Challenging the dominance of English in international schools - Part three: Linguistic discrimination

When English – actually, particular varieties of English – is dominant within a community, there is a significant risk of linguistic discrimination. We all have a responsibility to pay attention to this and fight against it. In international schools, linguistic discrimination might look like the exclusion of students from activities due to English proficiency, microaggressions such as repeated mispronunciation of non-English names or mockery of accents, assumptions about students’ identities or abilities due to their accents, suggestions that non-dominant forms of English are 'incorrect', and so on. As Language Friendly School – an organisation that promotes linguistic and cultural inclusion in schools – states, schools should “not allow exclusion or bullying around languages, dialects, or accents”. Linguistic discrimination should be explicitly included in safeguarding and bullying policies and its enforcement taken seriously by all in the school. As well as introducing these institutional changes, we should educate ourselves and others in our schools so we are equipped to recognise and challenge linguistic discrimination. As Katherine Kinzler explores in her book How You Say It, “Linguistic discrimination is seen as normal and typical, and because of this, it flies beneath the radar. It has become so common and so ingrained that most people do not question it. But we need to start questioning it, and each other, and more importantly, to start questioning ourselves — particularly those of us who speak in a way that conveys linguistic privilege” (Kinzler, 2020, p.156)

Given the linguistic diversity and dominance of English in most international schools, we surely have a responsibility to educate our community members so they have the “vocabulary to use in identifying instances of linguistic discrimination, and to differentiate accent discrimination and discrimination involving other protected categories” (Kinzler, 2020, p.176).

Reflection Questions:

• Do your school’s bullying or safeguarding policies explicitly refer to language, accents, or dialects?
• Is everyone in your school community informed about different forms of linguistic discrimination?If not, how could this be addressed?

Explore More:

• ‘Embracing Multilingualism and Eradicating Linguistic Bias’
•  The Vocal Fries podcast

If you asked your students to describe an English speaker, would they imagine someone from the vast range of countries across the English-speaking world? Someone who speaks English as an additional language (they massively outweigh ‘native speakers’ globally, with 743 million ‘non-native’ and 378 million ‘native’ speakers of English, after all)? Or would they immediately think of a Brit or North American? In a 2020 International Educator article, Heidi Dyck Hilty describes her experience of, in international schools, seeing “parents walk their children out of a classroom on the first day of school when they saw that the teacher was Filipina” or “corall[ing] other parents to complain to the superintendent because the classroom teacher was of Vietnamese origin”. Such incidences are often cloaked with references to English and English native-speaker status (and ‘native speaker only’ still continues to be used in some international school job adverts). This is a manifestation of native speakerism-  “an ideology that upholds the idea that so-called ‘native speakers’ are the best models and teachers of English because they represent a ‘Western culture’” (Holliday, 2017) - that unfortunately persists in some international school spaces.

In contexts in which explicitly expressed “linguistic biases are far more tolerated than racial prejudice”, “(non)native speakerness often becomes a proxy of race” (Kubota & Chiang, 2013, p.489). As Natalie Obiko Pearson wrote in her recent Bloomberg report, “At international schools, a native English speaker isn’t someone who aces language proficiency tests. Nor is it a person who comes from any of the more than 50 nations, from Singapore to Nigeria to India, where English is legally an official language and often the de facto tongue of the highly educated… Rather, native English speakers are citizens of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland — and sometimes South Africa, but only the 8% of South Africans who are White (and they count even if their first language is Afrikaans).” According to 2021 research, 91% of international school heads of school are nationals of these countries, 74% of leaders, and 66% of teachers. Schools that are committed to diversity, inclusion, and international mindedness should actively seek to diversify their recruitment so students can see teachers and leaders from a variety of backgrounds, including users of different varieties of English and those for whom English is an additional language, and these teachers should be protected from discrimination.

Resisting English native speakerism also demands we make changes in other areas as well as recruitment. We all plan and teach with an "implied student" (Ulriksen, 2009) in mind – the kind of student that is presupposed by the way we plan our units and lessons – and I wonder to what extent the implied student for many international school teachers is shaped by native speakerism. To what extent are we planning our teaching for imagined English native speakers, rather than the multilingual learners in our classes? What would change if we all more intentionally designed lessons with our multilingual learners in mind? I also wonder to what extent in international schools we judge all students against the standard of an ‘idealised native speaker’ of English, when the concept of native speaker has itself been criticised as more “a myth than a real existence”, being rooted in a monolingual ideology, and connoting inferiority on its opposite category (Qin & Ibrahim, 2021, p.90).

Reflection Questions:

• To what extent are people who are not native speakers of English represented in teaching and leadership roles within your school?
• How does English native speakerism manifest itself in your school? How could it be challenged?

Explore More:

• ‘Native speakerism in International Education: Are we looking for a unicorn?’

In the final chapter of this series, I will provide an overview of how professional development and classroom practice need to change to challenge the dominance of English in international schools.

The previous article of the series can be found here. 

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(This article is part of a piece originally published on Medium)