The professional identity construction of non-local NNESTs in the Saudi context

Abstract

Whereas NNESTs make up the majority of ELT professionals in the world today, they are still treated as ‘the marginal majority’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2016) . In the last few decades, there have been calls for a more equitable ELT profession that moves beyond the NS fallacy (Phillipson, 1992). In response, critical scholarship has widely attempted to challenge NESTs’ privilege and NNESTs’ marginalization by demythologizing the NESTs’ superiority and accentuating the unique advantages that NNESTs possess (e.g., Braine, 2010; Mahboob, 2010; Medgyes, 1994). The majority of this research, however, has approached NNESTs as a single homogenous group who favourably share the students’ L1 and understand their local culture. Those studies were apparently referring to ‘Local NNESTs’ (Yazan & Rudolph, 2018), and neglecting a large portion of NNESTs who, as a result of this ever-globalized world, travel to various corners of the globe and teach in contexts to which they are not local. This multiple case study, grounded in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) and Wenger’s (1998) theory of Communities of Practice, addresses this gap as it aims to qualitatively investigate the professional identity construction of four Non-local NNESTs, those whose identities correspond with neither the idealized NESTs nor with the privileged local-NNESTs. The study took place in a dominated by the Native Speakerism ideology English language centre in a Saudi university, and the data were collected through questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, non-participant classroom observations, focus groups, and documents review. The findings showcase the complexity of the teachers’ identity construction. Although the participants were similar in that they shared their non-localness and non-nativeness, they navigated the waters of this ideologically-loaded context differently. Their biographies, the broader professional and sociocultural contexts, as well as their imagined futures played a significant role in their (non)participation in their workplace.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Laura Dominguez: orcid.org/0000-0003-2701-2469

Catalogue record

Export record