Área de operaciones internas y procesos

Following the above summary of the findings, in this section the three research questions are revisited in order to provide short and direct answers to them.

5.3.1 First Research Question

The first research question was as follows: For Saudi Recruiting Committee members and programme administrators, how important are the following criteria: the

applicants’ academic qualification, accent, nationality, native speakership, and teaching experience? And are there any additional criteria that should be met by applicants in order for them to be hired to teach English in Saudi higher education institutions? The answer to this question was that the Saudi RC members saw the five hiring criteria presented in the questionnaire as being in the following order of

importance: academic qualification, teaching experience, native English speakership, nationality and accent. They added a few other criteria, such as experience in teaching English as a foreign language or in foreign countries, exposure to and respect for other cultures, and the age of applicants.

However, although they said that ‘academic qualification’ and ‘teaching

experience’ were the most important criteria they used in the hiring of EFL teachers, it was evident (as discussed in chapter 4, section 4.4.6) that these two criteria were

overridden by the allure of native speakership. That is, the participants rated the Yellow speaker, a native speaker who held the lowest academic qualification and had the least

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teaching experience, significantly more positively than all the three qualified NNESTs. Also, the vast majority of the recruiters (N= 46) ranked him as either the first or the second most qualified applicant of the five.

5.3.2 Second Research Question

The second research question asked: If the native speaker factor is to be found

important, is there a relationship between the importance of this factor and the chances of NNESTs being employed? The answer to this question is a definite ‘yes’. A

statistically significant relationship was found between the importance given by the participants to the ‘native English speaker’ criterion and their perceptions of the five applicants’ qualification levels and therefore their suitability for the job.

Indeed, the participants evaluated the second native English speaker, the Yellow speaker, as highly qualified and in particular, more qualified than all of the three non- native speaker applicants (the Red, Blue and Green Speakers). It should be remembered that all of the applicants held noticeably higher qualifications than the Yellow speaker (see chapter 4, table 4-1), yet he was perceived to be more qualified than the three NNESTs. For example, a non-native English speaker teacher with 7 years’ teaching experience, three of which were in Dubai, which has a culture similar to that of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and a Master’s degree in TESOL was perceived to be less qualified than the Yellow speaker (NEST) who held a Bachelor degree in English and had one year’s experience of teaching in the United Kingdom.

Not only was the ‘NES’ criterion found to affect the chances of NNESTs being employed, but also ‘nationality’ and ‘accent’ were found to have similar effects. As discussed in the previous chapter (sections 4.5.2 and 4.5.3), those who assigned these two hiring criteria more importance perceived the three highly qualified non-native English speaker applicants (the Red, Blue and Green speakers) to be significantly less qualified in comparison to those who attributed less importance to the same two criteria. Thus, a qualified NNEST who applies for a job to teach English in a Saudi institution where the person responsible for recruiting teachers believes that the nationality and accent of teachers are important hiring criteria will suffer and have less chance of being employed there.

5.3.3 Third Research Question

This section answers the last research question, which asked: To what extent do Saudi Recruiting Committee members prefer less qualified NESTs over more qualified NNESTs? To answer this question, it is necessary to examine the responses of the

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participants to the 7th statement: ‘I prefer to employ native speakers to teach in my department even if their qualification level is lower than that of non-native speakers’. As discussed in the previous chapter (section 4.7), the results showed that the most participants in a single category (41.1%, N= 23) said they did not prefer less qualified NESTs over qualified NNESTs, 19.6% (N=11) of them frankly stated that they did, and the remaining 39.3% of the participants (N= 22) chose ‘not sure’. However, the

hesitation expressed by those who chose ‘not sure’ gives an indication that some of them were cautious about expressing and/or hiding their preference for less qualified NESTs over qualified NNESTs. Moreover, the mean score (average of the evaluations) of the Yellow speaker’s qualification level, as perceived by the 23 participants who said they did not prefer less qualified NESTs over NNESTs, was 6.39 out of 7 - an

extremely high score. Therefore, it was not surprising to find that those 23 participants would be happy to employ the Yellow speaker, since they were not paying any attention to his actual qualifications to teach English as a foreign language. It is reasonable, then, to assume that more than the 11 ‘frank’ participants would employ less qualified NESTs simply because they are native speakers of English, regardless of whether they were the most qualified applicants or not. Therefore, taking into account the ‘cautious’ 39.3%, it is fairly safe to answer the third research question by saying that many Saudi recruiters would prefer to employ less qualified native speakers of English than more qualified non-native English speakers to teach English in Saudi higher education institutions.