Being Non-NESTs

1. Being Non-NESTs Instructor Chinfen Chen

2. Bad Sides of Being Non-NESTs

3. Common difficulties • Vocabulary: similar to idioms, slang,and appropriacy, an infinite set with numerous lexical items. Who can master all? • Speaking fluency: rate of speech, readiness to speak, the ability to speak coherently. • Pronunciation: Which one is standard, RP, Scotland, Kenya? accent allowed? • Grammar: article, prepositions

4. Dilemmas of a linguistic-cultural nature • With scanty information about L2, we still appear to be well-informed sources in the classroom. • By birth, we represent our native language and culture, by profession we are obliged to represent a foreign language and culture. • Behave like a L2 culture or keep L1 one

5. Schizophrenia & Inferiority Complex • Schizophrenia: At a near-native level, we become so imbued with L2 language and culture, losing our native identity, especially students refuse to fooling around. • Inferiority Complex: Not competent enough to lose native identity, glaring defects in our L2 knowledge. Good teachers should be good learners but Non-NESTs hard to find access.

6. Teaching Anxiety • Most foreign teachers: feeling overloaded, pushed around, exhausted, irritable, little achievement, marked reduction with outside world, unappreciated. (Claxton, 1989). For: • People treat teachers more like workers, less like professionals • The incompatibility duties and wishes, our injunctions about personal worth undermined, lose self-esteem

7. Three Alternatives for Anxiety • To move on to another profession • To improve our situation - to confront • To suffer from constant stress - to avoid, to eschew human contact, to blame others

8. Admit it Speak out Shift into mastery mode Open the safety valves Don’t sweat over the small stuff Enjoy yourself Find the right balance 7 Steps to Reduce Stress

9. Admit it • Syndrome for stress: depressed, edgy or defensive or abused when mildly criticized or begin to hurt people for no reason • We will find comfort that everybody is stressed to a greater or less degree.

10. CA:immature language efficiency for mature ideas), Speak out DC:their limited cognitive capacity is so preoccupied with anxiety that they cannot focus on L2 performance . • Most Non-NEST scare to be exposed in public, in front of colleagues and advanced students because of Communication Apprehension, fear of negative social evaluation, test anxiety, and Derogatory Cognition. • Observing other’s class, discussing with other teachers, no hiding

11. Shift into Mastery Mode • Mastery mode: confront challenges, obtain new information, take exciting adventure • Survival Mode: stay safe, search for simple, reassuring and stable mode - who lashed out students’ errors, they themselves also afraid of making errors --- monitor-overusers

12. Open the Safety Valves • Conflict between social demands and our incapability to meet them • Caring and sharing, being positive, let the anger erupt, to have a good laugh, to release one angry in an appropriate way

13. Don’t Sweat over Small Stuff • Language teaching is some kind of humble service to mankind, aware of being a human being, who has natural impatience, fatigue, not endless dynamic and reassuring. • Allow self to make errors.

14. Enjoy Yourself • To feel relaxed and confident in the English classroom, dressed up smartly, or just jeans, returning to hobbyhorse, teaching like a bit like acting, enjoying our professionals, and needing relaxation and meditation before teaching. It’s our rights to feel good about ourselves, and find pleasure for ourselves.

15. Find the Right Balance • Speak about positive anxiety, which is stimulating, energizing and focusing. • Dunham, 1992, increasing demands can raise teachers’ efficiency up to a certain point (moderate), but beyond that point you will lead to reduce job effectiveness • Scovel, debilitating anxiety and facilitating anxiety (lowering affective filter).

16. Find the Right Balance • Claxton found that good teachers were more stressed than poorer ones. The better teachers have professional confidence to admit openly to the stress they experience.If we have the guts to admit our weaknesses, we are sure to set out on tight path to overcoming our stress.