This document analyzes the discourses used in 59 English language teaching (ELT) recruitment websites. It finds that 81% of sites require teachers be native English speakers from countries like the US, UK, Canada, etc. Images on sites typically depict young, white teachers. Descriptions emphasize the travel and lifestyle benefits over qualifications. This framework of whiteness and exoticization of countries excludes many qualified teachers and reduces education to a marketable experience.

1. ELT Recruitment Websites,
Whiteness, and Inner-Circle
Ownership of English
Lindsey Ives
Todd Ruecker
Department of English
University of New Mexico

2.  Research Questions and Background
 Framework: Critical Discourse Analysis
 Methodology
 Findings
 Overall trends
 TEFL Heaven
 Hess Language Institute
 Discussion/Conclusion
Overview

3.  What characteristics are commonly attributed to the
ideal candidate? Are individuals excluded explicitly or
implicitly?
 What benefits are emphasized to prospective English
teachers?
 What characteristics are attributed to target teaching
countries?
Research Questions

4.  Native speakerism: “an established belief that
‘native-speaker’ teachers represent a ‘Western
culture’ from which spring the ideals both of the
English language and of English language teaching
methodology’’ (Holliday, 2006, p. 6).
Native Speaker Privilege

5.  Extensive work on NEST privilege:
 Hiring prejudice (Canagarajah, 1999; Thomas, 1999)
 Student preference(Butler, 2007; Timmis, 2002)
 Legal discourse (Ruecker, 2011)
 Racism and native speakerism (Kubota & Lin, 2006; Shuck, 2006; Rubin,
1992)
Native Speaker Privilege

6.  A few studies on recruitment discourses
 Selvi (2010)
 38 ads from TESOL Career Center and 211 from Dave’s ESL
Café
 60.5% of TESOL ads and 74.4% of Dave’s ESL ads had NES
requirement
 Other requirements: variety of English, location of degree
attainment, residence/citizenship
Background

7.  A few studies on recruitment discourses
 Lengeling and Pablo (2012)
 Analyzed 39 ELT recruitment documents, mostly from
Mexico
 NES consistent requirement
 Other characteristics: ideal teacher young, English is easy
to teach and learn, and that teachers are able to teach in
beautiful and exciting places.
Background

8.  Characteristics of CDA:
 Uncovers the ways in which discourses create/recreate
power hierarchies in society
 Recognizes that micro interactions reproduce macro
structures
 Can focus on both visual and textual
 Can focus on sentence level or more broadly on larger
sections of discourse
Theoretical Framework
Fairclough, 1993; 2010

9.  Google search terms: teach English, teach abroad, teach
EFL, english schools [name of country], teach English
[insert country].
 Selection criteria:
 The site was in English, meaning it was targeted towards
foreign teachers
 The site was a recruitment space for specific schools or
programs, often partnered with a TEFL certification program,
not a repository of freely posted ELT ads (e.g. Dave’s ESL
Cafe)
 The selected sites recruited for teaching jobs in China, Japan,
Korea, Taiwan, or Thailand.
Assembling the Corpus

10.  59 sites selected for analysis:
 7 TEFL certification sites
 6 global recruitment sites
 7 sites oriented towards cultural exchange/gap year
 5 school sites recruiting for multiple countries
 15 Korean-specific recruitment/school sites
 5 Taiwan-specific recruitment/school sites
 8 Japan-specific recruitment/school sites
 6 China-specific recruitment/school sites
Assembling the Corpus

11.  Based on a preliminary review conducted separately,
we developed a list of topoi:
 Teacher Qualifications
 Benefits
 Work Environment
 Country Description
 Developed a matrix with 20 characteristics centered
around these 4 areas.
 Completed with the help of WebCorp, a web corpus
analyzer.
Analysis

12.  NES requirement on 81% of sites
 “WE DO NOT ACCEPT APPLICATIONS FROM NON-
NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS AND THOSE NOT RESIDENT
IN JAPAN” (capitalization in original) (Modern English,
Japan).
 “Please also note that it is a requirement from our
partner school for you to be native English speaking”
(ETA).
Overall Trends – NES
Requirement

13.  Alternative qualifications:
 “Those who are not native speakers, must display
greater qualifications for teaching English then a native
speaker, and/or have met with us for personal
interviews. A non-native will be scrutinized more before
being employed, but once employed they are judged by
their ability and their customer's satisfaction just as any
other teacher is. We would rather have a non-native
teacher who can inspire enthusiastic learning (and
spending), than a native speaker who dulls the
enthusiasm of our clients.” (Heart English School,
Japan)
Overall – NES (cont.)

14.  Immigration Requirements: Passport from U.S.
Canada, Ireland, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and
South Africa
 “We seem to get a high amount of applicants from
the Philippines. While we appreciate your
enthusiasm, we cannot change the rules of the
Korean Immigration department.” (Asknow.ca)
Overall Trends – Country of Origin

15.  Picture requirement:
 Helped assess the “right candidate”
 “If you look old, grey haired, bald, or tired looking, then
job offers will be minimal. It does not seem to matter to
employers that you were highly qualified or have
excellent previous teaching experience” (Teachkoreanz).
 “As mentioned elsewhere, it is difficult for non-
Caucasian people to find employment teaching in Korea.
There is an image that most schools have in their head
of who they want to hire” (Asknow.ca).
Overall Trends - Appearance

16.  85% sites had degree requirement, typically from any
field
 14% required related experience
 31% emphasized no experience needed
 Ideal teacher
 Enthusiastic on 83% of sites
 Flexible 64%
 “teachers should be open minded, flexible, positive,
enthusiastic and have a passion for teaching.”
Overall Trends –
Other Requirements

17. Site 1: TEFL Heaven

18. TEFL Heaven:
Marketing Discourse
 “A Teacher’s Life” video
 Focus on recruit’s needs rather than institutional
requirements
 “If you are new, you will like. . .”
 “If you have a desire to teach English abroad. . .”
 References to travel and pleasure
 “Ticket to travel”
 “Paradisaical bliss”

19. TEFL Heaven— Images
 176 Images from the site:
 12 of local people of individual training participants
 13 of individual training participants
 15 of individual or groups of teachers
 21 of individual or groups of students
 49 of teachers and students together
 66 of participants having fun/ generic images of sites,
beaches, etc.

20. Site 2: Hess Educational
Organization

21.  Catering to inexperienced teachers: “We pick you up
from the airport, provide complimentary hotel
accommodation, and guide you through more than 70
hours of theory and practicum training before you
teach.”
 Exotic travel lifestyle: life “filled with fireworks, kung
fu, red lanterns, karaoke, hot springs, pushcart
vendors, tai chi, fried rice, cute kids.”
Hess: Marketing Discourse

23. Discussion
 Colonization of education by marketing discourse
(Fairclough, 1993)
 Flashiness of advertisements
 Students as consumers
 Whiteness as “cash value” (Lipsitz, 2006)
 Country requirements, exclusion of places like India,
Philippines
 Exchange value: travel, accommodation, salary, job
guarantees, culture
 Exoticization of cultures

24.  Decentralize white and native speaker normativity in
classroom
 Engage in critical discourse analysis
 Read about and discuss white/native speaker privilege
 Native and nonnative speakers should work together
 Harness native-speaker/white privilege to make
institutions question their practice
A Few Recommendations

25.  Butler, Y. G. (2007). How are nonnative-English-speaking teachers perceived by young
learners? TESOL Quarterly, 41(4), 731–755.
 Canagarajah, S. (1999). Interrogating the ‘‘native speaker fallacy’’: Non-linguistic roots,
non-pedagogical results. In G. Braine (Ed.), Nonnative educators in English language
teaching (pp. 77–92). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum As- sociates.
 Fairclough, N. (1993). Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse:
The universities. Discourse & Society, 4(2), 133-168.
 Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. New York:
Routledge.
 Holliday, A. (2005). The struggle to teach English as an international language. Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press.
 Thomas, J. (1999). Voices form the periphery: Non-native teachers and issues of
credibility. In G. Braine (Ed.), Non-native Educators in English Language Teaching (pp. 5-13).
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
 Kubota, R., & Lin, A. (2006). Race and TESOL: Introduction to concepts and theories.
TESOL Quarterly, 40(3), 471–493.
References

26.  Lengling, M. & Pablo, I. M. (2012) A critical discourse analysis of advertisements:
inconsistencies of our EFL profession. In R. Roux, A. M. Vázquez, and N. P. T. Guzmán
(Eds.) Research in English language teaching: Mexican perspectives (pp. 91-??).
Bloomington: Palivo.
 Lipsitz, G. (2006). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from
identity politics. Temple University Press.
 Ruecker, T. (2011). Challenging the native and non-native English speaker hierarchy in ELT:
New directions from race theory. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 8(4), 400-422.
 Rubin, D. L. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of
nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33(4), 511–
542.
 Selvi, A. F. (2010). All teachers are equal, but some teachers are more equal than others.
WATESOL NNEST Caucus Annual Review, 1, 156-181.
 Shuck, G. (2006). Racializing the nonnative English speaker. Journal of Language,
Identity, and Education, 5(4), 259–276.
 Timmis, I. (2002). Native-speaker norms and international English: A classroom view. ELT
Journal, 56(3), 240–249.
References