LETs and NESTs: Voices, Views and Vignettes ed. by F. Copland, S. Garton, & S. Mann (review)

LETs and NESTs: Voices, Views and Vignettes¹ describes the experience of Native English Speaking Teachers (NESTs) in Brunei Darussalam, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan; their roles in school education; and their collaboration with Local English Teachers (LETs). The designations NEST and LET were coined as an alternative to “native” and “non-native” because one group should not be defined negatively or as deficient in relation to the other. The term “local” stresses the concept that such English teachers are nationals of the countries in question, whereas the NEST label implicitly endorses the notion that the presence and expertise of native speakers is of universal relevance. This is a questionable assumption, however, that the editors appear to take for granted.

The book consists of 14 chapters that analyse, among other topics, the experience over the past half-century, new initiatives in Latin America, professionalism and myths in English Language Teaching (ELT), cross-cultural challenges in team teaching, project management, and racist perceptions of NESTs. Authors from both the sending and receiving countries are strongly represented. The bulk of the book is thoughtful self-evaluation. The final chapter, “Opinions and positions on native-speakerism,” includes short opinion pieces, or vignettes, which influential scholars were invited to write independently of the LET and NEST studies. These scholars – Andy Kirkpatrick, Robert Phillipson, Constant Leung, Claire Kramsch, Jennifer Jenkins, Enric Llurda, Ahmar Mahboob, Aya Matsuda, Julian Edge, Hywel Coleman, and Alastair Pennycook – therefore do not figure in the Table of Contents of the book or merit bios as contributors.

A foreword written by John Knagg of the British Council states that NESTs should not be “monolingual and unqualified but increasingly multilingual, multicultural and expert” (p. 3). However, the chapters confirm that this is seldom the case. Knagg states that the goal of British efforts is to promote British interests in a “global ELT profession” (p. 3). The assumption is that the UK—presumably in parallel with Australia, Canada, and the United States—has the relevant expertise for this task. Knagg does not refer to the major importance of the ELT industry for the British economy, geostrategic interests, and British soft power, for universities, publishers, language schools, and consultancies, or for the British Council’s income.

English is a foreign language in the five Asian contexts, but the book makes scarcely any mention of what are widely seen as key constituents of well-qualified foreign language teaching. These include contrastive analysis of the learner’s language and the target language (in areas like morphology, syntax, and phonetics); metalinguistic, meta-communicative, and cultural knowledge; discourse, pragmatic, and strategic competence; bilingual dictionaries; and translation. Penny-cook rightly notes that translation is banned in the ELT industry (p. 255). ELT pedagogy also ignores the major importance of differences of script between English and Chinese or Korean, and the major semantic and cognitive differences between English and these linguistic cultures (Bunce, 2016).

In Scandinavia the learning of English is relatively successful, for a wide range of reasons, among them that teachers are well qualified, textbooks are produced locally and build on translation as well as communicative activities, and there is exposure to English outside the classroom. Native speakers of English play virtually no role as teachers in many European countries, except as targets in multimedia technological form.

Several of the contributors to this book state baldly that native speakers can add significant value to education systems around the world. However, it is illogical to expect this from the input of young NESTs from countries that are notoriously unsuccessful in achieving foreign language learning in general education, and who have seldom achieved high proficiency in a foreign language. What is not questioned in the book is the ELT communicative language teaching paradigm, or whether the monolingualism of most Anglo-American applied linguistics and ELT is fit for purpose. The editors state that “language teachers should aspire to be multilingual and multicultural [emphasis added]” (p. 249). But how...