University Students’ Perceptions of Native and Non-Native Teachers of English

University Students’ Perceptions of Native and Non-Native Teachers of English

CICEK BASARAN, Banu

Key words: native and non-native teachers, EFL, students' perceptions, teaching and assessment ABSTRACT The fact that English is becoming a world language has led researchers to think about English teaching environments. The concept of native and non-native English teachers is one of the topics that were studied by the literature. The majority of the studies considered the teachers’ perspective, rather than studying the learners’ opinions on the issue. Among the ones that did examine the students’ opinions, EFL context based studies are rare. Turkey is one of the countries where English is taught as a foreign language. We need to investigate the students’ perceptions about the issue in order to improve the language education in this context. This study investigates the issue from the university students’ point of view. The study is based on three concepts: (a) whether the students prefer native speaker teachers over non-native ones; (b) whether the previous experience of native teacher has any effect on students’ perceptions; and (c) whether there are any differences perceived by the students between native and non-native teachers in terms of assessment and teaching. The participants are randomly selected 132 students from Middle East Technical University, Turkey. An online questionnaire was used for data collection process. Overall results indicate that the students show a tendency to favor native English teachers over non-natives; however, the students favor non-native teachers of English when it comes to teaching English grammar.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1737