Discourses of Chinese ELT Stakeholders on Native Speakerism

Abstract

Abstract This paper reports on part of the findings of a large-scale study exploring the viewpoints of Chinese ELT stakeholders (students, teachers and administrators) on native speakerism in order to find out whether current EFL education in China is still affected by this chauvinistic ideology. The analysis of data via a critical lens reveals that the vast majority of the participants conferred upon NS products (teacher, language, culture and teaching methodology) a status superior to that granted to the NNS counterparts and failed to see linguacultural and epistemological inequalities between the English speaking West and traditional NNS countries, inter alia, China. These findings suggest that the three participant groups as an entirety succumb to native speakerism, and by extension that ELT in China is still haunted to a great degree by this ideology. Given that this study treats each participant group separately, future studies are expected to explore inter-group interactions in ideology.