Who's Worth More? - Peter Medgyes

In 2005, I was a Freshman at the University of Limpopo and I had three professors for English (viz. one for Literature, one for Linguistics and one for Language - Grammar). The grammar professor was a, with the lack of a "good" word, Native Speaker of English from the US of America. We never really like her class because of her teaching methods that were more hands-on and required us to do more homework than we enjoyed. While she gave us instructions on basic grammar rules, there were cases were these grammatical rules went unexplained while in the NNEST classes the professor would try by every means to explain why grammatical rules have to be applied. E.g. the NEST professor may say "a 2nd person singular takes an 's'" and leave at that, the NNEST would say that and explain why it has to be like that occasionally code-switching to Sotho(Sotho was a dominating language in the class hence assuming the "language to fall back to" when English became to difficult to understand). And this was regardless of the English "section" (i.e. Grammar, Literature or Linguistics) that they had to handle. Hence we enjoyed the NNEST English classes as compared to their counter NEST part.

Peter Medgyes asks a rather odd and interesting question in this article, who's worth more? When I started reading this article, I was greatly interested in his method of weighing who's worth more and at the same time wondering if we could have factors that we could use to measure the worthiness of these speakers. At first he uses the native competence/native-like proficiency, of which he points out that NNS would never be at a NS language proficience level. From that he points out that NSs are at an advantage. Later on he gives us the advantages that NNESTs have. 1. Models of successful English Learning. 2. Effective teaching of learning strategies. 3. Source of in depth information about the English language, hence my example in the opening paragraph. 4. Ability to anticipate language difficulties. 5. More emphatic to the language needs and problems of their learners and 6. the sharing of a mother tongue with the learners.

The NNEST advantages show us some of the things that NEST can not do making a NNEST a valuable part of ELT. To some degree they point out that Learners of English would more often than not go through conscious learning of the language of which the NNEST have an idea of what's going on. A NEST knows the language mostly if not totally through acquisition (unconscious learning) while a NNEST knows it through learning (conscious learning). Thus suggesting that NNESTs relate better to the learners' English Language Learning (ELL).

My last teaching job was at a province where they speak a language (Sotho) which was completely different to my mother tongue (Zulu/Swati). And I was an English teacher at a rural school where the learners never speak in English unless if they are required to give an answer in English (in the classroom). The first two months were difficult for I had learned the colloquial of Sotho and the learners were using a complete different Sotho from the one I had learned. Their previous English teachers had thought them English constantly code switching to their mother tongue to explain difficult concepts and I could do that. Not because I didn't want to but because I couldn't. I took it upon myself to learn the learners L1 to make teaching and learning easier for us ( especially me). As time went by, we (the learners and me) started enjoying teaching and learning because I could 1. easily code-switch to their colloquial and 2. refer to my language learning experiences to explain concepts. I find it really interesting that Medgyes mentions the necessity for one to learn the learners L1 to make ELT and ELL more effective.

All that being said, it remains on the shoulders of us as NNESTs and NESTs to see the need to work together for effective ELT/ELL. For a NNEST needs the competence of a NEST and a NESt needs the expertise of a NNEST. Given the fact that we admit to the fact that we need each other NS or NNS, we need to be recognised as an Alliance of Language (English) Teachers. There's one question that we need to address, how do we convince the school's stakeholders (i.e. the learners, parents, school officials, sponsors and the communities that they serve) that a teacher is a good enough teacher or worthy teacher regardless of their L1? How do we bring them to realise that we need both NEST and NNEST (or whatever the case might be) in ELT/ELL?