Jenkins (2003), mentions two opposing views about non-native Englishes as 'deficit', Quirk and Kachru. Before mentioning my point of view on these two opposing views, I will briefly remind the claims that I am interested in.
1) Quirk says that there is a huge difference bwetween native and non-natives in terms of their internalizations of language conventions such as their diffrence in terms of grammatical correctness of sentences. I belive it is not about being native and non-taive but rather about how much you are educated to about the grammatical rules. For instance, I can not be competent Turkish grammarian unless I do have an extensive eduaction of Turkish language. This view alos creates imbalance in terms of advantages and disadvantages of being non-native or native. Being multilingual has more value than being a native speaker of English in terms of one's ability to teach English. similarly, rather than having a clear-cut criteria to judge to efficieny of a language teacher, which is being either native or native, we need to look at how much a person can use the language functionally, that is also when functional literacy come into play.
It is also related to the English teacher's educational background, context and his/her teaching skills. A native teacher who ruins his/her students' self-confidence( which may cause students' developing sense of inefficieny that will continue throughout their education and which may totaly cause to give up learning English) is definitely better than a non-native teacher who will encourage students' creativity and developing positive attitudes.
As I tried to discuss I am more in favor of Kachru's ideas. However, I belive that most of the teachers in the ELT arena are not ready to digest this tolerant approach to language teaching in practice. In theory, it seems reasonable to respect non-native varieties as diffrences rather than deficiencies, but in practise, it depends on the perosnal choices and tendencies of teachers. I know many teachers here in this program, who may seem tolerant to non-native English are not actually applying this idealogy in their teacher practices. For example, while giving feedback, I know teachers rather than focusing on the content I am trying to communicate, they are only correcting my grammatical and punctuation mistakes, which is really discouraging for me as an English teacher.
Reference
Jenkins, J. (2003). world Englishes: A resource book for students. London, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
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I agree with you on this mismatch between theory and practice. Sometimes it practioners and scholars preach all these things only to do the opposite or find themselves perpetuating the same inequalities and replicate the same power relations and inequalities they espouse to be working to fit against. And unfortunately as emerging teacher/scholars, it can be disheartening and discouraging to see that sometimes what we are told not to do are in fact being replicated on us. I don't know why it happens or why there has to exist that contradiction. However, i can only hope that whether as emerging teacher/scholars or well established ones, we learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of those that came before us, that we not replicate the inequalities and always work towards empowerment of our students and lead by example.
YanıtlaSilon a personal note: just wanted to let you know...i know how you feel. and the it never feels good to have someone make you feel less than or not good enough. just wanted to let you know you are not alone and more importantly you are doing great! don't let those bad experiences or discouraging moments "haunt" you, instead I hope it helps to further inspire you to be the teacher you want to be and the kind of model/mentor you want to be for students and colleagues both now and in the future.