Native-Speakerism

                                                     Z.Hazal Ceylan
The Definition of Native-Speakerism

         Native-speakerism is a pervasive ideology within ELT, characterized by the belief that ‘native-speaker’ teachers represent a ‘Western culture’ from which spring the ideals both of the English language and of English language teaching methodology (Holliday 2005). Use of the concept follows a now established concern about political inequalities within ELT.

Holliday, A. (2006). Native-speakerism. ELT Journal, 60(4), 385–387. doi:10.1093/elt/ccl030

In-text citations: 

• (Holliday, 2006)
 

Examples of Native-Speakerism

• "The discourse of native speakerism is made of the following assumptions: that 'native' speakers are the authorities of the language and enjoy superior competence; that those who use it as an additional language have to treat 'native' speaker competence as the target; and that 'native' speakers are the best qualified to teach that language. Among those who justify the inherent superiority of 'native' speakers, one can mention Prator (1968) and Quirk (1990). They treat the varieties spoken by multilingual speakers as interlanguages attempting to approximate the 'native' speaker norm. However, other scholars argue against native speakerism (see Valdes 1986; Kachru 1991; Braine 1991; Canagharajah 1999a). They point out that the superiority of the 'native' speaker is linguistically anachronistic as it goes against the relativistic tradition in linguistics that postulates that there are no status differences between languages in purely linguistic terms (though there are extra-linguistic reasons for such inequality). Furthermore, languages in situations of contact will always undergo modes of appropriation and, eventually, localization."
  (Suresh Canagarajah and Selim Ben Said, "Linguistic Imperialism." The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, ed. by James Simpson. Routledge, 2011)
• Nordquist, R. (2013, January 13). Native speakerism. Retrieved December 21, 2016, from Education, http://grammar.about.com/od/mo/g/Native-Speakerism.htm
  In-text citations: 

  • (Nordquist, 2013)