苦笑余天手上的纹身:有谁知道这篇文章出自哪里?

Following Martin Wedell’s piece “Local teacher or native speaker?” now is perhaps a good time to explore the discomfort over the use of “Native speaker” (NS) and “Non native speaker” (NNS). The discomfort nay, stem partly from the fact that the word “native” is sometimes misguidedly used to mean a primitive sort of savage; also partly because there will be an increasing number of expert English users all over the world who did not start their lives speaking English.The expression “mother tongue” may be suffering the same guilt complex. Is it fair to brand a girl a NSRS of English because her mother was a French speaker while her father spoke English? “Father tongue” then? Or should it have been “motherland tongue”? Fairer even might be “environment tongue” for children growing up in an English speaking environment (even though their parents might speak another language at home).
Students often tell me that they come to the U. K. because they want to learn “pure” English in the “original” environment. While I agree that learning in an English environment leads to more effective English learning, this “purity” is a dangerous concept and I believe it is closely linked to “mother” values and the term “native speakers”.
“Motherland” and “fatherland” imply a patriotic love for one’s country, but language cannot easily work in this way, particularly when it is a “world language” we are talking about. True, language is closely related to “culture” but, for most modern users of English in the world, language is more about international communication than nationality.
Terms such as “monolingual”, “bilingual” and “multilingual” may be more appropriate for the future. Or perhaps the fairest way is to eliminate altogether the need for these terms. There is some concrete evidence that NNS and “mother tongue” are already losing their influence.
To study for the RSA Cambridge Certificate or Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults (CELTA or DELTA), teacher trainees no longer need to have English as their first language and there is no mention of NS or NNS. The CELTA rubric, for example, states that participants must be “able to use written and spoken language in the classroom which is clear and coherent and essentially free of mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar”. There is no mention of where the trainee was born or grew up.
More broadly, in English speaking countries, bilingual and trilingual people from a variety of backgrounds are now not at all rare. These people speak nearly perfect English and are accepted, I believe, as “native speakers” would be (that is... if I used that term any more!).
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