PRESENTATION 'WHO WOULD YOU PREFER TO LEARN FROM?' by Stefany Castiblanco, American School Way

Who would you prefer to learn from? Misconceptions around the EFL teacher
By Stefany Castiblanco

For most people who are beginning the process of learning a foreign language, knowing who their teachers will be like is the main concern. Is my teacher a native speaker? Was he trained to be a teacher? Has he ever been to an English-speaking country? These are some of the most common questions learners ask when starting an EFL
program.

This ongoing research study aims at analyzing some of the students’ misconceptions of EFL teachers. On one hand, Non-Native or Native; and, on the other, trained teacher or
untrained teacher, are the categories under EFL teachers are frequently tagged. Through the following situation, I aim to illustrate those main four terms composing the
two dichotomies to be explained here: Imagine you are a student at an art institute, and you need to learn painting techniques to implement them and later being able to explain its creative process using English. Who would you like your teacher to be: an artist or an economist? I guess you have already made up your mind, haven’t you?
Now, I will add two more details: the artist is a Spanish speaker who has been trained for teaching, and the economist is a Native English speaker with training on teaching. Did that additional information about these two hypothetical teachers make you change your mind?
I would not blame you if it happened. And the truth is that it might depend on the learners’ purposes.

This mixed-methodology study will consider learners and teachers’ ideas about those terms by first, obtaining a general overview from situational surveys, which will be later tabulated to establish convergences for further analysis. Simultaneously, class observations of 50 teachers -from American School Way, one of the largest language
institutions in Colombia- will be contrasted in terms of students' evaluation of the classes and teachers' performance in a matrix with the survey results. Based on such analysis, a reflection could be shared with language institutions to highlight the value of their teachers’
profiles.

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