ABSTRACT

If someone professes to be a language teacher, he or she could be expected to possess some specialized knowledge about the language. However, what constitutes knowledge about language has been characterized, both historically and institutionally, in a number of distinct and often disconnected ways in L2 teacher education. For much of our professional history, the public discourse surrounding L2 teachers has operated under certain assumptions about the supremacy of the native speaker; that is, if you can speak the language, you can teach it. Thus, in part, knowledge about language has, at least in the public discourse, been defined as “native speaker-ness.”