Collections of Professor Dr David Ngin Sian Pau

1.Preface

Thomas Leverett made agreement with Halliday that English is not inherently owned by a single culture in a single place. Also, without question, there is no reason that an applicant generically labeled 'non-native' cannot be as good a teacher or a better one than a fellow teacher who is seen as 'native'. Eliminating such a distinction is a complicated process, but not only can a non-native acquire a native instinct with English crucial to effective teaching, he/she can also empathize with the learner's frustration with the target language in a way the native-speaker never can.

On the contrary, I don’t take this kind of statement as important as many English teachers think how notable Thomas Leverett and Halliday are. I would rather state that their ideology will definitely give native speakers illogical impact which can make them become egoist English teachers without the real knowledge of what teaching English is all about. If a native English speaker, without prior knowledge of learning how to teach English to speakers of other language, think himself or herself as Thomas Leverett and Halliday stated above they will face countless problems in their teaching career and will misunderstand the country and the people in which their teaching takes place because of the untolerable treatments they might face in the classroom.

If we do not eliminate self-exaltation to get a teaching job without having real knowledge of pedagogy and the preponderancy of the idea that only native English speaker should or can teach, the English language will be of a single culture in a single place in a few decades or centuries. If their ideas were true, the English language would have never become the international language in anyway. I am not a native Burmese speaker but from a tribal group called “Zomi” though I was born and brought up in Burma or Myanmar. And many people, whose major was “Burmese” at the college or university in Myanmar especially from Zomi or other tribes, who later became Burmese language teachers, tutors or professors, have been able to teach Burmese to Burmese native speakers. It becomes their profession. Actually, tribals are other speakers of Burmese in Myanmar though some people who major in Burmese teach Burmese even at doctorate degree level. English became my first language in the university 13 years ago at undergraduate level, and teaching English has been my profession since I first graduated from the university. But because of my country and the official language of Myanmar, I am being known as non-native international English teacher.

As I wrote it in my practical assignments, I have never been taught English by native speaker though I speak English like native speaker as if I were from one of the English speaking countries. So language learning can never be the same as cultural inheritance and being native speaker of a language is not a distinction though they have the responsibility to keep the standard and promote that language even when they do nothing about it. Moreover, being a native speaker of a language doesn’t make a person the teacher of that language. The same situation is applicable to the English language as well. I am a native Teizang speaker but have never been a teacher