Native Speaker TESOL Teacher's Talk: Examining the Unexamined

Abstract

In this paper we provide a critical analysis of “native–speaker”TESOL teachers’ classroom talk and interview data collected from English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs in an Australianuniversity to move beyond commonsense ideas of how their talkmight resource the language classroom. Using the sociolinguisticconcept of “frame”, we analyse episodes of talk from the classroompractices of two teachers. We examine the complexity of layered meanings produced as the teachers teach and simultaneously provide linguistic instruction on the language that is vicariouslyproduced in their talk or the activity. We propose that unexamined,native speaker teacher talk, although well-intentioned, can also carry risks that might make it problematic for the language learner.The two extracts reveal two potential problems—the nativespeaker’s agility in con/textual shifts, and the native-speaker’s capacity to cumulatively rephrase classroom questions and addunnecessary syntactic complexity that was not in the initial question.