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Two of the most contentious issues in second language (L2) instruction are the status (i.e., professional

identity) and professional roles of teachers. L2 teachers’ identities are often shaped with

reference to the “native speaker/non-native speaker” (NS/NNS) distinction, which is often raised

vis-à-vis English, the most widely used L2 worldwide and the lingua franca of today’s global communication.

This binary distinction has been used by some actors to justify discriminatory practices

in the English language teaching (ELT) profession for a long time. For example, O’Reilly (1909,

p. 44) calls the belief that an NS is the best model for language teaching a “blown and pompous fallacy.”

However, debates over this controversial dichotomy have intensified in the last few decades.

Medgyes (1992) was the first to discuss discrimination against NNS teachers. Braine (2010, p. 2)

argues that it “may have been because the topic is unusually sensitive and may have been considered

politically incorrect” to raise the issue of this discrimination before the 1990s. The discrimination

is based on the assumption that NNS teachers have less knowledge and fewer skills than

NS teachers. Some scholars have recently argued that “expertise” rather than nativeness (Rampton,

1990) should be the only indicator of professionalism and effectiveness.

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