City of Buenos Aires’s ELT landscape and its resilience against native-speakerism

Abstract

Scholarship on the Argentine English Language Teaching (ELT) context is scant; even more so is research addressing Native-speakerism in the Argentine context. This article fills an important gap pertaining to the understanding of the City of Buenos Aires-the largest city in Argentina- and its language education system. The data obtained via document analysis provides a description of the city’s population language level and language education infrastructure which in turn offers relevant insights regarding the city’s system’s strengths and weaknesses against Native-speakerism. The factors that render the City of Buenos Aires strong against Native-speakerism are (1) a public school system which requires qualified teachers; (2) an overall public/private school system which prefers qualified teacher with classroom management experience over proficient speakers of English with no teaching experience; (3) a legal hiring framework that favors the local labor force; (4) and availability of highly trained and respected English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. All these strengths notwithstanding, weaknesses in relation to Native-speakerism exist within the medium/small private language school industry, which can (and might) circumvent the law to hire (under-qualified) NESTs illegally. The breeding ground for Native-speakerism in medium/small private language school calls for further research to delve into what extent Native-speakerism takes place in this specific context.