Between competence and comfort: Elementary students’ perceptions of native and non-native English-speaking teachers in an Indonesian international school

The debate on native (NEST) and non-native (NNEST) English-speaking teachers concerns the issue of whether native speaker status is a fair proxy for teaching quality, but most of the evidence comes from adult and university learners. This study explores the view of children who experience both groups on a daily basis. The study involved three picture-elicited ‘Fun’ Focus Group Discussions with fifteen sixth-grade students at an English-medium international school in Surabaya, Indonesia. The data was analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The children valued their NESTs, who also acted as their class teachers, as models of pronunciation and as creative designers of classroom games, but several described their discipline as frightening and exclusionary. They described their NNESTs, a local-subject teacher and a teaching assistant who joined them at mealtimes, as patient and caring, but they noticed their grammatical and pronunciation errors. Children also reported difficulty with NESTs’ fast speech, unfamiliar vocabulary and dictation tasks. The themes of fast speech and NNEST mispronunciation were following a discussion prompt that introduced them. The results suggest that children’s evaluations are domain specific: native speaker status affected their judgments of linguistic accuracy but was not a strong factor in their judgments of care and support. The perceptions were formed within a staffing structure in which native speakers were in charge of the class and of English, so that role and nativeness cannot be fully separated in these data. We argue that native-speakerism is communicated to children through institutional roles and discourse, and that rapport and pedagogical skill should be considered alongside linguistic proficiency in the allocation of teaching roles in schools.