Arabic-L:PEDA:Jobs restricted to native speakers

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Sat 26 Jan 2008
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Jobs restricted to native speakers
2) Subject:Jobs restricted to native speakers

-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------
1)
Date: 26 Jan 2008
From:shehade at mappi.helsinki.fi
Subject:Jobs restricted to native speakers

The basic question that needs to be raised is: Should a professor of
Arabic language and Islamic studies master this language both in theory
and practice or not? As far as I know there is no condition in the  
policy
of professorship which says that the candidate has to show a profound
knowledge in Arabic and what counts mainly is publications. Consequently
the phenomenon of finding professors of Arabic who are unable neither to
speak any sort of Arabic nor write MSA is common.
On the other side not every native speaker of a certain language can  
be a
good teacher. Beside this ability of one Arabic dialect and a profound
active knowledge of MSA that most academic Arabs have he needs to know  
the
educational methods of teaching and like this profession.
H. Shehadeh

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2)
Date: 26 Jan 2008
From:"Iktômi" <ikto.ness at gmail.com>
Subject:Jobs restricted to native speakers

Hi everybody!!

I was very pleased to read this discussion for it's an issue that  
interests
me personally! I am a teacher of French ( L1 Arabic). I come from a  
country
where Fr is a L2, and spoken by nearly the majority of the population.  
I do
consider myself a native speaker of French, in reality I am bilingual,  
since
I spent 8 years of my life in France, and I was always considered  
French by
the natives. It sounds as if I had no problem with anything related to  
what
you were discussing about, but I am writing because I recently had many
discussions with a friend of mine, same origin, nearly the same  
competences
in French, and gratuated for teaching French as a Foreign language. She
spent 6 months looking for a job, but she was refused at all her
applications (around 70 applications). All of these applications were
highlighting the condition that the teacher had to be a native-speaker,
which, on the official documents, is not her case. She ended up thinking
about conducting a PHD research on these representations native/ non- 
native
language teachers, and we've been talking about the issue a long time.
I totally agree on this idea: a native speaker is not necessarily a good
language teacher and a non-native, one may know how to explain things  
and
teach them for he/she is more sensitive to the learning difficulties. I
would like to add though, something I consider very important: non- 
native
teachers' perceptions towards themselves and their teaching. these can  
also
be problematic, and creates a feeling of insecurity and lack of  
confidence.
Myself, I would't have questioned my language abilities hadn't I been
recruited to teach the language. I was so confident or rather, my  
language
performance was generally natural, until I had to teach and transmit  
it to
my studemnts, I started questionning every language use, every  
expression,
even the most obvious ones. Teaching is a form of knowledge
transmission, It's a responsibility, and when the context points out to
non-native teachers, non-native teachers themselves feel inconfident,  
and
can end up being paralysed by all those social constructions
Thank you

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