Challenges of Being a Non-native English Teacher
You can be continents away from English-speaking countries, you might have never met a native English-speaker and now you are an English teacher. You teach the language of a nation that you learned its language and culture only through textbooks. As a non-native English teacher, who learned English through reading and textbooks, I want to share my experience and some common challenges in my field.
Accent, the Unfairest Criterion!
From my point of view, the accent can be the biggest challenge that a non-native English teacher would encounter. You can be easily misjudged and fitted to the category of disqualified teachers just because you don’t speak English like the valley girls of New York.
Considering accent, sometimes we face such bizarre expectations that most of the time as non-native English teachers we fail to meet them. That’s while by taking a deeper look it will be revealed that it’s not teachers who should be blamed, but the wrong standards for evaluating their abilities.
For instance, if we don’t master rhetoric as Obama does or when we speak English don’t give them the feeling that they are listening to an enchanting interview with Michele Obama, or if we are not as selective about our words as Meghan Markle is and we can’t articulate words as perfectly as she does, then we are not cut out for this job.
Although the accent is becoming a more and more popular and common criterion for students and administrators for evaluating English teachers as qualified or disqualified one, the truth is that accent is just the decorative part of speaking ability.
While adopting different accents and the ability to speak foreign languages with the original accent is appreciated and can be considered as a blessing for speakers, it can’t be a fair criterion for evaluating teaching skills and abilities. Being a good English teacher requires skills beyond accent, such as being a strong communicator, a passionate and patient listener, a life-long learner, having an encouraging and uplifting personality, showing empathy, etc.
Phonetics Differences Gave Birth to “Tink” and “Tank you”
Phonetics in Longman dictionary is defined as “the science and study of speech sounds”.
Depending on the level of differences between the mother tongue of a teacher and the English language, teachers may face different levels of difficulty when it comes to phonetics. Due to the lack of a sound in his/her mother tongue, the teacher may not be able to articulate the sound like native speakers. The situation gets even worse when the teacher should teach the correct form of a sound that even herself/ himself didn’t manage to articulate properly.
For instance, in languages such as Turkish and Persian there is not such a sound as “ /θ/ “ in words like thought, thank you, etc. Almost all Turkish and Persian speakers have a hard time pronouncing “/θ/” and you may hear “Tank you” not “ /θæŋk/ you” from these speakers.
Another example is the sound “B”, which puts Arabs in trouble in speaking English. Since in Arabic there is no “p”, they substitute it with “B” in speaking and it results in saying “beble” instead of “people”.
These “phonetic differences” may result in overusing some sounds. As a result, if you hear a non-native English teacher overusing the “/θ/” sound in using verbs like “say or sing” it’s better to know that, phonetic differences are the reasons behind. While they struggle to articulate the correct sound and imitate native speakers, this attempt leads to overusing the sound that doesn’t exist in their mother tongue.
A Teacher or an Omniscient?
Just because somebody can speak a language doesn’t mean that s/he masters all the majors and fields in that language. Isn’t it unreasonable and irrational to expect a native English speaker who is majored in English literature to have a good command of economics, accounting, art, history, and geography at the same time?
The same is true for non-native English teachers. Just because someone is an English teacher doesn’t mean that s/he should know the answers to all the questions in all the fields in English. I had a first-hand experience of this type of challenge when a friend called me and asked me to translate her accounting textbook from English to Persian in a week, yes, just in a week!
First of all, being a translator and teacher are two different stories. A teacher might be an amateur translator or vice versa, but working professionally as a translator requires having deep knowledge in that field, mastering jargon, subjects, concepts, topics, and technical words. Press translators’ skills are different from a medical one, let alone expecting an English teacher to know all fields, just because she knows English.
It’s a Joy to Know about Your Experiences
If you are a non-native English teacher, depending on your mother tongue and the country that you teach in it, you may have different challenges and experiences. I welcome your comments and opinions to be added to this piece.
