English teachers should be native English speakers

You got owned
<<Only 1% of learners ever comes close, and not just because they're lazy, but because it is ACTUALLY REALLY FUCKING HARD. So if every teacher is to have native like pronunciation, there will be another 99 who don't make the cut. What will you do with them? Firing squad? Who will teach English if not them? >>
First of all, they don't have to be indistinguishable from a native, they just have to pronounce things correctly. There's a difference. Second, 1% of the population is more than enough to teach English. It's not like we're randomly picking people of the street, putting them through a credential program, and then weeding out 99% of them because they can't speak English correctly. If you just can't learn English, why are you pursuing a career in teaching English? On top of that, there are native speakers that you can hire. There's a available if you're willing to pay enough.

I don't think that it's "really fucking hard" to learn English to an acceptable level (although "acceptable level" is a vague term). I don't know how it is in other countries, but in California, getting a teaching credential means spending tens of thousands of dollars and years to get a teaching credential. I'm sure that if someone were to put that much time and money into learning English, they would get acceptable pronunciation. My feeling is, if someone speaks English less well than I speak Spanish (my second language), they either have serious language acquisition problems, or they aren't trying very hard.

<<Actually the high school level of mathematics and science is abysmal. The difficulty of what you do in the senior years is relatively no more difficult than the present perfect tense. >>
That's absurd. Even if someone has a high aptitude, learning calculus takes months. For normal students, it takes years. Learning present perfect tense can be done in a single lesson. There are all of three things you need to know ('has' for third person singular, 'have' in all other cases, then the present participle). At least, the actual form can be learned in a single lesson. Maybe using it correctly takes a few more lessons, and you'll also have to know the present participle of a verb to use the present perfect, so that's several more lessons to learn the present participles of various verbs.

N.
<<You don't get my point. There's no such thing as "Basics" in pronunciation. There's right, and there's wrong. And they should be teaching right. >>
That's not quite true. Each letter in English has a "default" pronunciation, and possibly a few secondary ones. Learning those would be the basics. Prosody, on the other hand, would be advanced pronunciation.

<< I mean their the teachers who teach their subject worse than any other! >>
I don't know if that was just a typo, but it's "they're", not "their".

H
<<Moreover, I think a teacher whose native language is the same as his pupils' is better (provided that he knows his subject perfectly, sure enough) - he's got his own experience of learning, he knows the pitfalls etc. >>
I think that the absolute ideal would be to have learned from both during the course of one's studies. They both bring something different, and I agree with your assessment that often native speakers are lacking in explicit knowledge of the language. What I like about forums such as this is that I think that they help me with that quite a bit.

>>>That's not quite true. Each letter in English has a "default" pronunciation, and possibly a few secondary ones. Learning those would be the basics. Prosody, on the other hand, would be advanced pronunciation.

I'd rather consider prosody a part of fluency.

>>>I don't know if that was just a typo, but it's "they're", not "their".

Yes, a typo. I guess I still need some time to get used to an English forum, looks like I have to quadruple check everything I write here, hehehehe.

Would you believe it when I tell you that there are actually fully qualified young Polish people teaching English to young people in secondary schools in the UK? You'd better believe it as it's true.

They hold degrees in the English Language, probably gained back home in Poland but maybe here in the UK - I've no definitive proof of this - and my guess is that they speak a better standard of English than do many of their colleagues...I'd so love to be a fly on the wall of a staffroom in one of those schools as these Polish people chat with their British coleagues over a cup of tea and a jammy dodger.

colleagues

The polish learn English very fast, I have worked with a few and they pick it up very fast..!!

Well the owners of this site are Polish, I reckon.

Most of the polish that have come to live / work in England could speak a little English before they came [ only a little ] They soon learn though..!

Not like the spanish though, they sound like they have cocks in there mouths when they talk..hahaa..

I think the ideal situation is to have team teachers and (yeah, sounds PC, I know)mutual respect. One native teacher and one native speaker.
The native speaker has to respect the teaching of grammar and not say things like "Nobody knows what an infinitive is," and the native teacher has to accept that some phrases that are being taught may sound outmoded/outdated/out-of-date and that he/she may actually say things that are incorrect.

Probably won't happen...

Example: Native teacher=Korean teacher of English
Native Speaker=Native speaker of English

Agree with K. Nonnative for grammar and native for pronunciation. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like anybody really cares.

Thats what already happens in most schools that I have worked at.

But I feel K is a little biased against native-speakers.

Non-native teachers must respect that their English sucks, they are most likely bitter, twisted arseholes and that nobody gives a fuck what they think.

We almost never had any native speakers teaching languages in my high schools, just people who had studied their subject extensively. I think the only native speaker I ever encountered at that level was a Japanese teacher, and that was only because that school was on a base in Japan. University level teachers were more likely to be native speakers (except for the ones teaching Latin, of course). But does that mean languages shouldn't be taught in high schools? You're generally just learning the basics of grammar and structure and vocabulary at that point anyway, and any learning is valuable. i would imagine it's the same for people learning English.

<<Non-native teachers must respect that their English sucks, they are most likely bitter, twisted arseholes and that nobody gives a fuck what they think. >>


That's true.

But students, too, need to respect that their English sucks and that it doesn't matter for shit whether they have a native teacher or not. They need to accept that no one gives a shit about whether they're learning at the maximum rate or not and that includes not only the teachers but most of the other students too, who are glad as fuck when they don't have to do shit.
If the student is really that motivated that he gives a shit then he should show some fucking initiative and not expect the teacher to do everything for him.

Never a truer word said Gordon.

Yes Gordon, but the student will never get motivated by themselves. They're students.