TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Defining
successful
teachers
Kirsten Holt suggests that teaching competences are the key to the future for our profession.
W
hat makes someone a good or
successful English teacher? Surely
it isn’t a question of whether a
teacher is a native speaker or not?
Unfortunately, that is still
sometimes the criterion by which teachers are
judged, even though relatively recent debate suggests
this way of thinking is seriously flawed. How, then,
should we define success instead? This article offers
up a solution: using teaching competences.
A catalyst for change
In 2016, when Silvana Richardson gave her rousing
IATEFL conference plenary ‘The “native factor”,
the haves and the have-nots’, there was much debate
around native versus non-native speaking teachers,
as she discussed why we still needed to talk about
the topic of nativeness, despite the fact that the ELT
profession has been talking about the struggle of
non-native English speaking teachers (NNESTs) for
visibility and due recognition since 1983.
The reality turns out to be far less sanguine than
the intents – with the situation remaining relatively
unchanged for the professional teacher of English
whose first or home language is a language other than
English. Why, in some circles and teaching contexts, is
a native English speaking teacher (NEST) still
considered better than a NNEST? Why can an
unqualified native speaker still be seen as preferable to
a qualified and professional non-native teacher, despite
numbers of the latter far outweighing the former?
Perhaps, it’s time to move away from the debate
around mother tongues and start to examine,
instead, what makes a successful teacher, thereby
placing the emphasis on teachers as facilitators of
language learning, rather than models of target
language. By doing so, could we begin to change the
perceptions outlined above? Would we then harness
the potential of giving greater (employment)
opportunities to all, if we could find ways of
52 Issue 118 • September 2018
defining and developing qualified and experienced
teachers, irrespective of the old labels?
What is a native speaker
anyway?
Whilst many school adverts still insist that NESTs
only need apply, I can’t help but wonder what they
are hoping for. There’s obviously the traditional
definition that can found in many a dictionary:
‘a native speaker is a person who has spoken the
language in question from earliest childhood
(or from birth)’; but what does this really mean?
Take myself, for instance, because people often
struggle to identify where I’m from. I started off
life with fairly clipped tones, having been born in
one of the home counties of England; but that
soon morphed into an Irish lilt on certain words
and a northern twang on others, before changing
into a hybrid Southern African accent, then to an
Australian one, after living there for a year or so.
I’ve eventually finished up with a more
international English dialect (so I’ve been told),
which uses a mix of British, Australian and
American, and a smattering of more Brazilian-
sounding words – an unintentional accent
smorgasbord from my nomadic 20s. I know I’m
not alone in this, because a quick informal poll
showed other NESTs have their own accent
smorgasbords; by rights, we could apply to the
native-speaker-only adverts, but is that school then
getting what they expected?
And what about the model of ‘native
speakerism’? It tends to be judged on what a
well-educated, middle-class, mainstream person is
able to produce linguistically within the Common
European Framework of Reference (CEFR) C2 level
(or C1 at least). There obviously has to be some
mastery model, but is this the standard of the average
native speaker? Compare these two examples:
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‘Looks to me like the Bernie people will fight. If
not, there blood, sweat and tears was a waist of time.
Kaine stands for opposite!’ (Donald Trump on
Twitter in 2016)
‘Yuv just goat one thing tae worry aboot. The
simplicity ay it aw. Ken whit ah mean?’ (Irvine Welsh,
in his novel Trainspotting, 1993)
One is grammatically incorrect but the
messaging (arguably) worked. The other is
grammatically correct, but perhaps some people will
struggle to understand the dialect.
Not only this, but do all native speakers have the
same command and knowledge of language that a
non-native speaker who has studied it for years and
become an expert in their own right possesses? Or if
a NNEST is constantly reading and listening to
native speakers, wouldn’t the chances be that this
teacher would be able to make the same choices a
native speaker would – when it comes to vocabulary,
for instance? Can a NNEST be qualified as a NEST
if such is the case? If so, what’s the difference, then?
I suspect Claire Kramsch hits the nail on the
head when she suggests: ‘Native speakership, I
suspect, is more than a privilege of birth or even
education. It is acceptance by the group that created
the distinction between native and non-native speakers.
… It is not enough to have intuitions about
grammaticality and linguistic acceptability and to
communicate fluently and with full competence; one
must also be recognized as a native speaker by the
relevant speech community.’ This definition is
interesting because it opens up the possibility that
native speakers could be made rather than born.
However, work is still needed to establish what level
of English we mean a ‘native speaker’ possesses.
Although the CEFR’s scheme has six recognised
levels, with C2 (the top level, ‘Mastery’) often being
used to define the performance of an idealised
‘native speaker’, or a ‘well-educated native speaker’
or a ‘near-native speaker’, such concepts were not
taken as a point of reference during the development
of the levels or the descriptors. Nonetheless, given
that the CEFR intended to ‘characterise the degree
Figure 1
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TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
of precision, appropriateness and ease with the
language which typifies the speech of those who
have been highly successful learners’, could we
change the term native or near-native competence
to proficient competence?
To illustrate how these ideas work in practice,
it’s worth referring to Péter Medgyes’s
‘interlanguage continuum’, which demonstrates
how ‘non-native speakers constantly move along
the continuum from zero to [proficient]
competence as long as they learn-to-use/use-to-
learn English’, though note that I’ve amended the
term native competence to proficient competence.
The ‘glass wall’ towards the end represents the
barrier that confronts the non-native speakers
(or indeed some native speakers, in terms of
knowledge, understanding and/or application)
who come quite close to proficient competence
(compare the nebulous ‘near-native speaker’) but
whose progress gets halted sooner or later.
If Claire Kramsch’s proposal is then applied
to the continuum, along with research findings
that suggest the average English language
teacher sits more in the middle of the continuum
(where significant numbers of students are
taught competently by teachers of a CEFR B1+
to B2 level of English), it is possible to broaden
out the possibilities of what is acceptable for a
teacher (obviously depending on context) and
what works successfully in practice. Figure 1
shows a revised interlanguage continuum.
So, where does that leave us? Arguably, and
perhaps most controversially, the big difference
isn’t whether or not one is a NEST or a
NNEST, but whether or not one is, or isn’t, a
competent teacher.
What is a successful teacher?
We often see what we expect to see. Imagine
you’re driving on the road for the moment, and
you’re thinking of buying, or have just bought,
a blue Mini … you’ll soon find yourself
noticing far more blue cars, especially Minis,
Issue 118 • September 2018 53
TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
as you start not really noticing the cars of other
colours or makes. However, if you look for cars in
general, you suddenly start seeing how many
non-blue cars there are, because you now notice
them far more often.
In other words, if you change the terms of what
you are looking for, how you look will change. We all
see things through our own filters. So, imagine you
are looking for teachers for your school. Is it the type
of teacher they are, ie NS or NNS, that you are
looking at? Why? What reasons will you use to
quantify your decision? If you look for their
knowledge, abilities and skills (ie teaching
competences) instead, how many more applicants
will you find? Figure 2 puts this in other words:
simply being native ≠ competence in teaching
simply being an expert ≠ competence in teaching
simply being qualified ≠ competence in teaching
Figure 2
Each one of these on its own is simply not enough
to quantify whether someone has competence in
teaching, even though they are the benchmarks that
many adverts for teachers have been built on.
What makes a successful
teacher?
The definition of a successful teacher should
encompass their capabilities as well as their
background – in a similar way to that in which the
CEFR portfolio can show a learner’s competence in
notional and functional skills. And, fortunately, the
teaching equivalent of the CEFR exists in the form
of a Teaching Competences Framework.
To illustrate how a profile of a successful teacher
works in practice, I’m using The Eaquals TD
Framework, deliberately chosen because it doesn’t
have the terms non-native or near-native in its
material. I should point out that, obviously, there
are other frameworks also available – choose the
one that chimes best with your teaching practices.
The framework has three development phases,
covering both knowledge and skills in domains such
as planning, teaching and learning; teaching and
supporting learning; assessment of learning, and so
on, with teaching competences making up each
domain. (See the link at the end of the article for the
full framework.)
■■ Phase 1 tends to apply to a teacher just starting out
in their career, when they still need to gain experience
across a wide range of contexts and courses and/or
the input they gained on their teaching training
course needs to be activated and developed.
■■ A teacher moves into Phase 2 when they start
experiential learning, reflecting on their teaching,
54 Issue 118 • September 2018
accumulating experience and gaining greater
autonomy and competence as a professional.
■■ Phase 3 is often associated with teachers of a
broad proficient, or near-proficient, teaching
repertoire; they may already be mentors in their
school, teacher trainers and/or people who have a
strong commitment to their profession.
The focus is far more on what happens in the
classroom than on what ‘type’ of teacher is teaching
the class, because it comes down to what a teacher
can demonstrate they can do, rather than the length
of teaching service they might have, their seniority
or their nativeness versus non-nativeness. The
framework is designed to help teachers chart their
CPD progress: their background knowledge and
awareness, their professional skills and what
experience they have developed so far. Teachers are
likely to end up with an uneven or ‘jagged’ profile,
owing to the fact that they won’t be at the same
phase across all competences at any given point in
time, just as a student isn’t with the notional and
functional syllabus in the CEFR – progression, by
its nature, tends not to be linear.
In Figure 3 are a few suggestions of mine for
what teachers can do to record what stage of a
particular teaching competence they are at.
This ‘evidence’ of your CPD progression can
then be recorded in a portfolio, ideally in electronic
form, so that you can post links and chart progress.
The MyCPD digital tracker from Pavilion is a handy
way to do this, as you can upload lesson plans,
Development CPD activity
phase
Phase 1 Read an online article and post a comment.
Read a couple of articles on the same topic and answer
a related questionnaire/do a quiz/write a short summary
or blog.
Attend a conference talk (and participate on Twitter
or write a blog post about it).
Phase 2 Participate in an online discussion or add opinions
to a social media query.
Do a reflective observation (reporting back on
experiential learning).
Do peer observations and analyse lessons learnt.
Share a lesson plan.
Upload lesson feedback.
Phase 3 Record a class/TT session as a reference tool for others.
Mentor a colleague and record events.
Provide guidelines or a teaching plan of a particular
technique, method or teaching tool/aid.
Deliver a presentation on best practice and share/
upload your slides.
Figure 3
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 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

notes, feedback, etc, and then personalise it to show

how it is helping your development. This makes
for a great self-assessment tool, but if you want
to extend it further, your Director of Studies, senior
teacher or mentor could then add comments or give
you feedback to upload. Alternatively, try using it
for development plans or in appraisals, where you
could discuss your CPD progress with your line
manager. There is also the potential to use a CPD
log in tandem with your CV, to showcase your
progression and expertise, or certainly to act as a
catalyst for discussion.
CEFR Companion Volume with New Descriptors 2018 (https://rm.coe.int/
cefr-companion-volume-with-new-descriptors-2018/1680787989)
Kramsch, C ‘The privilege of the nonnative speaker’ In Blyth, C and Sieloff
Mangan, S The Sociolinguistics of Foreign Language Classrooms:
Contributions of the Native, the Near-native and the Non-native Speaker
Heinle 2003 (available from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED481796)
Medgyes, P ‘Native or non-native: who’s worth more?’ ELT Journal 46 (4) 1992
Richardson, S ‘The “native factor”, the haves and the have-nots’ Plenary at
IATEFL conference, Birmingham 2016 (https://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2016/
session/plenary-silvana-richardson)
The Eaquals Framework for Teacher Training and Development
(www.eaquals.org/our-expertise/teacher-development/the-eaquals-
framework-for-teacher-training-and-development/)

t t t Kirsten Holt is Head of ELT at Pavilion Publishing

If we start defining teaching by what we can do in the
classroom rather than who we are, then the focus
shifts away from the, perhaps, almost-defunct NEST
versus NNEST debate (I live in hope), to a far more
meaningful and powerful message, encompassing
teachers’ knowledge, skills and abilities. Surely that’s
better for the profession as a whole? n
& Media, having worked in publishing for over 12
years. Previously, she worked in education for a
similar length of time, first as a teacher/materials
writer, then as a teacher trainer, before becoming a
Director of Studies and trainer of teacher trainers.
Kirsten is passionate about supporting teachers,
authors and editors alike in their professional
development, as well as investigating ways to
respond to the evolving world of ELT.
kirsten.holt@pavpub.com

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www.etprofessional.com Issue 118 • September 2018 55