An Investigation Into English Major Students’ Perceptions Of Native And Non-native English-speaking Teachers In EFL Teaching

With the development of globalization, English has been widely recognized andfrequently used worldwide. In China, the increasing contact of Chinese people withthe outside world has accelerated the development of English instruction in Chinesehigher education. Recently, the number of English language learners has continuallyincreased, and such unprecedented increase in learning English has led to the greatincrease in the demand for qualified English teachers. In recent decades, the teachingof native English speaking teachers and non-native English speaking teachers hasbeen a hotly-debated issue in the academic field of English language teaching.The present study first reviewed the related researches on native and non-nativeEnglish speakers. On the basis of literature review, an investigation was conducted inForeign Language Department of Jiangxi Normal University.126third-year Englishmajors participated in the survey. The study aimed to explore the students’ perceptionsof the native and non-native English speaking teachers and seek to find out whetherthere are any differences between the two groups of English teachers in their teachingpractice from the students’ perspective. The questionnaire developed by Evrimüstünlüoglu (2007) was employed to study the students’ responses to the two groupsof English teachers from the dimensions of in-class teaching behaviors, classmanagement, class communication skills and personal characteristics. StatisticalPackage for the Social Sciences17.0(SPSS17.0) was used to analyze the collecteddata, including mean, standard deviation and paired sample t-value.The results show that the students generally held the neutral opinion that bothnative and non-native English teachers have their own strengths and weaknesses.They could serve as different roles and could be qualified teachers equally in differentdimensions in their teaching practices. Meanwhile, there are significant differencesbetween native and non-native English teachers in their teaching process. NNESTsperformed better in teaching behaviors and in class management than NESTs did. Incontrast, the NESTs were good at communication skills and showed more favorablepersonal characteristics. With regard to the findings above, some pedagogical implications andenlightenment to EFL teaching practice can be drawn. As both NESTs and NNESTshave strengths and constrains, they should, then, borrow the strengths from theircounterparts and try to overcome their shortcomings. The two groups of Englishteachers should be encouraged to further study the advanced pedagogical knowledgeand improve the cultural awareness through pre-service or in-service training. Theyshould communicate with the students to know their current situations and meet theirdemands as much as possible. In addition, collaborative language teaching betweenthe two groups of teachers like peer coaching and group study can improve theteaching quality in EFL teaching.