ABSTRACT
The field of English Language Teaching (ELT) worldwide has been dominated by colonialist ideologies of who is a legitimate speaker of English, who can be a valid English language teacher, and who is the final authority on ELT pedagogies. Eurocentric theories embedded in the imperialist worldview that “native speakers” from the predominantly English-speaking countries of the West have more ownership of English than “nonnative speakers” from the non-West1 inform the theories and pedagogies in this field. The native/nonnative division is also situated in global power relations and ideologies. For example, in critiquing the linguistic imperialism of English, Phillipson (1992) argues that the division between “core English-speaking countries” of the West (the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and “periphery-English countries,” where English is used as an international link language (e.g., Japan and Sweden) or where English was imposed in colonial times and now exists as indigenized varieties (e.g., Pakistan and Nigeria), parallels the relationship between the dominant rich countries and the dominated poor countries. Moreover, because core English-speaking countries of the First World are predominantly Anglo societies, the “native speaker of English” is often a code word for White speakers of English (cf. Paikeday, 1985). Native
speaker ideologies and discourses in applied linguistics tend to position native speakers of English as White people speaking standard, good, correct, real English with a standard accent, whereas nonnative speakers are constructed as people of color speaking nonstandard, deficient, inferior English with a nonstandard, inferior accent.
