Have you had a native English speaker as your English teacher?

32 comments

1. No. It always amazed me that people can go to Japan or other countries to teach English.

   All my foreign language teachers were Romanian, and I never heard from other people here that they had a different experience. The only exceptions may be some niche languages, but definitely not for English, French, German, Italian or Spanish.

2. I didn’t have English in school but my classmates had, and they never had a native English speaker. There is no way all the spots could be covered by foreigners. Fancy private schools may have had, but not most.

   It doesn’t matter; they spoke like one minute each every week so they learned next to nothing useful.

3. Only once. My 10th grade English teacher (classe de seconde, 1st year of highschool) was an exchange teacher from Charlotte, North Carolina.

   In 9th grade, my english teacher was a native Spanish speaker (daughter of Spanish immigrants). Never had one as an actual Spanish teacher until university.

4. Yep, we had some American teachers back at school in the fifth and sixth grades. But it didn’t really work out, as the absolute majority of us stupid kids were terrible in English anyway. And soon 2003 arrived and the invasion of Iraq began, so the relations between Russia and USA, for the lack of a better word, soured, so this practice ended.

5. All my English teachers (plus all third language teachers) have been native Swedes. But most of them had spent some time in UK (and respective third language country).

   With the exception of one teacher at university, who was a Brittish woman teaching a course they had named “Bussiness English”.

   It was mostly just presentation training. No glossaries nor grammar homework.

6. Nope, that’s very unusual. You rarely ever had someone native teaching a language class except Swedish of course.

7. Nope. All my teachers from the beginning of primary school to the end of university are / were Polish. Even in the language school I used to go to every English teacher was a native Polish speaker. Besides, in order to teach a language you have to know how to teach it, so you can’t just be a native speaker and teach others just like it’s no big deal. Plus in Poland teachers earn so little that any foreigner who wants to teach a language in a public (meaning not private) school clearly must have lost their mind.

8. Yes. Although, I went to a bilingual class so it was always going to be more likely. My English teacher was a native speaker on the grades of 1-2. In addition many of my English teachers originally went to a university in an English speaking country: teachers on grades 1-2 and 7-9 and in high school 2/5 English teachers.

9. I taught in Germany on an exchange program.

   There were fellow teachers who were there to teach English.

   The local parents complained as they didn’t want their children being taught American English.

   One parent was upset over the pronunciation of the word “cat”.

   Apparently the way Americans pronounce it (with a longer A) is wrong.

   The Oxford English pronunciation has a shorter “a” sound.

10. No. Have only had Danes teach me English in school (same for other languages). However most of my teachers had lived in other countries e.g. UK and Canada

11. We had a Canadian English teacher in the second year of secondary school (age 13-14). Iirc she moved here after marrying a Dutch person? All the other foreign language teachers were native Dutch AFAIK.

12. Nope, all my language teachers were Dutch, though apparently the extracurricular Mandarin class did have a Chinese teacher.

13. I’ve had a French French teacher, a French English teacher and an Austrian French teacher, but never native speaking English teacher.

14. Nope. I did have a French teacher from the Democratic Republic of Congo, but none of my English teacher were native English speakers (although one did have a Scottish accent cause she lived in Scotland for a while).

15. Personally, no, all my English (and for a time also German) teachers were Italian, but often native speakers came to assist the teacher (they were very young, so they could have been university students, but I don’t really know how those things work).

16. Yes, we had several native English teachers, mostly from the USA. The quality of classes was low as the only qualification of most of them was being native speakers. They usually had no idea how to teach.

17. I got a new English teacher about every two grades, only one was a native speaker and he was by far the worst English teacher we ever had. We barely learned anything in those two years. He was not the only of my teachers who had a problematic relationship with alcohol but the others were at least functional.

18. I have been very lucky with my language teachers in general. Most of my education in English was done by an Irish woman and later a Dane who had lived and taught literature at a US university for several years.

    My German was not taught by a native, but by the same Irish woman, as she had lived and worked in Germany for almost 10 years.

    My Spanish teacher was a guy from Andalusia

19. In high school we had native speaking lectors once a week for five years. They all were from Manchester or the Nottingham area (according to my teacher, they have the best accent), but in the last year we had an irish and a scottish woman who constantly teased each other for their accent. We had a French lector too, for a couple of years, but she was demotivated and bored, so my class asked to not renew her contract.

    Ordinary teachers were all born and raised in Italy. The one i had in primary school. Lectors in high school were interesting.

20. My English teacher was a Dutch man with a British accent. Our curriculum was British-English. My German teacher was also Dutch. And I had two French teachers, one who was Dutch and one who actually was French, but who spoke fluent Dutch. In the Netherlands, you need to know both Dutch and the language you’ll be teaching. I think that’s why most teachers end up just being Dutch. I actually work as an ALT now in Japan, but here it works the same. Yes, as a foreigner, you can be an assistant English teacher easily if your English is native or pretty much native-level like in my case. But this is with the emphasis on *assistant*. To be an actual English teacher here at a junior high school or high school, it’s also a must that your Japanese is fluent. Honestly doesn’t it work this way even for the UK? I would assume that the reason why it’s more common in the UK to have native speakers teaching their language is simply because many people out there, especially in Europe, can already speak English fluently.

21. I did, we had one guy from Scotland (a retired engineer), one guy from South Africa (a retired repairman) and one guy from Canada (an unsuccessful carpenter). Kinda fun to talk to except their grammar background was understandably poor, so I’d rather call that genre a conversational exerciser than the actual language learning. No questions “why so?” could possibly be answered, etc.

22. Of the four English teachers I had throughout high school, three were Dutch and one was Scottish.

    However I did TTO (tweetalig onderwijs / bilingual education) so for other subjects I also had a teacher from Australia, one from Canada and one from Ireland.

    ETA: my teachers for French and German were all Dutch though.

23. Generally English teachers here are just Dutch, and so are most at my school. However, my teacher is originally from England/London. She’s been living here for 20 years and speaks pretty much fluent Dutch, but she’s still a native English speaker.

24. We had an English Teacher in secondary who thought he was perfect at the Queen’s English pronunciation. In reality he sounded like a 1940s radio announcer with extremely exaggerated vowels.

    When he took a class to London for a trip he couldn’t make himself understood anywhere, people just stared at him. They heard words that sounded like they could be English but didn’t match theirs at all.

25. Yes, we had separate grammar and speaking classes.
    Grammar being taught by a Czech and speaking being led by a native speaker. Same system was also applied to German.

    Also in both cases the native speakers were actual teachers and I really enjoyed the classes, although as I read above, this is not the rule here.

26. Kind of. Some years, one of the English lessons was conducted by a native English speaker. In my case, it happened roughly at ages 16-19, but it depends on the school. I now teach at a primary/lower secondary school and there is a native English speaker, but again, just as an addition to regular lessons taught by a Czech teacher.

    IMO, native speakers aren’t necessarily better than certified language teachers. Purely knowing a language doesn’t make you good at teaching it (especially when acquired naturally without conscious effort).

27. My first was just a standard Swede, not the best but I had neighbour from Yorkshire who helped me with prononciation. My second English teacher, Swedish, had been living in Australia as young so some what good pronunciations but bit out of date since he was now 60.

    Last one I had , had lived for 10 years in Wales and England but was from Skåne and her prononciation was either horrible, it was like one of these bad movies with a Swede in it, My name is Helga and I am from Swee-den or really good but every word ch was pronounced K. I never heard any one from Wales say Kapel isntead chapel or karm instead of charm.

    So instead I learned from the Yorkshire guy, a Cornwell lady and two weird Scots and that where I am today.

28. No. My university had a native speaker requirement but for the ~10 years I took English at school and the 8 years of French, I had German people teaching me the language. I think the reason is that in order to teach a language in school in Germany, you have to have a teaching degree but this isn’t true for university.

29. No. They were all local teachers (some with such a low level I wondered how they got the job). To compensate, every now and then we had a native English student who came for a few months and taught us how to properly pronunciate

30. All of my teachers were Czech. One year (we were like 13-14 years old back then) we had a guy from the US come to our class about once a week. He was supposed to help us practice speaking/conversation, not teach us in the way a regular teacher would.

31. Regularly, no. Not in public schools, anyway. Only as a visiting teacher for one or two weeks.

    One of the German teachers in one of my schools was bilingual with one German and one Hungarian parent which was the closest thing we got to a native teacher. The second closest was a Spanish teacher who was native Hungarian but used to live in Spain and had a Spanish husband.

    Private schools and specialized language schools are much more successful at hiring native teachers (probably because they actually pay them a wage that is above the poverty threshold). All of my Japanese teachers were natives who came to Hungary for one reason or another, usually for learning the language (apparently Finno-Ugric languages are some of the easiest European languages for Japanese natives, and considering the grammatical similarities I can see why). My first teacher however has been in the country for a longer time and she was also teaching in one of the private schools for rich people’s kids as her main job.

32. Nope, and it makes sense. Just “being a native speaker of a language” isn’t enough to qualify someone as a good English teacher (or a teacher of any other language). You have to know how to teach grammar, to contrast the two languages, to point out the most common mistakes speakers of a certain language make, etc.