How to Get a TEFL Job as a Non-Native Speaker in 2019
For a ‘non-native speaker’ teacher, trying to get a TEFL job might be a bit of a stressful and frustrating endeavour. Your ability to speak and teach the language is bound to be questioned. Your passport is likely to become your biggest liability. You will constantly come up against job ads for ‘native speakers’ only. […]
How to Change the Law to Guarantee Equal Opportunities for Non-Native Speaker Teachers by Gerhard Erasmus
It is often encouraging to see how far we have come in terms of equal opportunities regardless of a candidate’s place of birth or first language. For example, I have a number of friends teaching English in Australia even though English is not their first language. It is encouraging because despite Australia being a country where […]
How to Reply to Job Ads for Native Speakers Only and Get a Job as a Non-Native Speaker
A few years back something happened that completely changed my career. At the time I was working for a very well-known language school chain; I applied for a job in another country within that same chain and was openly told that they wouldn’t hire me because I was a ‘non-native speaker’. Probably sounds familiar to […]
Eight Reasons Why We Still Need to Talk About Native Speakerism
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 […]
How to maintain a thriving language school through an equal opportunities policy and an ethical code by Julie Wallis
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 […]
Resilience is the key: my journey as a non-native speaker teacher by Eleni Symeonidou
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 […]
Learn More About Our Mission and Values
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 […]
Why rebellious stubbornness (sometimes) pays off
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 […]
FECEI issues a statement against native speakerism
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 […]
How to raise students’ awareness and tackle native speakerism using these five simple activities
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 […]