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The native/non-native debate: A practitioner responds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2024

Carol Griffiths
Carol Griffiths*
Affiliation:
Girne American University, Turkish Republic of North Cyprus
*
Email: [email protected]; www.carol-lorac.com
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Extract

It is, perhaps, with some surprise that I find the native/non-native divide again attracting attention. The first I remember of this being an issue was when we were informed that the native speaker was dead (Paikeday, 1985). Needless to say, to those of us who did not feel at all deceased, this came as a surprise, but the announcement certainly attracted attention. The next contribution to the debate that I remember was Peter Medgyes's (1992) question regarding whether native or non-native was worth more. And so the dispute has continued spasmodically until the present, when we find two pieces on the subject within two recent issues of Language Teaching (Llurda & Calvet-Terré, 2024; Selvi et al., 2024).

Type
Pedagogical Implications
Information
Language Teaching , First View , pp. 1 - 3
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Anderson, J. (2022). What's in a name? Why ‘SLA’ is no longer fit for purpose and the emerging, more equitable alternatives. Language Teaching, 55(4), 427–433. doi:10.1017/S0261444822000192CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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