Originally Posted by evanny (Post 868800)

yes. and then you went on talking about how 90% of them are speaking incorrectly because they have accents. accent doesn't mean incorrect the way you make it to be and it is nothing that person's ears can't get used to in a single month.

i met a girl on a street one night and started talking. after 15 minute conversation it turned out she was an exchange student who had been studying in england for a single year, and yet after 15minutes i could not tell the difference between her and a native. and even more - she came from the same country i did.

Originally Posted by RealJames (Post 868724)

Yeah for sure.
As a bonus, non-native teachers tend to be a hell of a lot cheaper!

Trained native speakers, though, I believe will still be better than trained non-native speakers as teachers.
You have a good point that they can relate to how that person learned the language, and the native speaker doesn't have that.
Actually a big part of why I took learning Japanese seriously was to improve my ability to teach them, not so I would speak Japanese during the lesson, but to understand where they are coming from and how their language differs so as to better understand the challenges.


After Edit;


Another point is that it's a lot more difficult to unlearn and relearn something correctly than to simply learn it correctly the first time.
When learning from a non-native speaker, there's always a good chance that you might learn something flat out wrong, as opposed to learning something that's "wrong" but doesn't actually disturb the ears of native speakers.

There are many non-native teachers who are excellent teachers, who don't make these mistakes and in fact speak English just as well as I do. But there are FAR more who don't but profess to.
As a student, especially a beginning student, it's nearly impossible to differentiate these from each other.

How can you know, as a beginning student, that the non-native teacher you select is in fact reliable?
A native speaker, once he starts teaching you, if you learn, he's good, if you don't, he's not, but there's no doubt that what he's saying is correct English regardless of his ability to teach it.
A non-native speaker, once he starts teaching you, if you learn, he's good, if you don't, he's not, but there's no guarantee that what he's teaching is correct English.

See what I mean?

Originally Posted by evanny (Post 868874)

you have a point that a student won't know if he is thought incorrectly by a non-native.
however i can't imagine any big mistakes that could be made and then hard to re-learn. mistakes usually made by non-natives are either pronunciation or simple translation - forgetting the meaning of words. other than that i don't know if any major mistakes that would "damage" students language in a long run can be made by a non-native, especially since all non-native speakers have finished universities in order to get a license to teach.

Originally Posted by evanny (Post 868876)

well in my country for you to be a teacher you actually have to study teaching to be one. every teacher i know has spent 4 years in university, then usually majors and only then starts to teach while also attending all kinds of courses once in a while for improvement.

and what you just said are the mistakes i mentioned. but i would not call them major. i would be far more worried if i was thought incorrect grammar than idioms or pronunciation. and usually both of these things are left for the person to fix on his own when face with real life situations. doesn't matter how good the non-native teacher is - everyone still needs to practice with different people to "see" how language works in real life.