EFL Learner's Self-concept: Repercussions of Native Speakerism

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Christian Fallas Escobar

Resumen

In Costa Rican universities, English as a foreign language (EFL) programs are often filled with practices and discourses that idealize native speakers of English and construct them as the models to follow. In these programs, instructors’ overreliance on native speaker proficiency models create unrealistic standards that can misinform EFL learners’ views of their proficiency as English speakers. As these students ‘fail’ to align their present L2 proficiency to the ideal praised in the classroom, they develop negative self-concepts, which lead them to characterize their proficiency as deficient and incomplete. In this paper, I examine tacitly validated practices and circulating narratives in two academic EFL programs in a public Costa Rican university regarding learners’ expected EFL proficiency and problematize the repercussions these unspoken expectations may have for these students’ overall self-concept as L2 speakers. In light of the results that I discuss herein, I advocate for the abandonment of the native speakerism trend that still prevails in the EFL programs in question and for the construction of EFL teaching practices that provide EFL learners with the validation they deserve for their expanding linguistic repertoire. 

En las universidades costarricenses, los programas de inglés como lengua extranjera están plagados de prácticas y discursos que idealizan al nativo hablante del inglés y lo posicionan como elmodelo a seguir. En estos programas, el uso constante y exclusivo de modelos nativo hablantes por parte de los profesores crean estándares poco reales que pueden distorsionar la percepción que los estudiantes tienen sobre sus capacidades en el idioma inglés. Esto debido a que cuando los estudiantes no logran alinear sus destrezas en la segunda lengua a la proficiencia que implícitamente se idealiza en la clase, estos desarrollan un auto-concepto negativo que los lleva a describir sus propias destrezas lingüísticas como deficientes e incompletas. Es por eso que en este estudio, me doy a la tarea de analizar narrativas circulantes en dos programas académicos de inglés como lengua extrajera de una universidad pública en Costa Rica, en cuanto al nivel de competencia en inglés que los estudiantes perciben se espera de ellos al terminar el programa, y problematizo las repercusiones que estas expectativas implícitas tienen en el auto-concepto de los discentes. A la luz de los resultados que aquí presento, abogo por la erradicación de la tendencia de idealizar al nativo hablante del idioma inglés que aún prevalece in los programas en cuestión y por la construcción de prácticas pedagógicas que validen las destrezas que los estudiantes desarrollan en programas de inglés como lengua extranjera. 

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Fallas Escobar, C. (2019). EFL Learner’s Self-concept: Repercussions of Native Speakerism. International Journal for 21st Century Education, 5(1), 19–35. https://doi.org/10.21071/ij21ce.v5i1.5796
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Christian Fallas Escobar, Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica

Christian Fallas Escobar holds an M.A. in Second Languages and Cultures from Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, and a Certificate in Teacher Training from the School of International Training. He has been an EFL instructor for over thirteen years and currently works in the Escuela de Literatura y Ciencias del Lenguaje at the Universidad Nacional. Among his areas of interest are critical thinking, reflective teaching, multiculturalism & multilingualism, translanguaging, and the intersection between economics, politics and EFL. He has co-authored a textbook for EFL and published several papers dealing with translanguaging in EFL contexts, bilingualism in Latin America, and neoliberal discourses and their connection to the rise of EFL.  

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