Native Speaker Required
Karla Guedes
Karla Guedes
Portuguese and English as a Second Language teacher, interpreter and translator.
Southampton, United Kingdom
Freelance Portuguese and English teacher, interpreter and translator at various places
Karla Guedes • Firstly, I would like to thank Thomas for posting this text here, very interesting piece and comments that make all English teachers, NS or NNS, reflect on the matter.
I would like to share my case and my frustration here as a NNEST.
I have taught EFL in Brazil for nearly three years before coming to the UK. Since then I have done CELTA, BA in Linguistics and Phonetics and I am currently doing an MA in Applied Linguistics for Language Teaching.
I have been trying to get a job as an ESL teacher in this country for years and it seems to always get down to me not being a native speaker of English.
Some of my CELTA classmates that were NS managed to get a job in the field pretty easily, even though they had no experience and no other qualifications.
In sum, It is very much the case that NS of English do have advantages over their NNS counterparts. Hopefully, things are slowly changing, but it is still rare and there is some prejudice involved.
