Native teacher or non native teacher? Which one is better?

Question

People want native teachers but is it really always good? I learned English mostly from my friend who is German but speaks English very well. He could teach me things which I didn't understand and was wondering about but friends who are native English speakers couldn't understand what I didn't understand often because all of the things I was wondering about are all natural things for the native speakers.
For advanced student, native speakers are the best for the teaching but I doubt if it's good to be taught by native English speakers if you are a beginner.

Answer 1

It would be totally wrong to compare them. Native speakers are native speakers, as their name suggests; they are not teachers. Teachers are people trained for this job, foreign languages included. I met a person from New Zealand, who was working as a native speaker and couldn't tell the difference between Venice and Vienna. The students made so many jokes about her that she had to leave, probably to be a native speaker somewhere where the students weren't more educated than herself.

Answer 2

Having taught ESL for 18 yrs and then taught teachers how to teach ESL/EFL for 12 years, I want to share some cold hard facts - not opinions. There are over 1 billion ESL speakers in the world and of those more than 800,000,000 have been taught by NON-NATIVE speakers. It would be unrealistic to think that only native speakers are qualified to teach a language, it's like saying that if one doesn't have children one cannot be a teacher or a children's doctor/psychologist...it's a false assumption that continues to survive and flourish. Realistically, even native speakers have a huge variety of accents and dialects so what constitutes "native" language speakers ?? Canadians ??(from the west coast or the east coast), Americans ?? (from Boston, Kentucky, Tennesse, California, New York ), British ?? (from Liverpool, Scotland, Ireland, Cockneys, Geordies), New Zealanders ??, Australians ??, South Afrikaans?? ....The fact is that regardless of who teaches English, most ESL/EFL learners will retain their accents and that's as it should be. English is just the vehicle of communication not communication itself, regardless of the level. What you are talking about and referring to are idioms, expressions, colloquialisms, but remember that EACH Native version of English has it's own very specific set of those. That's why even "native" speakers from other countries have a difficult time understanding EACH OTHER !! LOL....SO....let's just learn English, which is now the modern Esperanto/Lingua Franca of the world and be just be able to communicate with each other.

Answer 3

It would aide in immersion. When the students do not understand a native speaker, the native speaker might have to do a mini lesson.

Perhaps on things like multiple meanings.

We often say things that might confuse others. I am running a fever. My watch is running slow. The car is not running. I am running a race.

A native speaker just has a different perspective and it is good to have native speakers and non native speakers to teach.
As teachers we just have to know that not everything translates.

Answer 4

All things equal, native speakers are the best. As long as the teacher is truly fluent in both languages, it depends more on the teaching ability of the teacher. Non-native speakers can actually pass on their own sticking points to students. I had a Spanish teacher whose native tongue was English. The first week of class she had us convinced that we'd never be able to roll our r's. One day we had a substitute who was a native Spanish speaker. We were all rolling our r's in 3 minutes. The English speaking teacher was visibly stressed while trying to teach us that part and she overexplained. She was better at explaining grammar though. I think it would be ideal to have a team with a native speaker and non-native speakers alternating.

Answer 5

It's always better for a beginner to learn from professional teachers because they know how to teach all the intricacies of language. Once you know the grammar and how to put words together, it's probably better to learn from a native teacher for pronunciation. The best thing is to go to the country where the language is spoken or go to a school where there is total immersion in the language.

Answer 6

I think submersion is the best way to learn any language with would be with native users or people who only use that language in you presence. Once you have a good basses then you go back and learn the technical part.

Answer 7

The ability to speak a language, any language, does not automatically mean you are able to teach it. German included.

Answer 8

Did you ask "Which one is perfect" or "Which one is best"? Your idea that you can learn non-native pronunciation as a beginner and correct it later is absolutely without foundation. You must learn first what is standard and it will stick with you much longer. I learn many "British-isms" from my U.K. and down-under friends but it doesn't change my pronunciation that I learned as a child.

Are the one billion people who learned English from non-native speakers wasting their time? Not at all. But if they could go back in time they should jump at the chance to learn spoken English from a standard accent native speaker. I once was honored to be a judge of an oral English contest at one of the 33 key universities here in China. Students made their speeches one by one when suddenly I was shocked to hear a native speaker, or so I thought. At the end of the contest, when that girl won handily, I posed with her for photos and asked her "Where in America did you live?" She was taken aback and replied "I lived in North Carolina for two years when in primary school." That was more effective for her English speaking skill than the 12 years she learned English in China.

English is a variable language as is Mandarin. Well, not quite so much as that. Here in Shanghai, my friends from other regions in China can only understand half of what they hear spoken by the Shanghainese. No way the common folk of Shanghai could qualify as teachers of Chinese as a foreign language. I know because all of my English students at this university are majoring in that.

But let's first decide who best teaches lessons in writing, grammar, spelling or literature. For these aspects of English, native accent is not very significant. The training of the teacher is more important than the accent. I wouldn't go so far as to make an analogy about doctors, however. That's unrealistic. By the way, the number of years one does something poorly is sometimes a hindrance to learning to do it better. We know that once a student learns to speak with an accent or to pronounce in a non-standard way (my students put on warm "klo-thez" in winter), it becomes much more difficult to "unlearn" the non-standard pronunciation. You might consider that the neuro pathways made in the brain by learning are like a path in the forest. Once it is made, it does not quickly fade away. And we are apt to take the beaten path of poor pronunciation rather than struggle to learn the more standard one.

In that sense, it is much better to learn to speak a language, whether English, Mandarin, French or Basque, from a native speaker who has no serious accent or pronunciation issues than from a non-native speaker.

For learning to speak fluently and with rhythm and widely accepted pronunciation, I would suggest a standard American accent teacher or a "BBC" style standard British accent teacher. American accents do not vary as much as do British accents where some northern accents are worlds away from southern accents. We could call them dialects since they are only about half understood by those far removed in the same country. When the British gloat about the superiority of the "king's English" over that of lowly American English, I laugh so much I almost "fall on me bum". They best not send a northern man overseas to teach the language. We'll never understand what the Chinese businessmen are saying after that. Let's "dinna gang" there, as Maddy Prior would say.

Even a New Zealand or Australian accent is not far removed from standard British accent. We can see problems with the "native English" accents of South Africa or Philippines where African, Dutch and Spanish have greatly changed the accent from standard British and standard American. Although we cannot bottle the correct accent and sell it like cough syrup, we can come close to the standard broadcast accent of the two types of English that are most commonly spoken around the globe: Standard American English (over 70 percent) and Standard British English (about 25 percent). Those two styles of pronunciation are the best to emulate if you want to be understood far and wide.

If you haven't the chance to learn pronunciation from a native speaker face to face, learn it however you can. There are also CDs, tapes, Internet radio podcasts, web sites for ESL learning, V.o.A. and B.B.C. for remotely located "native teachers".