From time to time, I still ask myself why bother? TEFL Equity campaign has been going for five years now, and sometimes you do start doubting yourself whether there’s any need to continue. But when I see comments like the one below, which was left below one of my blog posts recently, I forget about any …
Eight Reasons Why We Still Need to Talk About Native Speakerism Read More »
We are a small, yet highly accredited learning organisation and we employ professional qualified academic staff. The London School is regularly inspected by AISLi, Eaquals and The Veneto Region and our teachers meet the high standards set by these organisations. Over the past year we have been working on a research project. We invited learners from …
I am going to share my journey and lessons learnt as a non-native in the ELT industry in the hope that others will feel that they are not alone if they have had unpleasant experiences, and empowered about their teaching identity. I come from Greece where I did my BA in English Language and Literature …
Resilience is the key: my journey as a non-native speaker teacher by Eleni Symeonidou Read More »
You might have noticed that our website has undergone some big changes in the last few weeks. As TEFL Equity Advocates & Academy was developing and evolving, it became increasingly apparent that the initial design of the website was not fit for purpose. So I decided to redesign it from ground up to offer you …
Personally, I’m a rather stubborn type sometimes. And just a tiny bit rebellious. Like to go a bit against the current. Or maybe driven. It depends how you look at it sometimes. To give you one example, this whole website is the result of this stubborn rebellious drive to promote professional equality for ‘native’ and …
Why rebellious stubbornness (sometimes) pays off Read More »
In February this year I had the pleasure to attend FECEI’s (The National Federation of Private Language Schools in Spain) annual conference in Madrid. For a while I’ve been really amazed with all the great work FECEI has been doing to promote equal opportunities in ELT, especially as far as ‘native’ and ‘non-native speakers’ are …
FECEI issues a statement against native speakerism Read More »
You are probably familiar with the widespread preference for ‘native speakers’ in ELT job ads, especially as far as the private sector is concerned. However, this is just one manifestation of the ideology of native speakerism visible in our profession. And if we are serious about tackling it, we also need to look beyond the …
Recently, you might have seen me post quite a lot about English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) on this blog. So perhaps, you might be wondering: what’s the big deal about ELF? why does Marek want me to start teaching ELF? how the heck is it related to TEFL Equity’s fight against native speakerism? That’s …
Three reasons why you need to start teaching English as a Lingua Franca Read More »
A lot of the times course books feature a rather narrow range of recordings of standard ‘native speaker’ voices. Just to give you a few examples: Syrbe and Rose (2016) note that most characters presented in books are ‘native speakers’ (mostly either US or British) ‘Non-native speakers’ also tend to contribute much less in dialogues, …
How to motivate students using recordings of successful E(LF)nglish users Read More »
It is no secret that English has become the global lingua franca. Research shows that ‘non-native speaker’ users of the language outnumber the ‘native’ ones by at least 4:1. And this number is only going to grow in the coming years. So how can we best help students become successful users of English in this …
Support Equality. Tackle Native Speakerism.
