Non‐Native‐Speaker English Teachers

Abstract

Today we live in a very interesting world. The English language, spoken approximately by two billion people in varying degrees of proficiencies (Graddol 2006), is now considered to be ‘the world's first truly global language’ (Crystal 2004: 4) and believed to have ‘touched the lives of so many people, in so many cultures and continents, in so many functional roles, and with so much prestige’ (Kachru 1990: 5). What makes this picture even more interesting is that it is acknowledged that non-native English speakers (NNSs) are estimated to outnumber their native speaker (NS) counterparts by three to one (Crystal 2003). Therefore, there is a growing realization that the ownership of English is shared by all its speakers, regardless of their ‘nativeness’ (Widdowson 1994).