Really tough to hear of your experience, Sharkie! I hope these are just the teething troubles of finding your first job after graduation, and you’ll soon find something more stable.
Have you seen these posts about superstar teachers in Taiwan here and here? Maybe they’ll give you ideas how to carve out another niche for yourself 😉
With all good wishes,
Ingrid

In terms of hiring English instructors, I can resonate with my difficulties with this post right now. I may have completed an MA course with good grades but I am still struggling to find a stable full-time position. Employers definitely “favour” people with a “white face” or eyes of “different colours”. No matter how much work you have achieved in the past, native speakers always have the priority for earning positions. I have no choice but to do two part time teaching jobs as well as earn clients’ “trust” in order to have them spread the message about my teaching ability. If things still do not work well, I really have no choice but to move to another region that treats everyone equally.

Overall, experiencing this problem is depressing…especially in my hometown where I was born.

No worries, Christof. I’m glad you value Language on the Move!
The quality of public debate in the US is indeed a cause of concern … economically, the US is the 2nd most poliarized (i.e. most unequal) society in the OECD, yet the material elites are largely running this ‘anti-elitism’ debate and have managed to pin the ‘elitist’ label not on the obvious material elites but on intellectuals, liberals, etc. Unfortunately, this very group has actually bought into this confusion of elitism – where ‘elitism’ seemingly is not about having deep pockets but liberal rationalism – and is therefore incapable of mounting a coherent counter-discourse. I mean your association of ‘elite’ with ‘expert’ is a case in point. For fantastic reading there is of course Joe Bageant of Deer Hunting with Jesus fame and Thomas Frank (What’s the matter with Kansas?).

Hi Ingrid,
Didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. I apologize if it seemed as if I was. I will admit to perhaps sometimes using this type of forum as an opportunity to wax poetic beyond the actual focus of a given article/reply. Part of the reason for this is because such forums are so rare in academe — we don’t have enough opportunities, in my view, to, as we say in the U.S. “get into the ring” with other academics.

I completely agree with: a) the need to challenge unscientific views of, well, pretty much anything, whether we’re talking about language, or climate change; b) the importance of being able to appeal to science in order to do so.

That noted, I also think that in the United States at least — where there is an incredibly powerful streak of “anti-elitism” and often outright antipathy toward “expert” knowledge — appeals to science can often be very ineffective and, in fact, can backfire, politically and ideologically. One need look no further than the extreme denialism toward climate change in the U.S. and the presidential candidates’ total silence on this issue to see evidence of this.

Basically, I do not know the best, most effective way to translate “expert” knowledge in such a way as to effectively effect social change on some of the issues we discuss on language on the move. And, as an activist/scholar, this is a point of frustration for me.

Well, I didn’t say any of that and object to having words put in my mouth. Accent is, as I said, highly salient and has social consequences (another plug for the new edition of Rosina Lippi-Green’s English with an accent seems to be in order). We’ve had posts here an Language-on-the-Move that show that accent can be matter of life and death (e.g., here and here).
However, to turn ‘native accent’ into a proficiency criterion is to confuse a linguistic fact with its social effects. Pointing that out has nothing to with being ‘elitist’ or even ‘critical’ but is simply a scientific statement. In the same way that Galileo wasn’t ‘critical’ or ‘elitist’ for stating that the sun didn’t revolve around the earth …
The insidious thing about letting the belief that ‘native speaker status’ or ‘accent’ are valid *linguistic* criteria go unchallenged is that that ends up underwriting its social effects (including the fact that it has come to replace race as a way to discriminate in many contexts; see, e.g., here).
To go back to your own example: if sounding ‘like a native’ referred to a linguistic feature, you wouldn’t need to worry about your daughters sounding like natives because they are obviously ‘native speakers’ (having learnt the language on their, well, father’s knee, as Bloomfield had it). As it is, what you seem to desire is for them to sound like kids who not only learnt the language from birth but also learnt it in a particular social environment (a highly elusive and, hence, normative desire). And, if they ever live in Germany, you may even find that sounding like an American with good German may be a more attractive identity option for them than sounding like just another German.
Btw, having been born and bred in Germany doesn’t automatically mean you are taken to be a ‘native speaker,’ either, if you don’t have the ‘right’ geographical and class background; a story I’ve told elsewhere …)

I agree that native speaker status and accent are to a large degree about perception and that, from a critical perspective, they are “irrelevant.” But just because critical academics say things are “irrelevant” doesn’t make it suddenly seem that way to the 99% of people for whom accent is indeed extremely salient, and thus, in the sense of everyday, socially lived practice/treatment, indeed quite relevant.

I believe this discussion is similar to the listserv discussion about “folk” (mis)understandings about “a” language. You can, as we say in the US, talk until you’re blue in the face about the fact that there is no such thing as “a” language, no such thing as “English”, “German”, or really any analytical category from a purely “objective” analytical perspective.

But if 99% of people see these analytical categories as “real” and “relevant”, it doesn’t really matter if a small number of academics say they aren’t. Indeed, I think one of the greatest challenges for critical applied linguists, and critical scholars in general, is figuring out effective ways to critique “folk” knowledge that actually persuade “average” people to change their views. Using the rather pejorative term “folk” to describe apparently “lesser” views of social reality isn’t a great way to begin going about doing this ;-). People see right through to the elitism and are immediately turned off.

I don’t think you can divorce ‘native speaker status’ from race. Jackie Chang’s PhD thesis about ideologies of English language learning in Taiwan found that ABCs (=America-born Chinese; i.e. ‘native speakers’ of English) were paid less as English teachers than Continental Europeans (i.e. ‘non-native speakers’) because they didn’t *look like* natives. I have repeatedly written about the fact that ‘native speaker status’ is as much a matter of perception as performance (e.g., here, here and here).
Accent is intriguing because it is often the most salient but easily the most irrelevant aspect of linguistic proficiency … meaning that it as much in the eye of the beholder as on your tongue.

It’s very difficult to step out of this model, even for the most critical of people. For instance, I admit to being biased towards teachers with a “native” German accent when it comes to my kids learning German. I don’t want them to have an American accent when speaking German. I know how problematic this view is, from a critical perspective, but I cannot step outside of it.

I so badly want my daughters to be able to pass as “natives” in two different language communities — and I do think their accents are pretty darn close to “native” in German, though they have a bit of a German accent in English for now (this will go away).

Why do I want this so badly? Because I think it opens up extremely exciting multiple identity possibilities for them that comparatively few people have.

So-called balanced bilinguals who have ‘native’ like accents in two languages are able to throw of the yoke of a single linguistic identity, itself tied to all sorts of other confining identities (national, etc.). But the irony is that their ability to do so is linked to the very same stubborn essentialism they must end up reproducing in an effort to “escape” a singular identity .

Khan

Thanks, Angel, and welcome to Language on the Move! Your work, of course, has been inspirational. For interested readers:
Kubota, R., & Lin, A. (Eds.) (2006). Special Issue: Race and TESOL, 2006, TESOL Quarterly, 40(3), 471-660.
Kubota, R., & Lin, A. (Eds.) (2009). Race, culture, and identities in second language education: Exploring critically engaged practice. New York: Routledge.

Chang, J. 2004. Ideologies of English Teaching and Learning in Taiwan. Sydney, University of Sydney. PhD

http://languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Chang_Jackie_ideologies-of-english-teaching-and-learning-in-taiwan.pdf