Áreas de Conservación

In the US, Flynn and Gulikers (2001: 151) tackled the issues of NNEST hiring criteria from their own perspective and experience as programme administrators. Their article presents a set of guidelines designed to improve NNESTs’ employment prospects. It also explores the attitudes of programme administrators, ESL learners and NNES applicants. The six questions presented in the article pertained to the criteria adopted by programme administrators when hiring NNESTs, the mentoring or support that

NNESTs need when they are hired, how NNESTs should react when they are perceived not to be ‘American’ by their students, the role of MA TESOL programmes in the professional development of NNESTs, the recommended interviewing strategies for them, and the factors that should be considered by NNESTs when accepting or declining a job offer.

They assert that of these the question most relevant to the issue of NNESTs’ employment is the first, which investigates the criteria recruiters use when they hire English teachers. In their discussion of this question, they note that the main issues associated with the NNESTs are their accent and fluency. Flynn and Gulikers (2001: 153) believe that “if NNES professionals have an accent, it should not interfere with understanding. That is, their speech should be intelligible to both native and nonnative speakers of English”. Although they mention the NES/NNES dichotomy, they do not discuss the effect of the applicants’ status as natives or non-natives on their employment prospects. Moreover, they imply that some NNESTs, and indeed NESTs, do not have an accent. Everybody speaks with an accent since it is “no more than one’s way of

speaking, the way one sounds when speaking, the way one uses sound features such as stress, rhythm, and intonation” (Kumaravadivelu, 2004: 1).

The issue of intelligibility is repeatedly mentioned here and therefore merits further discussion. In the broad sense of the term, it refers to the ability to recognise and understand what a speaker is uttering. Kumaravadivelu (2004: 3) defines intelligibility as “being understood by an individual or a group of individuals at a given time in a given communicative context.”

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However, Smith and Nelson (2006: 429) refer to developments concerning the perceived status of native speakers and highlight the fact that lack of intelligibility could come from native as well as non-native speakers of English.

those who have traditionally been called “native speakers” are not the sole judges of what is intelligible, nor are they always more intelligible than “non-native” speakers

The issue of intelligibility is perhaps closely linked with familiarity of variety. That is, the more familiar people (whether native or non-native) are with an English variety, the greater the chance for them to understand and be understood by the members of that speech community. Moreover, Smith and Nelson (ibid) assert that the burden of understanding does not lie on the speaker or listener alone but that it is an interaction between them. McArthur (2001: 7) provides an example on how the shared

responsibility of intelligibility is called for in a world where English serves as the world’s language. He reports on a Japanese executive in the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris who noted:

We non-natives are desperately learning English... Dear Anglo-Americans, please show us you are also taking pains to make yourselves understood in an international setting.

Smith and Nelson (2006: 430) divide intelligibility into three categories: intelligibility, comprehensibility, and interpretability. The first deals with the ability to recognise an utterance, the second concerns the ability to understand the meaning of an utterance, and the third is the ability to understand the meaning behind an utterance, where pragmatics plays an extremely important role. The authors argue that these three categories should be treated as degrees of understanding on a continuum of complexity of variables, from phonological to pragmatic, where intelligibility represents the lowest degree of understanding while interpretability represents the highest.

Mahboob (2003) was the first researcher to study the issue of NNESTs’

employment empirically. He explored the hiring practices of 122 college-level intensive English programme administrators in 50 US states and their attitudes towards the

importance of the native speakership criterion in their hiring practices. The study sought to answer three research questions: (1) Do administrators of adult English Language Programmes in the USA find being a native English speaker an important factor in making their hiring decisions? (2) Do adult English Language Programmes in the USA have an equal ratio of NESTs and NNESTs? (3) Is there a relation between the

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The instrument used was a questionnaire that consisted of three parts:

administrative questions, instructor questions and student questions. In the first set of questions, the participants were asked to rate 10 hiring criteria on a scale from zero to five (0 meant the least important, 5 meant the most important). These alphabetically- ordered criteria were: accent, American citizenship, American nationality, dialect, educational experience, enrolment in associated academic programmes, ethnicity, native English speaker, recommendation, and teaching experience. In the instructor questions, the respondents were asked if they were affiliated with an educational programme (applied linguistics, TESOL etc.) and if they had had an affiliation, they were further asked about the demographics of students and teachers in their departments. Finally, the student questions were used as distracters as they asked the participants about the total number of students in their programmes and the percentage of those students who were expected to study at a university after graduating from the programme.

Overall, the participants ranked the ten criteria in terms of their importance in the following order: teaching experience, educational experience, recommendation, native English speaker, accent, dialect, citizenship, nationality, enrolment in associated academic programmes, and ethnicity.

The results of this study revealed that 59.8 per cent of the participants considered it important for an English teacher to be a native speaker. Furthermore, the study showed that NESTs and NNESTs did not have an equal presence in the adult intensive English programmes in the United States. More specifically, the programmes surveyed included a total of 1425 teachers out of which 1313 were NESTs (92.1%) and only 112 were NNESTs (7.9%).

This huge discrepancy in the numbers of NESTs and NNESTs could be partially explained by the administrators’ answers to the third research question. That is,

Mahboob (2003) found that there was a significant negative relationship between the importance given to native speakership and the ratio of NNESTs in every programme. This means that programme administrators who assigned less importance to the ‘native speaker’ criterion had a higher number of NNESTs in their programmes. This also suggests that the administrators not only perceived nativeness as important but also assigned it considerable weight when making hiring decisions.

Moussu (2006) explored the hiring practices of 21 intensive English programme administrators in the United States as well as their perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of NNSTs. She distributed an online questionnaire which used Likert-scale

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questions and open-ended questions, one of which asked the administrators directly about the hiring criteria they used when recruiting English teachers.

The answers to this question showed that 95.2% of the administrators’ answers included the past teaching experiences of the applicants, 81% included an MA in a related field, 28.5% listed overseas experience, 23.8% included the job interview, 19% included native-like English fluency, and finally the letters of recommendation were listed in 9.5% of the administrators’ answers. In contrast to the findings of Mahboob (2003), it is obvious that the NEST/NNEST dichotomy was not used as a hiring criterion. Furthermore, the administrators were asked if they would assign NNESTs to the same classes taught by NESTs and the majority of them (62%) said they would. More importantly, all the administrators surveyed agreed that NNESTs could teach as well as NESTs (55% strongly agreed while 45% agreed). Moussu (2006: 159) asked the administrators: “If you don’t have any NNS ESL instructors working at your school right now, do you think you will hire one in the near future, if the opportunity comes up? [Italics original]. On a scale from ‘definitely yes’ to ‘definitely no’, only five administrators responded, out of whom two chose ‘definitely yes’, two chose ‘cautiously yes’ and one selected ‘maybe’.

As regards the perceived strengths of NNESTs, the respondents on the one hand acknowledged the pedagogical skills of the NNESTs and commended them for their use of multiple techniques, and their ‘strong collegiality’, ‘dedication’, ‘creativity in the classroom’ and high academic and proficiency standards and expectations of students. The perceived weaknesses of NNESTs, on the other hand, were their foreign accents, over-emphasis on grammar and lack of self-confidence.