Are EFL pre-service teachers’ judgment of teaching competence swayed by the belief that the EFL teacher is a L1 or LX user of English?

Abstract

This quasi-experimental study investigates whether knowing that an English Foreign Language (EFL) teacher is a ‘native speaker’ (NS) or not may elicit implicit biases in judgements of teaching competence. Participants were 266 pre-service teachers studying in Graz (Austria) and Munchen (Germany). After watching the same identical 5-minute video of a teacher in front of a classroom, they were invited to rate her on four dimensions (language, teaching, assessment, communication) and asked whether they would love to have this person as an English teacher. Close to half of the participants were explicitly told that the teacher was a ‘NS’ and slightly over half that she was a ‘NNS’. No significant differences were found between both conditions. Multiple regression analyses showed that teaching skill was the strongest predictor of loving the teacher, followed by language skill. Analysis of feedback collected through an open question revealed that only a small minority of participants mentioned the words NS/NNS. These findings suggest that bias about ‘NS/NNS’ is minimal in this population. We conclude by pleading to retire the toxic terms ‘NS/NNS’ and to replace them with the ideologically neutral and more flexible dichotomy of first and foreign language (L1/LX) user (Dewaele 2018).