Bilingual Students - Monolingual Teacher

This paper reports some of the findings of a study into the language background of teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL) to adults in Australia. The study was motivated by the author's noting, over many years of teaching ESL and of training ESL teachers, that there is no requirement that such teachers be bilingual, or have any proficiency in a second language. Still less is there any discussion of the issue in the profession. It is quite normal for ESL teachers to be monolingual, and there appears to be no questioning of this state of affairs. There are of course teachers who are not monolingual: who are native speakers of a language other than English or who have high levels of proficiency in other languages. However, there is no data to tell us about the language background and skills of the ESL teaching profession, so there is currently no way of knowing who is monolingual and who is bilingual. Secondly, since teachers' language background is not recognised as a subject worthy of investigation and discussion, there is no research on what significance it might have for their teaching. We do not know whether a teacher who speaks two or more languages has more to offer, when teaching English through the medium of English to mixed-language groups, than does a monolingual teacher. The study on which this paper is based makes an attempt to throw some light on the question.