Dongqi/Katie Z.
Last Christmas, my mom flew to Montreal from China to visit me. Since it was her first time in Canada, I decided to take her on a tour of the nearby cities. While on our way to Toronto, I made an acquaintance with a Caucasian man, a native English speaking Canadian who was extremely fond of the Chinese culture, so we chatted for a while. Before he left, he kindly complimented me for “speaking good English”, which made me feel super honoured. As soon as he left, my mom, who barely understood English, asked me what was going on. After explaining everything to her, my mom said to me in Chinese, “Oh I see. But why don’t you speak like him, a native speaker? Like, you don’t roll your tongue as much as he does. You know what I mean by ‘roll your tongue’ right? It seems that your oral English is still not good enough, huh?”
All of a sudden, I felt mixed emotions. For one thing, I was surprised in that my mom, whose English doesn’t even reach beginner-level, could tell that I pronounced the rhotic sounds less overtly and preferred a rather flat tone while speaking English. In addition, I felt upset that my mom questioned me by saying that “your English is not good enough”, simply because she detected that I spoke differently from a native speaker. Ironically, a few minutes ago my oral English was just praised by this native speaker. Besides, she seemed to take for granted that I would be able to talk exactly the same as the locals do, in other words, “speaking good English”, after receiving English education here in Canada.
My mother was not the only one that had this “native speaker” stereotype. In Amin (1999)’s work, two presumptions were drawn from the students (participants): native English speaker equals white people and only native speakers speak “real,” “proper,” “Canadian” English (p.94). It’s interesting to notice that, although my mom knew little about English, her limited knowledge of English was still associated with “being native-like”, or “being white people-like”. This, in fact, also made me realize that how far-reaching the ideology of “Native Speakerism” (Holliday, 2006) is, to which I believed that globalization has contributed a lot. However, what my mom didn’t know was that “native speaker” itself is a controversial term that bears as many critiques as supports. Furthermore, there are myriad English varieties existing around the world. In this perspective, every English speaker, either native or nonnative, is able to speak good English in their own way, while he or she is not necessarily considered to be so-called “native-like”. Anyhow, speaking native-like or not without question is not the only standard to measure one’s oral English proficiency by.
But then, I started to reflect on myself: why would I feel super honoured that my oral English was complimented by a Canadian? Was it because I regarded his English as the “standard” in my subconsciousness? In other words, did his compliment mean an authoritative recognition of my oral English? If so, I am also in support of the “Native Speakerism” (Holliday, 2006) deep down. Then why would I have the superiority to judge my mother? Interesting huh?
Questions for further discussion:
Have you ever noticed any “Native Speakerism” in your life? What’s your opinion on it?
As a language teacher, how would you deal with “Native Speakerism”?
References:
Amin, N. (1999). Minority Women Teachers of ESL: Negotiating White English. In G. Braine, Non-native Educators in English Language Teaching (p93–104). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Holliday, A. (2006). Native-speakerism. ELT Journal, 60, 385–387. doi:10.1093/elt/ccl030
