Native and Nonnative English-Speaking Teachers of English and Their Academic Literacy

In the world today, the demand for English teachers is growing exponentially in wide-ranging contexts and for numerous purposes. Despite this demand, teachers who do not speak English as their first language continue to experience bias in hiring and in the workplace even when they are well-qualified.  In the United States, where the immigrant population has grown and continues to grow significantly, TESOL programs are also scurrying to meet the demand for ESL teachers. The teacher learners themselves form a diverse pool of native (NES) and nonnative English (NNES) speakers with various backgrounds in language learning. This qualitative study delved into the academic writing of the NES and NNES participants, who were enrolled in a Master’s in Education/TESOL program in New York. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to investigate their literacy development and language learning to add to the growing body of research in this area, specifically to discover more about the background and needs of NESs and NNESs in teacher preparation programs.

This study explored the nature of literacy and language development among NES and NNES teacher learners through an analysis of surveys and a two-pronged textual analysis, which involved a thematic content analysis and a Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) analysis of the literacy and linguistic autobiographies that the participants wrote as part of their coursework. Specific observer perspectives offered within the SFL framework, in particular the experiential and interpersonal metafunctions, were used as tools to discover how the participants construed and negotiated their experiences of language and literacy. SysConc, an SFL concordancing tool, aided in the selection of targeted clause complexes with the pronominal “I” and words related to literacy, including read , write , listen , speak , book , language , and learn .

            The interpretation of the data indicated that literacy learning and language development are complex, interactive, and sometimes emotionally charged processes, about which the participants often expressed themselves through non-assertive lexicogrammatical choices. The comparison of data also revealed the people who most influenced the participants’ language development, and the similarities and differences among their writings from the standpoint of grammatical intricacy. The research has implications for the development of literacy and the training of teachers of English.