Middle School Teaching Units

Introduction:

In this paper I will discuss the phenomenon of using native English teachers in the Middle East region, precisely in United Arab Emirates in the context of EFL in the public primary schools. In this discussion I will examine the reasons beyond such a phenomenon. I will also examine the attitude of native and non-native speaker teachers who teach English language along with students’ parents’ attitudes. Moreover, I will link “communicative imperialism” (Phillipson, 2006) and the role of the media with the context of EFL in the Middle East region. Due to the natural of my paper, a “self reflective” (Pennycook, 2001: p.1) and previous experiences of other countries are expected to be present.

ELT in United Arab Emirates has witnessed an extraordinary revolution in the last 6 years. My interest of this issue emerged simultaneity with the appearance of a new type of schools which are gradually replacing the ordinary public schools in UAE. This type is called (Al-Ghad schools) which literally means “tomorrow schools” in Arabic. It clearly indicates the main purpose of these schools is to produce more sophisticated, moderated and competitive students. The vision of ministry of Education and Youth in UAE as what they declared is “to have a new generation who is more capable of English language and its vocabulary and grammar skills”, in other words “we need a generation who speaks English as it is his or her first language”, thus to achieve this goal teachers who “have a better command of fluent, idiomatically correct language forms, are more knowledgeable about the cultural connotations of the language” (Braine, 1999: p.xiv) are needed. In order to make this vision alive, a huge number of native English teachers had been brought from areas such as “North America, Britain, new Zealand and Australia which claim ownership over English”( Canagarajah, 1999: p.79). Furthermore, to support this vision, some authorized sources in the government argue that this new methodology of teaching is the best in teaching English which enables the students to acquire the language very easy and smoothly. Schiitz (2007) cites Krashen’s (1987) view that acquisition any language requires meaningful interaction in the target language (natural communication) thus, language acquisition does not require extensive use of conscious grammatical rules because learners grow up learning the language as it is something very natural in their life without an effort, especially at the beginning levels of their life. Moreover, Boyle (1997) illustrates that native speaker teachers have a range of advantages over the non-native speaker teachers because (a) English learned from birth and developed through his/her life as primary language which been used in his/her life (b) the intricacies of the grammar of the language are learned instinctively and can be employed with speed and certainty (c) native speaker of English engages with other native speakers of English as something natural in his/her social context, so he/she uses the language all the time as the dominant language, thus it is better to use native speaker teachers of English to teach their first language. Additionally, McNeill (1994) in his study about the characteristics of native and non-native speaker teachers of English argues that native speaker teachers have the advantage when it comes to learners’ vocabulary needs. It is sensible to point here; the government is replacing non-native speaker teachers with native speaker teachers of English gradually in order to provide their students with the opportunity to hold conversations with teachers in English, and only in English.

On the other hand, Al-segair (2007) who works as a teacher in a prestigious university in the Middle East illustrates that in his investigation about native speaker teachers in the Middle East, “I found some of them used to work as dog-trainers back in Chicago” (paragraph, 2). He also pointed out that some teachers were “a bunch of former company employees and some had worked in western embassies” (paragraph, 2) who did not work as teachers before. Al-segair thus explains that not because you are a native speaker of a language qualifies you to teach it! Teaching a language requires “skills, competence, training and knowledge” (paragraph, 3). Going further in this issue, Al-Osaimi (2007) illustrates that some schools do not bother to recruit qualified English teachers, however, parents usually more impressed by where did teachers come from and the fact that their accent sounds more ‘American or British’ considered to be enough to convince them that they are the most suitable teachers to teach their children, regardless what they have of qualifications or experiences. Such criteria forced me to wonder why such thinking is dominant in the region.

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