mother tongue.
There are good and bad 'non native' English teacher as there are good and bad 'natives'.
If a 3 month certificate versus a long term degree is an indicator for 'quality' I have my personal doubts. But the places I get to meet those '3 month' natives I usually get to choose to keep or change them, whereas a teacher usually stays at his/her school throughout his professional career and as a student I have no other choice but to 'love' or 'endure' them.
My best English teacher have always been 'natives' as they are the true source of their language.
Lejan . 30+
I found out about their 'secret' simply by asking and was told, that most American or British movies never get dubbed on TV, only subtitled and this is the way they adopt this Language. And not only its 'melody', grammar and vocabulary as well!
I can only speak by my experience in Germany, but here we focus way to much on grammar and correct spelling than on fluent conversation.
I didn't learn my native language at school. I learned it by listening to my parents. And my parents never tought me any grammar, they corrected mine, because you don't need to know about it if you know how it 'feels' right.
Many Germans I know 'freeze up' if they have to speak English. Why? Because they are afraid to make mistakes. Why? Because this is what school does to us. Teacher rate our English skills by grammar and spelling and just a tiny bit by verbal participation in class if one is lucky. When I was at school this was the given standard. They give you the tools but never - or not enough - encourage to use them.
You don't need 'methods for helping students remember the class' if you keep confronting them over and over again with conversation. Talk, talk, talk!
After 9 years of school English I had to learn that 'please' is not the right way to say 'you are welcome'. Can you imagine that?!
I don't want anyone to read Shakespeare in English lesson. It is just off the point!
Unless one wishes to become a translator or book auditor there is little use for ordinary students to be trained as such.
And what is my grammar good for if it blocks me to speak freely, because my 'transcoding module' is just not fast enough?
Have you ever made fun of someone who spoke in your but not his/her native toungue, yet spoke gramatically incorrectly? No, decent people usually don't do that. Personally I lost count how often I managed to make 'natives' laugh. Yet by unintentional humor, not by false grammar.
steven ira
really any native can talk english and if theres alot alot alot of time the spanish will absorb it via osmosis but theres not so much time.And many teachers quote unquote can explain that the second conditional uses the past plus would and the third column of the verb (speak spoke spoken) but after most students cant speak well. PERIOD.the explanation is not the teachers job. the capturing it producing it on demand is the language teachers job..the history teachers is paid to explain in easy terms. so to it is the job of a geology teacher .but the language teacher is not teaching english for students curiosity.its for life and death in murcia spain. English Is The New Money...no english no job its that simple and the monied people get english all they want live in nannies english lang schools in murcia at 1500 a month per kid..you got 2 kids did you say??
..its the non monied folks who need teachers.methodology..when the usa army went to europe in ww2 they taught the GIs german french right away by memorizing 500 sentences . and in israel the same for learning hebrew. they told the immigrants to memorize translated form german or french to phonetic sentences in hebrew to say the basics and from there you can permutate new sentences..simply put any one can explain but get the student to produce it on demand thats the TEACHER job.thats my job.
Lejan . 30+
Lejan . 30+
What is more authentic : professionalism or nativity?
I learned the good old Oxford English at school and struggled my way through. And then came the day where I met my first 'British native' and this elegant gentlemen talked to me in a language I have never ever heard before, even though he was speaking English. I did not understand a single word! Way to fast, way to much accent, way to 'native'.
The fact that I wasn't answering, underlined by the look on my face, made clear to him that I wasn't just shy, so he repeated the same gibberish but this time, slower.
This helped to the extend, that I could identify some of his words like 'where' 'do' and 'is', yet still not enough to get his point. I must have been 15 at that time, so five years of 'Oxford School English' has already been cast upon me. In vain, so to speak. Admittedly I was not among the best in my class and my football skills were way more advanced, but in the given situation this didn't really help me either.
First when this gentlement put his hands aside his hip and started to move them in circles, I was able to point him the direction to the trainstation. Even at a time in which the steam engine has already become a legend.
16 years later I returned from a one year stay in the US to Germany, fluent in English, and set out on my first business trip into the UK. And to my own surprise, I struggled, again!
Most professional English teacher I had at school were no native speaker, so the 'melody' of the language I was taught was nothing but English with a strong German accent. Our books might have past the 'Oxford' test, but not what we got to 'hear'. Therefore our verbal results could not become any better than 'pigeon English'.
Have you ever noticed that people from Northern European countries, like Norway or Sweden, have a beautiful pronunciation and that they are surpeisingly fluid in their English?
Fritzie Reisner 100+
There are native speakers whose grammar and writing in English is better than that of many Engish teachers, and there are native speakers whose grammar and diction are weak.
Further, those who learn a language by living in the country (which is to say, they are surrounded by native speakers without necessarily having a formal classroom English teacher), tend to become more fluent in speaking than those learning in the classroom from the professional teacher.