native speaker essay

Native Speaker

Chang-rae lee, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

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Native Speaker: Introduction

Native speaker: plot summary, native speaker: detailed summary & analysis, native speaker: themes, native speaker: quotes, native speaker: characters, native speaker: symbols, native speaker: theme wheel, brief biography of chang-rae lee.

Historical Context of Native Speaker

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• Full Title: Native Speaker
• When Published: 1995
• Literary Period: Contemporary
• Genre: Novel, Immigrant Fiction
• Setting: New York City
• Climax: While lounging in bed at a hotel on Staten Island, Henry and Lelia watch the news and learn that John Kwang’s headquarters in Queens has been bombed.
• Antagonist: Dennis Hoagland, but also racism and xenophobia

Extra Credit for Native Speaker

Comfort Food. When his mother was dying, Chang-Rae Lee spent a year learning how to cook the Korean meals she used to make him when he was a child—an experience he recounted in his New Yorker essay “Coming Home Again,” which was adapted as a short film in 2010.

Native Speaker

53 pages • 1 hour read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-11

Chapters 12-18

Chapters 19-23

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Why is the novel titled Native Speaker ?

Henry’s sense of self is harmed when he fails in his assignment on the psychotherapist Luzan. What is the reason for this failure, and what does it reveal about Henry’s psyche?

Make an argument: Should Lelia and Henry stay together? Explain your reasoning.

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Truth & Lies

Native Speaker - Definition and Examples in English

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In language studies , native speaker  is a controversial term for a person who  speaks  and writes using his or her  native language  (or mother tongue ). Put simply, the traditional view is that the language of a native speaker is determined by birthplace. Contrast with non-native speaker .

Linguist Braj Kachru identifies native speakers of English as those who have grown up in the "Inner Circle"  of countries—Britain, America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

An extremely proficient speaker of a second language  is sometimes referred to as a near-native speaker .

When a person acquires a second-language at a very young age, the distinction between native and non-native speaker becomes ambiguous. "A child may be a native speaker of more than one language as long as the acquisition process starts early," says Alan Davies. "After puberty (Felix, 1987), it becomes difficult—not impossible, but very difficult (Birdsong, 1992)—to become a native speaker." ( The Handbook of Applied Linguistics, 2004).

In recent years, the concept of the native speaker has come under criticism, especially in connection with the study of World English ,  New Englishes , and English as a Lingua Franca :  "While there may be linguistic differences between native and non-native speakers of English, the native speaker is really a political construct carrying a particular ideological baggage" (Stephanie Hackert in World Englishes--Problems, Properties and Prospects , 2009).

Examples and Observations

"The terms 'native speaker' and 'non-native speaker' suggest a clear-cut distinction that doesn't really exist. Instead it can be seen as a continuum, with someone who has complete control of the language in question at one end, to the beginner at the other, with an infinite range of proficiencies to be found in between." (Caroline Brandt, Success on Your Certificate Course in English Language Teaching . Sage, 2006)

The Common-Sense View

"The concept of a native speaker seems clear enough, doesn't it? It is surely a common sense idea, referring to people who have a special control over a language, insider knowledge about 'their' language. . . . But just how special is the native speaker?

"This common-sense view is important and has practical implications, . . . but the common-sense view alone is inadequate and needs the support and explanation given by a thorough theoretical discussion is lacking." (Alan Davies, The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality . Multilingual Matters, 2003)

The Ideology of the Native Speaker Model

"[T]he notion of 'native speaker'--sometimes referred to as the ideology of the 'native speaker' model—in the field of second language education has been a powerful principle that influences almost every aspect of language teaching and learning . . .. The notion of 'native speaker' takes for granted the homogeneity among, and superiority of the linguistic competence of 'native speakers' and legitimizes the unequal power relations between 'native' and 'non-native' speakers."

(Neriko Musha Doerr and Yuri Kumagai, "Towards a Critical Orientation in Second Language Education."  The Native Speaker Concept . Walter de Gruyter, 2009)

An Ideal Native Speaker

"I know several foreigners whose command of English I could not fault, but they themselves deny they are native speakers. When pressed on this point, they draw attention to such matters as . . . their lack of awareness of childhood associations, their limited passive knowledge of varieties, the fact that there are some topics which they are more 'comfortable' discussing in their first language. 'I couldn’t make love in English,' said one man to me. . . .

"In an ideal native speaker, there is a chronologically based awareness, a continuum from birth to death where there are no gaps. In an ideal non-native speaker, this continuum either does not start with birth, or if it does, the continuum has been significantly broken at some point. (I’m a case of the latter, in fact, having been brought up in a Welsh-English environment until nine, then moving to England, where I promptly forgot most of my Welsh, and would no longer now claim to be a native speaker, even though I have many childhood associations and instinctive forms.)" (David Crystal, quoted by T. M. Paikeday in The Native Speaker Is Dead: An Informal Discussion of a Linguistic Myth . Paikeday, 1985)  

• Definition of English as a Second Language (ESL)
• Get the Definition of Mother Tongue Plus a Look at Top Languages
• What is Outer Circle English?
• Definition and Examples of Native Languages
• The "Inner Circle" of the English Language
• English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)
• The 'Expanding Circle' of English-Speaking Countries
• Definition and Examples of a Lingua Franca
• Non-Native English Teachers
• What Is World English?
• English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
• Interlanguage Definition and Examples
• English-only Movement
• New Englishes: Adapting the Language to Meet New Needs
• Broken English: Definition and Examples
• What Is a Second Language (L2)?

• Original article
• Open access
• Published: 18 February 2020

Examining the influence of native and non-native English-speaking teachers on Korean EFL writing

• Andrew Schenck   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3864-6267 1  

Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education volume  5 , Article number:  2 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Both Native English-Speaking Teachers (NESTs) and Non-Native English-Speaking Teachers (NNESTs) may have advantages as writing instructors, yet little is known about how they actually influence writing in EFL contexts like South Korea. To address this issue, 76 high proficiency Korean EFL university students from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) were separated into a group that received extensive native English speaker instruction ( n  = 57) and a group that did not ( n  = 19) using a self-survey. Analysis of essay content revealed that words used by Korean EFL writers with more NEST instruction are similar in difficulty and variety to native English writers. Concerning style, Korean EFL learners with more NEST instruction used stances to evaluate, validate, and state personal opinions, while learners with less NEST instruction used speech formulas and more unbiased logical arguments. Regarding grammar, Korean EFL learners with extensive NEST instruction used more sophisticated vocabulary, word forms, and verb tenses to create a novel argument using personal experience, whereas Korean EFL learners with low NEST instruction tended to use formulaic and logical arguments with more accuracy. Overall, results suggest that NEST instruction in Korea promotes more creativity and sophistication in composition, while NNEST instruction encourages more accurate use of language. In accordance with the findings, curricula or teacher training may be developed to ensure that each type of instruction shares the strengths of its counterpart.

Introduction

Recently, legislators in South Korea rescinded a law banning English education in the first and second grades of elementary school. This law, which had been designed to keep children that are “too young to learn a foreign language” from being negatively impacted (Jung, 2019 , p. 2), has been highly criticized by both parents and teachers who argue that it will only deepen the growing hardship of poor families, who cannot afford English instruction through extracurricular private academies (Jung, 2019 ). This issue is nothing new. It is the latest in a series of controversial debates over the best means to promote English education in Korea.

Ultimately, increased English classes both inside and outside the public-school classroom reveal an intense desire to overcome perceived problems with traditional language instruction in South Korea, which often promotes rote memorization and teacher-centric instruction (DeWaelsche, 2015 ). This type of learning, which helps students achieve in more receptive tasks like reading and listening (Kwon, Yoshida, Watanabe, Negishi, & Naganuma, 2004 ; Programme for International Student Assessment, 2015 ), may inhibit performance on communicative tasks like writing. This view is supported by evidence of TOEFL performance in 2009. During this period, average writing scores were well below the global average (Kang, 2009 ). Despite more than 6 years of English instruction in public school classes, learners still had problems with writing tasks, adaption of language to real situations, and critical thinking skills needed to make a written or spoken argument (Kim & Kim, 2005 ; Niederhauser, 2012 ).

To counter perceived problems with educational techniques which failed to cultivate writing skills, several curricular changes were enacted. In addition to communicative activities, writing assessments such as the National English Ability Test (NEAT) were introduced at the elementary school level (Moodie & Nam, 2016 ). While a positive step forward, such reforms resulted in failure, partly due to teachers who were unskilled or unequipped to implement such changes (Byun et al., 2011 ). Research suggests that many Korean instructors currently lecturing through English Medium Instruction (EMI) still need additional language training so they may teach writing more effectively (Kim, 2014 ).

Widespread dissatisfaction with attempted reforms for Korean teachers and learners of English has prompted both parents and educators to seek out the use of native English speakers who can teach the requisite communicative skills. To accommodate parental demand, widespread expansion of extracurricular academies which employ native English speakers has resulted (Kim & Lee, 2010 ). In addition to extracurricular activities, government programs like the English Program in Korea (EPIK) have been developed to hire native-speaking English teachers for public schools. The introduction of Native English-Speaking Teachers (NESTs), designed to enhance writing skills through natural communication, is conventionally thought to have a positive effect on production and critical thinking skills. Research does suggest that NESTs can have a positive effect on the completion of task-based activities (Jiang & Li, 2018 ). At the same time, these NESTs may lack a valid teaching credential or experience in English education, making them ill-equipped to teach. Lacking teaching experience, NESTs may not have an explicit awareness of underlying language systems, precluding effective instruction (Keh, 2017 ). NESTs, like their NNEST counterparts, may not have the repertoire of skills needed to prepare students to write effectively.

Potential problems of both NEST and NNEST instructors has sparked a controversial debate over the efficacy of each. While supporters of NNESTs contend that they provide effective language development through understanding of the Korean culture and language, as well as a shared understanding of the L1 (Brewer, 2016 ; Chun, 2014 ), they may overemphasize literal use of grammar and vocabulary, without an adequate understanding of the social and connotative world knowledge needed to use them. NESTs may have more knowledge about contextual and social concepts needed to use grammar and vocabulary, yet they may also lack educational experience or an understanding of the host culture, which may inhibit communication of key concepts (Wang & Lin, 2013 ). While debate continues as to the efficacy of NESTs and NNESTs, little research has been conducted to analyze how these teachers impact communicative competence in an EFL context like South Korea.

Potential impact of NESTs vs. NNESTs on writing

NNEST teachers may have an advantage in teaching grammatical features or literal denotation of vocabulary through comparison and contrast with a Korean learner’s L1, whereas NESTs may understand social contexts, connotation, and pragmatic usage of vocabulary within the target language, leading to more advanced use of language in authentic contexts. While this distinction has been proposed (Brewer, 2016 ; Chun, 2014 ; Wang & Lin, 2013 ), very little is known about the effects of such instruction. Cultural and linguistic influences of both NESTs and NNESTs may affect aspects of writing such as content, style, and grammar, warranting further investigation.

Content may be influenced by interaction with both NEST and NNEST instructors. Although impartial evaluation of content is a difficult task, research suggests that discrete measures of lexical variety (diversity of words), sophistication (word difficulty), and density (the number of content words, as opposed to grammar) are objective measures of quality writing, closely correlating to scores assigned by human raters (Lu, 2012 ; Read, 2000 ; Yu, 2009 ). Because such measures provide a more empirical, unbiased foundation for the judgement of differences in writing, they represent an ideal tool to judge the impact of NEST and NNEST instructors. A teacher’s ability to help learners with lexical variety, sophistication, and density may differ for both NEST and NNEST instructors. NESTs often possess a more complex lexicon with increased word variety, sophistication, and density, which can be advantageous in the classroom. Despite such an advantage, it is a mistake to think that this implicit knowledge will automatically be imparted through natural productive tasks. Research suggests that mere exposure to authentic communicative tasks is not enough to learn a language (Harper & de Jong, 2004 ). When learning metaphors, for example, which are imbued with culturally figurative language, EFL learners tend to benefit more from systematic and explicit explanations (Veliz, 2017 ). To be sure, an explicit understanding of underlying language systems, referred to as Teacher Language Awareness (TLA) (Andrews & Svalberg, 2017 ), is required for effective teaching. Teachers who lack such knowledge may avoid focusing on aspects of content that are problematic for learners (Keh, 2017 ). Because NESTs with little or no teaching experience may not have extensive TLA, they may rely too heavily on implicit techniques for language learning, inhibiting learner development. While NNESTs may lack some sophisticated knowledge of register and cultural context, they may provide more systematic and explicit instruction needed to learn a language. As second language learners themselves, NNESTs may be better able to explicitly explain a feature in English.

In addition to content (lexical variety, sophistication, or density), NNEST and NEST instruction may have a different impact on discourse within writing. Merriam Webster defines discourse as “a mode of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience that is rooted in language and its concrete contexts (such as history or institutions)” (Discourse, 2020 ). As this definition implies, discourse is closely related to the cultural institutions and contexts in which the language was created (Murphy, 2010 ). This is why we do not picture Cinderella wearing Nike flip-flops, even though this information may not be explicitly provided. Indeed, each speech community or cultural context uses a precise set of language to establish its own identity (Ortaçtepe, 2013 ). It is this language set that L2 English learners may use to build a type of hybrid style that is “largely, but not completely, native-like” (Pérez-Llantada, 2014 , p. 84). Korean EFL learners, for example, may “borrow” Western style stances and hedges to emulate native counterparts, leading to higher values for writing quality (Min, Paek, & Kang, 2019 , p. 12). While it is clear that the English speech community may use language that improves perceived writing quality, the extent to which NEST or NNEST instructors teach this culturally specific language is unclear. NEST instructors may use this language to teach rhetorical concepts like stance and hedges, leading to expression of agreement, disagreement, or opinion. If these teachers are not explicitly aware of such concepts, however, systematic and meaningful learning opportunities may not be provided. NESTs’ more advanced knowledge of specific language may also be ineffective as a teaching tool when EFL learners lack basic communication skills (Harper & de Jong, 2004 ). While NESTs may have a heightened awareness of culturally laden terms and linguistic devices, NNESTs may provide a better bridge between basic aspects of discourse in both languages, leading to a better foundational understanding of writing.

Finally, NNEST and NEST instruction may have a different impact on grammar within writing. In addition to words that denote aspects of content such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, there are bound and free morphological features that serve a grammatical function (White, 2009 ). Bound morphological features, present on content words like verbs and nouns, reveal aspects of tense (walk ed ), agreement (walk s ), or number (sneaker s ). In addition to bound morphological features, free morphemes like pronouns, auxiliary verbs, determiners, and conjunctions may be used to clarify and expand meaning within writing content (Master, 1996 ). Concerning both free and bound grammatical features, NESTs may have an advantage in creating quality contextual circumstances for their use. They may, for example, provide accurate input and communicative contexts for correct use of determiners like a , an , or the . Unlike non-native speakers, NESTs may provide more accurately conjugated nouns and verbs within input, thereby facilitating acquisition. Finally, they may provide more fluent and longer discourse through the use of conjunctions like and or addition . NESTs may also be at an advantage to identify errors in use of grammatical features that are not present in the Korean L1, such as the English determiner, present perfect tense, and phrasal verb. As with aspects of content and style, understanding and correct use of grammar by the teacher may not guarantee acquisition. Explicit grammatical emphasis may be needed to help foreign language learners focus on a target feature (DeKeyser, 2015 ; Dyson, 2018 ; Dyson & Håkansson, 2017 ; Pienemann, 1989 ). NNEST instructors have a distinct advantage in providing links to the L1 which may promote acquisition. Through providing cross-linguistic comparison and contrast, Korean EFL learners may be better able to understand and acquire grammatical features.

Both NEST and NNEST instructors may have strengths that help their EFL learners produce better content, discourse, and grammar in writing. Despite potential strengths, little research has been conducted to investigate how such advantages may actually influence English learners. Lacking a clear understanding of how both NEST and NNESTs can best be utilized, both teacher groups receive skepticism. They have become subject to bias and discrimination, which may negatively impact instruction, as well as cooperative educational efforts between the two groups.

Problems faced by NESTs and NNESTs

Insufficient evidence concerning the positive impact of NESTs and NNESTs on EFL learner development has fueled biases that depict both groups as inferior. NNESTs in EFL countries like South Korea, for example, are often thought to be less effective due to a lack of native proficiency. This bias, referred to as native speakerism, may cause teachers to lose confidence or suffer from an inferiority complex. Programs like the English Program in Korea (EPIK) also perpetuate this bias through recruiting teachers only from “inner circle” countries like the United States, England, Australia and New Zealand (Copland, Davis, Garton, & Mann, 2016 ). Not only is the problem of native speakerism present in South Korea, it is found in other countries like Thailand, where professional status of Filipino NNESTs is eroded by the misconception that native English skill is necessary for teaching (Ulla, 2019 ). Like non-native counterparts, NESTs often suffer from prejudice and discrimination, which is fueled by the view that inexperience or lack of teacher training makes them ineffective (Copland et al., 2016 ).

Evidence suggests that biases against both NEST and NNESTs in EFL contexts hamper the implementation of English programs like EPIK, primarily through a lack of collaboration, cultural conflicts, or an unwillingness to work together among the two groups of teachers (Copland et al., 2016 ). While such problems may have cultural or even political foundations, they are ultimately fueled by a lack of knowledge about how each type of instruction can be effectively utilized. Past studies have focused primarily on attitudes and perceptions of the teacher groups (Ma, 2012 ), which has limited understanding of the actual impact on EFL learner speech or writing. Through further research, strengths of both groups may be identified, leading to more effective utilization of teachers, a reduction of negative biases, and establishment of more effective cooperative efforts among both groups.

Research questions

Due to the need for further investigation of the impact of NESTs and NNESTs, this study was conducted to examine differences in academic writing among Korean EFL learners who are exposed to native English instructors and those who are not. Such study may lead to more effective use of both NESTs and NNESTs, particularly in cooperative efforts like EPIK. In accordance with a need for further research, the following questions were posed:

Does word choice of Korean EFL writers exposed to more native speaker instruction significantly differ from that of Korean EFL writers with little or no exposure to native speaker instruction? How does word choice of each Korean group compare to that of native English writers?

Does word choice in writing between groups reveal differences in content such as lexical variety, lexical sophistication, and lexical density?

Does word choice in writing between groups reveal differences in the utilization of stylistic devices like stances and hedges?

Does word choice in writing between groups reveal differences in the utilization of grammatical features?

To examine essays produced by Korean EFL learners, the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE) was used. This 2-million-word corpus contains essays from college students (including graduate school) from ten different EFL countries. Included in the corpus are essays from Korean EFL learners and native English speakers, which could be used for comparison (Ishikawa, 2018 ). The corpus also has an Infosheet (self-survey) completed by each learner, which includes demographic information like age and major, along with background details such as the amount of instruction received from NESTs (Question 31).

Research design

The aim of this study was to see how word choice differs between learners who receive a large amount of NEST instruction, learners who receive little NEST instruction, and native English students. To fulfill this aim, a mixed-methods approach was used. Word frequencies from the writings of the three groups (taken from ICNALE) were quantitatively tested for significant differences using a paired-samples t-test. Following this statistical examination, aspects of content, style, and grammar where quantitatively examined using statistics of word frequency or variety related to each respective aspect of writing (content, style, and grammar). This investigation was then followed by qualitative examination of learner essays.

Essays collected from the ICNALE Corpus

Essays in the ICNALE corpus were strictly controlled to ensure that all participants wrote about the same topics. They were given the same two prompts (Ishikawa, 2013 , p. 97):

Topic A: It is important for college students to have a part-time job.

Topic B: Smoking should be completely banned at all the restaurants in the country.

Following receiving prompts, all participants were given from 20 to 40 min to write an essay from 200 to 300 words. No dictionaries or other reference tools were allowed (Ishikawa, 2013 ). Control of topics in this way helped to increase the validity of contrastive analysis between groups in the present study.

Participants from the ICNALE Corpus

For this study, essays from 76 Korean EFL university learners at the highest proficiency level, B2+, were selected from the ICNALE corpus. The essays had been assigned the B2+ level because they were at Vantage or higher stages of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) according to proficiency values from tests like the TOEIC, TOEFL, and IELTS (Ishikawa, 2018 ). Each learner wrote two essays about the same topics, having a part-time job and banning smoking, meaning that 76 learners had a total of 152 essays. Using essays from the highest proficiency learners in the ICNALE corpus ensured that all writers had an equivalent degree of competence in writing. All essays came from Korean EFL university learners who ranged in age from 19 to 29 and majored in a variety of subjects from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. For comparison, essays from 100 native English speakers (a total of 200 essays) were also selected from the ICNALE corpus. These essays also came from university learners who ranged in age from 19 to 29 and majored in a variety of subjects from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

From the 152 Korean EFL learner essays from the B2+ level, 38 essays came from 19 learners who reported in the ICNALE self-survey that they had little or no instruction with native speakers (numbers 1 to 3 on a Likert scale), and 114 essays came from 57 Korean EFL learners who reported more extensive instruction with native English speakers (numbers 4 to 6 on a Likert scale). While the self-survey does not provide a precise description of how much experience learners have had with native speaking instructors, the separation of survey scores helps to ensure that one participant group has more NEST instruction than the other.

Preparation of Corpus data and analysis

Essays in ICNALE were separated by learner group and compiled into sub-corpora (text files) for analysis. The corpus of 38 essays from Korean EFL learners with low NEST support had 9312 words, while the corpus of 114 essays from Korean EFL learners with high NEST support had 26,753 words. Finally, the corpus of 200 native English writer essays had 44,966 words. To answer the research questions, word frequency values were obtained from each corpus using the online program called lextutor.ca.

To answer research question one, which sought to examine preferences in word choice, words that were used at least 10 times in one or more of the corpora (Low NEST Support, High NEST Support, and Native English Writer) were recorded in a spreadsheet for analysis. Next, frequency counts for words from the High NEST Support and Native English Writer corpora were adjusted to match the size of the smaller Low NEST Support corpus using the following calculation:

Frequency of Word in Corpus B * (Size of Corpus A / Size of Corpus B)

Following this calculation, which was conducted to proportionally adjust word frequencies for the High NEST Support and Native English Writer corpora to those of the Low NEST Support corpus, word frequencies of each corpus were statistically compared using a paired samples t-test to reveal significant (or insignificant) differences.

Research question two aimed to investigate differences in content. In accordance with this aim, lexical density, word difficulty, word types, and tokens (total number of words) were calculated for each group of essays (Low NEST Support, High NEST Support, and Native English Writer) using lextutor.ca. Amount of content was evaluated using lexical density. A high value for lexical density, which reflects a larger number of content words like nouns or verbs (as opposed to grammatical or functional features), may suggest that meaning within writing is more complex or substantial. Difficulty of content was evaluated by examining the number of vocabulary words present from the New Academic Word List (NAWL). When added to a list of core words called the New General Service List (Stoeckel & Bennett, 2015 ), the NAWL’s 570 word families account for approximately 92% of the total words (tokens) in academic texts (Browne, Culligan, & Phillips, 2013 ). Because the NAWL accounts for 10% of all words in academic texts, yet only comprises 1.4% of the words in fiction collections, the NAWL represents an ideal measure of difficulty in academic essays (Coxhead, 2000 ). The presence of more academic words may suggest additional sophistication of essay content. Finally, variety of content was examined by looking at type / token ratios. Whereas a type represents one root word, or lemma (e.g., eat), the token represents the instantiation of each type (e.g., eating, eaten, ate, etc.). A larger ratio (a larger variety of tokens) is thought to signify more sophisticated content (Laufer & Nation, 1995 ).

To answer research question three, which sought to evaluate how discourse (style) may differ, categories for hedges and stances employed in the study by Min et al. ( 2019 ) were utilized. These hedges and stances reveal a writer’s ability to increase and decrease the significance of opinions. They were divided into the following categories (Table  1 ):

Prototypical stances and hedges from each category were tallied from each corpus of essays (Low NEST Support, High NEST Support, and Native English Writer). Resulting values were then adjusted for corpus size as in the procedure for research question one. Next, use of the words was qualitatively analyzed. While not an exhaustive list of discourse words, comparison in this way yielded insights about how commonly used stances and hedges were employed by each group examined within this study.

To answer research question four, which was designed to evaluate grammar, words from specific categories for auxiliary verbs, pronouns, determiners and conjunctions were selected from Systems in English Grammar by Master ( 1996 ). For auxiliary verbs, both do and can were selected for analysis. In addition to use of the base form, evaluation of forms like does , did, done , and could were evaluated to reveal an awareness of tense and agreement. Subject pronouns I , you , they and we were also selected for analysis. Differences in pronouns may reveal an attempt to influence the reader through explaining personal experiences (e.g., I used to smoke.), addressing the reader (e.g., You may think that secondhand smoke is harmless, but…), or creating a more general example (e.g., They will suffer from secondhand smoke.). Next, the definite and indefinite articles ( a , an , and the ) were chosen to examine how determiners were utilized. Heightened use of articles may represent a more sophisticated or systematic use of the feature. Finally, types of conjunctions ( and , addition ) were selected for evaluation, along with words for relative and conditional clauses ( if , who , which , where , how , whether ). Through examining these words, aspects of sentence length and complexity could be evident. Following selection, words from each grammar category were tallied from all three corpora of essays (Low NEST Support, High NEST Support, and Native English Writer). Resulting values were then adjusted for corpus size as in the procedure for research question one. Next, grammatical word use was qualitatively analyzed in individual learner essays. Through such analysis, grammar related to auxiliary verbs, tense, agreement, pronouns, determiners, and conjunctions could be evaluated. While the words included in this study do not form an exhaustive list, they represent a foundation from which key grammatical characteristics may be ascertained.

Results and discussion

Research question one: differences in word preference.

Results of vocabulary analysis suggest that there are indeed significant differences in use of high frequency words. Although essay topics were the same for each writer, vocabulary from Korean EFL learners with more instruction from a native speaker differed significantly from those with little or no instruction from a native speaker ( t  = 3.11; p  = .002). At the same time, the writing of Korean EFL learners with high NEST support was not significantly different from their native English-speaking counterparts ( t  = −.64; p  = .520). This result suggests that EFL learners with high NEST support do indeed develop more native-like writing (See Table  2 ).

Statistical comparison of frequency of commonly used vocabulary suggests that there is indeed a difference in writing between groups. Follow-up analysis of individual word use suggests that these differences may be related to differences in content, style, and grammar.

Research question two: differences in content

Analysis of individual words suggests that there are indeed differences in content. While lexical density (number of content words) does not differ considerably (See Table  3 ), the amount of academic words seems substantially higher in the Korean EFL group with higher NEST support and in the native English speaker group. In the writings of Korean learners with low NEST support, only 4% of words were contained in the New Academic Word List (NAWL). This value is half that of the native speaker group. In the Korean group with high NEST support, 6.2% of the vocabulary was academic, which reveals a closer link to the native English speech community. While native speaker group performance is not a benchmark for quality, higher amounts of academic vocabulary may suggest increased sophistication of academic essays.

Qualitative analysis of content appeared to confirm the assertion that content of the Korean group with high NEST support was more academic. Words like anomaly and diminished revealed a sophisticated understanding of vocabulary. Furthermore, more precise descriptions of health issues through words like diabetes , larynx , hygiene , and stroke suggested a more specific and expansive explanation of content.

In addition to more academic words, a larger number of tokens per type in the Korean group with high NEST support (Table 3 ) suggests that word forms were more diverse and sophisticated than their counterparts with low NEST support. Korean EFL learners with high NEST support had essays with more word variants (e.g., hygiene, hygienic; beneficial, beneficiary; broad, broaden; disturb, disturbed, disturbing, disturbs , etc.). This increased use of different word forms, which included a variety of affixes (e.g., ben or dis ) appears to reflect higher complexity of content.

Research question three: differences in Discourse and style

In addition to content, aspects of style appeared to differ between groups. As can be seen from Table  4 , Korean EFL learners with higher native speaker instruction utilized more stances for evaluation. These writers used words like appropriate , bad , and important more often as a means to emphasize validity or invalidity of an argument (Table 4 ). Unlike their counterparts with less NEST instruction, Korean EFL learners with high NEST support used stances with awkward collocations, as in the following examples for the word appropriate :

It could be an appropriate solution to help them move out from the addiction.

I highly recommend you to find appropriate work, try different jobs and study hard.

In the above examples, the writers are trying to persuade, yet unique word combinations like “move out from the addiction” or “recommend you to find appropriate work” make the arguments appear awkward. In contrast to these awkward statements, Korean EFL learners with low native speaker support used stances with more accurate collocations. Refer to the following examples:

That’s why many of them are working as interns in order to gain an appropriate experience that would be necessary in their future profession.

I think periods of college are not appropriate to do part-time jobs.

Unlike their counterparts, the low native speaker support group of Korean EFL learners used expressions that are more conventional and accurate.

In addition to stances for evaluation, Korean EFL learners with high NEST support utilized stances for ease or difficulty much more often (Table 4 ). Overall, these stances appear to be used to express personal opinions or preferences about an issue, as a means to persuade the reader. This more overtly partial perspective may reflect an influence of NEST instructors from Western contexts, who may value personal opinion more than group consensus, a hallmark of Confucian societies like South Korea.

In contrast to Korean EFL learners with high support from NESTS, Korean EFL learners with low native speaker support did not use as many stances to evaluate an argument using personal opinion. These learners appeared to rely more on formulaic patterns obtained from input and instruction, thereby revealing a lesser tendency to create novel expressions or express personal opinions. This assertion is supported by low NEST support learners’ heightened use of elements of style ( according , generally , usually ), which may be memorized and may not directly express the personal opinion of a writer. These stances are often used to express opinions indirectly through outside sources (e.g., According to research…). Overall, learners with low NEST instruction appear to use these “unbiased” speech formulas to express an opinion. This perspective is illustrated by more extensive usage of stances for ability or willingness. The word able , for example, is often used with formulaic expressions for reasoning or inference. Refer to the following examples from Korean EFL learners with low NEST support:

If smoking is banned at all restaurants in Korea, we will be able to enjoy the dish more at the restaurants.

Since college students are already adults, they should be able to make money for living, independently from their parents.

When students have a part-time job and work it, they are able to think about concept of money and consumption.

In the above examples, an argument without personal judgment from the author is expressed. The logical arguments appear to show unbiased opinions of the author, with little awareness of the reader.

Unlike words for evaluation or discussion of ease and difficulty, which are characteristic of Korean EFL learners with high NEST instruction, elements of style or ability are not imbued with clear opinion about the argument being proposed. Korean EFL learners with low NEST instruction may prefer to use stylistic conventions without as much creativity or awareness of the reader. Whereas Korean EFL learners with less NEST support may rely more heavily on speech formulas and collocational knowledge, Korean EFL learners with more NEST support may be more creative in composition, choosing to express personal opinions about the validity or invalidity of an argument. While more creative, these learners may also use more incorrect or awkward phrases.

Research question four: differences in grammar

As with aspects of content and style, grammar within writing of Korean EFL learner groups differed in several distinct ways. Aspects of verb tense and agreement appeared much more frequently in the Korean EFL learner groups with more NEST support. For the word do , third person singular, past and present perfect tenses were used more often in the writing of Korean learners with extensive instruction from native speakers (See Table  5 ).

Conversely, frequency of the past tense in the word could was larger in the Korean group with low NEST support. Overall, this finding, along with larger values for root words like do and can among learners with little instruction from native English speakers, may reveal a tendency to rely on basic modals and formulaic expressions for hedging.

Concerning grammatical features associated with nouns, the high native support group of Korean EFL learners and native English speakers used I more often, supporting a claim that personal experience and opinion is used more extensively to support arguments of these groups. Such usage may represent an attempt to provide personal opinions that are designed to influence the reader. Korean EFL learners with low NEST support used we and you more often. This method to connect with the reader appears more neutral, perhaps supporting the contention that writings from Korean EFL learners with less NEST instruction are more impartial, logical, and formulaic.

Korean EFL learners with low NEST support used determiners less often than other groups (Table 5 ). Use of the indefinite article by Korean EFL learners with high NEST support more closely resembled that of native English speakers than their counterparts. However, the definite article, the , was used by Korean EFL learners with high NEST support much more often than native English speakers, perhaps reflecting a growing awareness of the grammatical feature, albeit an incomplete one. Because this feature is imbued with information about general cultural use (e.g., the sun), immediate situational use (e.g., Don’t go in there, the dog will bite you), local use (e.g., the car), and anaphoric use (e.g., I bought a cat. The cat’s name is Whiskers), an increase of determiners may reflect growing awareness of contextual relationships between nouns and other elements of a sentence or composition. It may also reflect a heightened understanding of the reader’s perspective (Celce-Murcia, Larsen-Freeman, & Williams, 1999 ).

It appears that larger clauses or sentences were more frequent in the Korean EFL learners with high NEST support and native English speakers, who used words like and and addition more often. Korean EFL learners with low NEST support tended to add complexity and content to individual sentences using relative clauses. This group used relative pronouns like which and who more often than other groups. It also used if more extensively, along with modals like will , can , or should be able to (e.g., “if it is banned, it could make Cleaner Street”). Greater reliance on such logical phrases may support the assertion that content of Korean EFL learners with less NEST instruction is more formulaic, being focused on unbiased interpretation rather than personal evaluation or devices to influence the reader. More frequent use of the words how and whether by Korean EFL learners with high NEST support and native English writers may suggest a higher emphasis on process.

Grammatical differences between Korean EFL learner groups may be illustrated through two excerpts from the ICNALE corpus. The following comes from a Korean EFL learner with more extensive support from NESTs:

I read an article, which is about whether teenagers should have a part time job. In today’s society, more and more college students have part time job after school. In my opinion, I support that teenagers have part time jobs in their free time and the reasons are as follows. First, I think that having a part time job can train the teenagers how to earn money and let them know that it is not an easy thing to make money.

From the excerpt, we can see not only a large emphasis on the first person, but a clear attempt to express the opinion of the author. In addition, the word and is used to construct longer sentences. While there is a clear focus on meaning, grammatical accuracy is inconsistent. The determiner in “a part time job” is correctly used in one context, yet it is absent in another. Collocations like “I support that” also have contextual clarity but are grammatically incorrect. This style contrasts significantly with texts from learners with little or no native English instruction. Refer to the following excerpt from a Korean EFL learner with little or no support from NESTs:

Have you ever seen people who smoke in the restaurant? Most people in Korea do not like a person who smokes in the restaurants, so smoking has been banned in most of Korean restaurants. However, there are still some restaurants where people are allowed to smoke. In my opinion, smoking should be banned at all restaurants in this country. The reasons are below. First, other people in the restaurants can feel uncomfortable …..

As suggested in quantitative analysis, learners use more relative clauses to expand nouns (people who smoke, a person who smokes, restaurants where people are allowed to smoke). While the writer attempts to make an opinion, vague references to people , as well as phrases such as “most of Korean restaurants” and “some restaurants,” appear to bleach out the perspective of the author, making it more difficult to discern the writer’s opinion. Questions such as “Have you ever seen people who smoke in the restaurant?” use the word you to address the reader, yet they appear mechanical and are not designed to influence the reader’s opinion. At the same time, there appears to be a heightened awareness of grammar, as is revealed by the use of the determiner the . This feature is consistently used throughout the text. Within “the restaurants,” however, no specificity is needed. In this case, the object is not known by both the writer and the reader. Such an error reflects an awareness of grammatical accuracy, yet it does not reflect awareness of context or the reader.

Analysis of word usage has revealed key differences in the essays of Korean EFL writers who have had extensive NEST instruction and those who have not. Compositions by Korean EFL writers with more NEST instruction closely resemble native English writers in word frequency and usage. These essays also include more academic vocabulary, as well as a larger variety of word forms to enrich essay content. Concerning style, Korean EFL learners with more NEST instruction tend to use stances that evaluate, validate, and state personal opinions about an argument. Learners with low NEST instruction appear to rely on speech formulas, utilizing more unbiased logical arguments that do not reveal either the opinion of the author, nor an awareness of the reader.

Regarding grammar, Korean EFL learners with more NEST support show a heightened awareness of verb tense and agreement; use determiners more often than their counterparts with little NEST instruction; utilize the first person singular more often, which reveals a tendency to use personal experience to support an argument; and tend to combine phrases or sentences using the conjunctions and or addition . Learners with low NEST instruction use pronouns such as we, you, and they more often, which may be an attempt to avoid personal opinion. They also tend to utilize relative clauses to add complexity to sentences, rather than using conjunctions like and or addition . In general, use of grammar in the study suggests that while Korean EFL learners with extensive NEST instruction use more sophisticated vocabulary, word forms, and grammar to create a novel argument supported by personal experience, Korean EFL learners with low NEST instruction use formulaic and logical speech sequences to express opinions more accurately and neutrally.

Results of the study suggest that both EFL learner groups have distinct advantages. While learners with more NEST instruction made more creative and sophisticated constructions, their counterparts were more grammatically accurate in their use of language. Such results have implications for language teachers in EFL contexts such as South Korea, which have a variety of schools staffed with both NEST and NNEST instructors. Learners who are taught extensively by NEST instructors may benefit more from exercises that utilize formulaic language, as well as grammar instruction to assist with the editing process. Learners without instruction from NESTs may benefit from increased tasks that cultivate creativity with language and critical thinking. Specialized instruction in this way may allow all learners to add rhetorical and linguistic variety, while cultivating greater grammatical accuracy.

Although this study has provided useful information concerning EFL writing instruction, limitations in method still exist, highlighting a need for further research. The present study only used a self-survey to report time spent with NESTs, which limited understanding of each learner’s educational background. Since educational policies that encourage the hiring of more NESTs may also be coupled with curricular changes, such as the addition of communicative tasks with more speaking and writing, any relationships between these potential covariates must be further investigated. More experimental or qualitative studies documenting curricular experiences of learners in conjunction with teacher influences can provide a holistic understanding of the EFL learner process, which may then be used to substantially improve instruction. Such study may help educators to develop policies and pedagogical techniques that combine the strengths of diverse groups, thereby enhancing the efficacy of English instruction.

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All materials for this study are available through the ICNALE corpus.

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Schenck, A. Examining the influence of native and non-native English-speaking teachers on Korean EFL writing. Asian. J. Second. Foreign. Lang. Educ. 5 , 2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-020-00081-3

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4 Tips to improve your skills as a business English writer

Written English is the lingua franca of global business.

As world economies become ever-more interconnected, English has emerged as the standard for global communication. Even if you generally feel comfortable speaking English in conversation--perhaps you do so daily--writing it is something else entirely. While the spoken word soon disappears into thin air, the written word remains. In other words, a mistake in printed text has a far greater chance of being scrutinized or--in the age of social media--ridiculed.

How to develop writing skills in English.

English as a second language has its own particular difficulties, partly due to the nature of the language itself and partly because so many people in so many places speak it. Here are our top tips for improving your business English writing skills.

Understand that standard English is a strange beast.

Over the centuries, many languages have influenced the development of English. Thus, its grammar and spelling can be highly irregular. Idiosyncrasies are very hard to learn, except by constant exposure over a long period. Even native English speakers find it difficult to explain the numerous irregularities inherent to their language--they just know what sounds natural to their ears.

Tip: Does "Red little riding hood" make sense? In English grammar, it's important to keep your adjectives in the right order .

Call in an expert.

If you have any native English speakers in your office, ask them for help proofreading your text. Don't be offended if they provide many corrections. If time permits, ask your colleague to explain the changes to help improve your fluency in English.

If you do not have the opportunity to consult a native speaker, or if your text is too long for your colleague to check, it may make sense to turn to a professional editor .

Tip: Use an English language corpus to make your prose sound idiomatic.

Keep it simple.

English has an extremely rich vocabulary and a flexible structure, so it can be tempting to write creatively. But when writing in a non-native language, it's best to keep a steady hand on the throttle of creativity and write plainly and clearly . Keep your prose short, keep it straightforward, and say what you want to say as simply as possible. Whenever possible, get a native speaker or editor to check your writing before clicking send.

Tip: No one wants to hunt for meaning in a text. Stick closely to the principles of plain English .

The thesaurus is not always your friend.

A thesaurus is a tool for finding more interesting alternatives for boring or commonly-used words. When writing as a non-native, use this tool sparingly. Many words in the English language have a range of synonyms, but more often than not each has a nuance that could make it entirely inappropriate for your specific situation.

Take the following:

"I shall adore to articulate toward you apropos a neoteric hobbyhorse I am nursing for respective dealings inside the bunch."

This is a somewhat exaggerated example of thesaurus-abuse. What the author actually meant to say was:

"I'd like to tell you about a new idea I have for personal interaction in the team."

Tip: If you're not sure what combination of words to use, consult a collocation dictionary .

English grammar tips & tricks.

Here's a quick list of what to avoid when writing in a non-native language:

• Colloquialisms and slang: Best not to use these, especially slang, as they usually do not translate well. Even commonly used slang can sound absurd when used out of place.
• Similes, idioms and metaphors: Only use these if you check first with a native speaker.
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• Humor: This is more of a gray area. While it may seem that some things are universally funny, many jokes or situations that seem funny in one language or to one culture do not travel well. Even jokes that are a hit in British English can fail with English-fluent audiences in the US or Australia. Use humor sparingly; its reception will depend greatly on your target audience.

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Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?

After moving abroad, I found my English slowly eroding. It turns out our first languages aren’t as embedded as we think.

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By Madeleine Schwartz

Madeleine Schwartz is a writer and editor who grew up speaking English and French. She has been living in Paris since 2020.

• May 14, 2024

It happened the first time over dinner. I was saying something to my husband, who grew up in Paris where we live, and suddenly couldn’t get the word out. The culprit was the “r.” For the previous few months, I had been trying to perfect the French “r.” My failure to do so was the last marker of my Americanness, and I could only do it if I concentrated, moving the sound backward in my mouth and exhaling at the same time. Now I was saying something in English — “reheat” or “rehash” — and the “r” was refusing to come forward. The word felt like a piece of dough stuck in my throat.

Listen to this article, read by Soneela Nankani

Other changes began to push into my speech. I realized that when my husband spoke to me in English, I would answer him in French. My mother called, and I heard myself speaking with a French accent. Drafts of my articles were returned with an unusual number of comments from editors. Then I told a friend about a spill at the grocery store, which — the words “conveyor belt” vanishing midsentence — took place on a “supermarket treadmill.” Even back home in New York, I found my mouth puckered into the fish lips that allow for the particularly French sounds of “u,” rather than broadened into the long “ay” sounds that punctuate English.

My mother is American, and my father is French; they split up when I was about 3 months old. I grew up speaking one language exclusively with one half of my family in New York and the other language with the other in France. It’s a standard of academic literature on bilingual people that different languages bring out different aspects of the self. But these were not two different personalities but two separate lives. In one version, I was living with my mom on the Upper West Side and walking up Columbus Avenue to get to school. In the other, I was foraging for mushrooms in Alsatian forests or writing plays with my cousins and later three half-siblings, who at the time didn’t understand a word of English. The experience of either language was entirely distinct, as if I had been given two scripts with mirroring supportive casts. In each a parent, grandparents, aunts and uncles; in each, a language, a home, a Madeleine.

I moved to Paris in October 2020, on the heels of my 30th birthday. This was both a rational decision and something of a Covid-spurred dare. I had been working as a journalist and editor for several years, specializing in European politics, and had reported across Germany and Spain in those languages. I had never professionally used French, in which I was technically fluent. It seemed like a good idea to try.

When I arrived in France, however, I realized my fluency had its limitations: I hadn’t spoken French with adults who didn’t share my DNA. The cultural historian Thomas Laqueur, who grew up speaking German at home in West Virginia, had a similar experience, as the linguist Julie Sedivy notes in “Memory Speaks,” her book about language loss and relearning her childhood Czech. Sedivy cites an essay of Laqueur’s in which he describes the first time he learned that German was not, in fact, a secret family language. He and his brother had been arguing over a Popsicle in front of the grocery store near his house:

A lady came up to us and said, in German, that she would give us a nickel so that we could each have a treat of our own. I don’t remember buying a second Popsicle, but I do remember being very excited at finding someone else of our linguistic species. I rushed home with the big news.

My own introduction to speaking French as an adult was less joyous. After reaching out to sources for a different article for this magazine with little success, I showed the unanswered emails to a friend. She gently informed me that I had been yelling at everyone I hoped to interview.

Compared with English, French is slower, more formal, less direct. The language requires a kind of politeness that, translated literally, sounds subservient, even passive-aggressive. I started collecting the stock phrases that I needed to indicate polite interaction. “I would entreat you, dear Madam ...” “Please accept, dear sir, the assurances of my highest esteem.” It had always seemed that French made my face more drawn and serious, as if all my energy were concentrated into the precision of certain vowels. English forced my lips to widen into a smile.

But going back to English wasn’t so easy, either. I worried about the French I learned somehow infecting my English. I edit a magazine, The Dial, which I founded in part to bring more local journalists and writers to an English-speaking audience. But as I worked on texts by Ukrainians or Argentines or Turks, smoothing over syntax and unusual idioms into more fluid English prose, I began to doubt that I even knew what the right English was.

Back in New York on a trip, I thanked the cashier at Duane Reade by calling him “dear sir.” My thoughts themselves seemed twisted in a series of interlocking clauses, as though I was afraid that being direct might make me seem rude. It wasn’t just that my French was getting better: My English was getting worse.

For a long time, a central question in linguistics was how people learn language. But in the past few decades, a new field of study called “language attrition” has emerged. It concerns not learning but forgetting: What causes language to be lost?

People who move to new countries often find themselves forgetting words in their first language, using odd turns of phrase or speaking with a newly foreign accent. This impermanence has led linguists to reconsider much of what was once assumed about language learning. Rather than seeing the process of becoming multilingual as cumulative, with each language complementing the next, some linguists see languages as siblings vying for attention. Add a new one to the mix, and competition emerges. “There is no age at which a language, even a native tongue, is so firmly cemented into the brain that it can’t be dislodged or altered by a new one,” Sedivy writes. “Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there.”

As my time in France hit the year mark and then the two-year mark, I began to worry about how much French was changing my English — that I might even be losing some basic ability to use the language I considered closest to my core. It wasn’t an idle concern. A few years earlier, when living in Berlin, I found the English of decades-long expats mannered and strange; they spoke more slowly and peppered in bits of German that sounded forced and odd. As an editor, I could see it in translators too: The more time people spent in their new language, the more their English prose took on a kind of Germanic overtone. Would the same thing happen to me?

Even languages that seem firmly rooted in the mind can be subject to attrition. “When you have two languages that live in your brain,” says Monika S. Schmid, a leader in the field of language attrition at the University of York, “every time you say something, every time you take a word, every time you put together a sentence, you have to make a choice. Sometimes one language wins out. And sometimes the other wins.” People who are bilingual, she says, “tend to get very, very good at managing these kinds of things and using the language that they want and not having too much interference between the two.” But even so, there’s often a toll: the accent, the grammar or a word that doesn’t sound quite right.

What determines whether a language sticks or not? Age, Schmid says, is an important factor. “If you look at a child that is 8, 9 or 10 years old, and see what that child could do with the language and how much they know — they’re basically fully fledged native speakers.” But just as they are good language learners, children are good language forgetters. Linguists generally agree that a language acquired in early childhood tends to have greater emotional resonance for its speaker. But a child who stops speaking a language before age 12 can completely lose it. For those who stop speaking a language in childhood, that language can erode — so much so that when they try to relearn it, they seem to have few, if any, advantages, Schmid says, compared with people learning that language from scratch. Even a language with very primal, deep connections can fade into the recesses of memory.

In her book, Sedivy cites a study conducted in France that tested a group of adults who were adopted from Korea between the ages of 3 and 8 . Taken into French homes, they quickly learned French and forgot their first language. The researchers compared these adults with a group of monolingual French speakers. The participants born in Korea could not identify Korean sentences significantly better than the French control group. Intimate moments of childhood can be lost, along with the language in which they took place.

Researchers have stressed that a first language used through later years can be remarkably resilient and often comes back when speakers return home. But even adults who move to a new country can find themselves losing fluency in their first language. Merel Keijzer, a linguist at the University of Groningen who studies bilingualism, surveyed a group of Dutch speakers who emigrated as adults to Australia. A classic theory of linguistic development, she told me, argues that new language skills are superimposed on older ones like layers of an onion. She thus expected that she would find a simple language reversion: The layers that were acquired later would be most likely to go first.

The reality was more complicated. In a paper Keijzer wrote with Schmid, she found that the Dutch speakers in Australia did not regress in the way that she predicted. “You saw more Dutch coming into their English, but you also saw more English coming into their Dutch,” she says. The pattern wasn’t simple reversion so much as commingling. They “tended to just be less able to separate their languages.” As they aged, the immigrants didn’t go back to their original language; they just had difficulty keeping the two vocabularies apart.

In “Alfabet/Alphabet: A Memoir of a First Language,” the poet Sadiqa de Meijer, who was born in Amsterdam, discusses her own experiences speaking Dutch in Canada. She worries that her language has become “amusingly formal” now that she doesn’t speak it regularly. A friend tells her that she now sounds “like a book.” Unless she is in the Netherlands, she writes: “Dutch is primarily a reading language to me now. The skill of casual exchanges is in gradual atrophy.” Her young daughter does not want to speak Dutch. “Stop Dutching me!” she says. For De Meijer, “people who speak a language they learned after early childhood live in chronic abstraction.”

This state of abstraction was one that I feared. On some level, the worry felt trivial: In a world where languages are constantly being lost to English, who would complain about a lack of contact with the language responsible for devouring so many others? The Europeans that I interviewed for work deplored the imperial nature of English; the only way to have their ideas heard was to express them in a language imposed by globalization. But what I missed was not the universal English of academics nor the language of peppy LinkedIn posts but the particular sounds that I grew up with: the near-rudeness of the English spoken in New York and its rushed cadence, the way that the bottoms of words sometimes were swallowed and cut off, as if everyone already knew what was being suggested and didn’t need to actually finish the thought. I missed the variegated vocabulary of New York, where English felt like an international, rather than a globalized language, enriched with the particular words of decades of immigrants. I began to listen to “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC, a public-radio station in New York, with strange fervor, finding myself excited whenever someone called in from Staten Island.

The idea that my facility with English might be weakening brought up complicated feelings, some more flattering than others. When a journalism student wrote to ask if I would be a subject in his dissertation about “the experiences of nonnative English-speaking journalists” in media, I took the email as a personal slight. Were others noticing how much I struggled to find the right word?

A change in language use, whether deliberate or unconscious, often affects our sense of self. Language is inextricably tied up with our emotions; it’s how we express ourselves — our pain, our love, our fear. And that means, as Schmid, the language-attrition expert at the University of York, has pointed out, that the loss of a language can be tied up with emotion too. In her dissertation, Schmid looked at German-speaking Jews who emigrated to England and the United States shortly before World War II and their relationship with their first language. She sent questionnaires asking them how difficult it was for them to speak German now and how they used the language — “in writing in a diary, for example, or while dreaming.”

One woman wrote: “I was physically unable to speak German. ... When I visited Germany for 3 or 4 days in 1949 — I found myself unable to utter one word of German although the frontier guard was a dear old man. I had to speak French in order to answer his questions.”

Her husband concurred: “My wife in her reply to you will have told you that she could and did not want to speak German because they killed her parents. So we never spoke German to each other, not even intimately.”

Another wrote: “I feel that my family did a lot for Germany and for Düsseldorf, and therefore I feel that Germany betrayed me. America is my country, and English is my language.”

Schmid divided the émigrés into three groups, tying each of them to a point in Germany’s history. The first group left before September 1935, that is, before the Nuremberg race laws. The second group left between the enactment of those laws and Kristallnacht, in November 1938. The last group comprised those who left between Kristallnacht and August 1939, just before Germany invaded Poland.

What Schmid found was that of all the possible factors that might affect language attrition, the one that had a clear impact was how much of the Nazi regime they experienced. Emigration date, she wrote, outweighed every other factor; those who left last were the ones who were the least likely to be perceived as “native” speakers by other Germans, and they often had a weaker relationship to that language:

It appears that what is at the heart of language attrition is not so much the opportunity to use the language, nor the age at the time of emigration. What matters is the speaker’s identity and self-perception. ... Someone who wants to belong to a speech community and wants to be recognized as a member is capable of behaving accordingly over an extremely long stretch of time. On the other hand, someone who rejects that language community — or has been rejected and persecuted by it — may adapt his or her linguistic behavior so as not to appear to be a member any longer.

In other words, the closeness we have with a language is not just a product of our ability to use it but of other emotional valences as well. If language is a form of identity, it is one that may be changed by circumstance or even by force of will.

Stories of language loss often mask other, larger losses. Lily Wong Fillmore, a linguist who formerly taught at the University of California, Berkeley, once wrote about a family who emigrated to California several years after leaving China’s Canton province in 1989. One child, Kai-fong, was 5 when he arrived in the United States. At this point in his life, he could speak and understand only Cantonese. While his younger sister learned English almost immediately and made friends easily, Kai-fong, who was shy, did not have the same experience in school. His classmates called him “Chi, chi, chia pet” because his hair stuck out. Boys mocked the polyester pants his grandmother sewed for him. Pretty soon, he and his classmates were throwing rocks at one another.

Once Kai-fong started learning English, he stopped speaking Cantonese, even to members of his own family. As Wong Fillmore writes: “When Grandmother spoke to him, he either ignored her or would mutter a response in English that she did not understand. ... The more the adults scolded, the more sullen and angry Kai-fong became.” By 10, he was known as Ken and no longer understood Cantonese well. The family began to split along linguistic lines. Two children born in the United States never learned Cantonese at all. It is a story, Wong Fillmore writes, “that many immigrant families have experienced firsthand.”

The recognition in linguistics of the ease with which mastery of a language can erode comes as certain fundamentals of the field are being re-examined — in particular, the idea that a single, so-called native language shapes your innermost self. That notion is inextricable from 19th-century nationalism, as Jean-Marc Dewaele, a professor at the University of London, has argued. In a paper written with the linguists Thomas H. Bak and Lourdes Ortega, Dewaele notes that many cultures link the first words you speak to motherhood: In French, your native language is a langue maternelle, in Spanish, lengua materna, in German, Muttersprache. Turkish, which calls your first language ana dili, follows the same practice, as do most of the languages of India. Polish is unusual in linking language to a paternal line. The term for native language is język ojczysty, which is related to ojciec, the Polish word for father.

Regarding a first language as having special value is itself the product of a worldview that places national belonging at the heart of individual life. The phrase “native speaker” was first used by the politician and philologist George Perkins Marsh, who spoke of the importance of “home-born English.” It came with more than a light prejudicial overtone. Among Marsh’s recommendations was the need for “special precautions” to protect English from “becoming debased and vulgarized ... by association with depraved beings and unworthy themes.”

The idea of a single, native language took hold in linguistics in the mid-20th century, a uniquely monolingual time in human history. American culture, with its emphasis on assimilation, was especially hostile to the notion that a single person might inhabit multiple languages. Parents were discouraged from teaching their children languages other than English, even if they expressed themselves best in that other language. The simultaneous acquisition of multiple tongues was thought to cause delays in language development and learning. As Aneta Pavlenko, a linguist at Drexel University and the University of York, has noted, families who spoke more than one language were looked down on by politicians and ignored by linguists through the 1970s. “Early bilinguals,” those who learned two languages in childhood, “were excluded from research as ‘unusual’ or ‘messy’ subjects,” she writes. By contrast, late bilinguals, those who learned a second language in school or adulthood, were treated as “representative speakers of their first language.” The fact that they spoke a second language was disregarded. This focus on the importance of a single language may have obscured the historical record, giving the impression that humans are more monolingual and more rigid in their speech than they are.

Pavlenko has sought to show that far from being the historical standard, speaking just one language may be the exception. Her most recent book, a collection of essays by different scholars, takes on the historical “amnesia” that researchers have about the prevalence of multilingualism across the globe. The book looks at examples where multiple languages were the norm: medieval Sicily, where the administrative state processed paperwork in Latin, Greek and Arabic, or the early Pennsylvania court system, where in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was not unusual to hold hearings in German. Even today, Pavlenko sees a split: American academics working in English, often their only language, regard it as the standard for research. Europeans, obliged to work in English as a second language, are more likely to consider that fluency in only one language may be far rarer than conflict among multiple tongues.

According to Dewaele and his colleagues, “the notion of a single native language, determined entirely by the earliest experiences, is also not supported by neurology and neuroscience.” While there are many stories about patients who find themselves speaking their first language after a stroke or dementia, it’s also common for the recovered patients to use the language they spoke right before the accident occurred.

All of this has led some linguists to push against the idea of the “native” speaker, which, as Dewaele says, “has a dark side.” It can be restrictive, stigmatizing accents seen as impure, or making people feel unwelcome in a new home. Speakers who have studied a language, Dewaele says, often know its grammar better than those who picked it up with their family. He himself prefers the term “first-language user” — a slightly clunky solution that definitively decouples the language you speak from the person you are.

Around the time I realized that I had most likely become the No. 1 WNYC listener outside the tristate area, I started to seek out writers who purposefully looked away from their “native” language. Despite the once commonly held belief that a writer could produce original works only in a “mother tongue,” wonderful books have been written in acquired, rather than maternal, languages. Vladimir Nabokov began to write in English shortly before he moved to the United States. French was a vehicle for Samuel Beckett to push his most innovative ideas. “It’s only in Italian that I feel I’m at the center of myself,” Jhumpa Lahiri, who started writing in Italian in her 40s, said in a recent Paris Review interview. “It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own.”

Could I begin to think about different languages not as two personas I had to choose between but as different moods that might shift depending on circumstance? Aspects of French that I used to find cold began to reveal advantages. The stiff way of addressing strangers offered its own benefits, new ways in which I could conserve personal privacy in a world that constantly demanded oversharing. My conversations in French changed, too: I was finally talking to others not as a child but as an adult.

The author Yoko Tawada, who moved to Germany from Japan in her early 20s, works on books in both Japanese and German; she writes fluidly in both languages. Tawada’s most recent novel to be translated into English, “Scattered All Over the Earth,” explores a future in which Japan is sunken underwater, lost to climate change. A Japanese speaker, possibly the last on earth, looks for a man who she hopes shares her language, only to find that he has been pretending to be Japanese while working at a sushi restaurant.

Using new languages, or even staying within the state of multilingualism, can provide distinct creative advantages. Tawada plays with homonyms and the awkwardness that comes from literal translation. What emerges in her work is not a single language but a betweenness, a tool for the author to invent as she is using it, the scholar Yasemin Yildiz has noted. Yildiz quotes an essay by Tawada called “From the Mother Language to the Language Mother,” in which a narrator describes the ways that learning German taught her to see language differently: Writing in the second language was not a constraint, but a new form of invention. Tawada calls her typewriter a Sprachmutter, or “language mother” — an inversion of the German word for mother tongue. In a first language, we can rarely experience “playful joy,” she writes. “Thoughts cling so closely to words that neither the former nor the latter can fly freely.” But a new language is like a staple remover, which gets rid of everything that sticks and clings.

If the scholarly linguistic consensus once pushed people toward monolingualism, current research suggesting that language acquisition may shift with our circumstances may allow speakers of multiple languages to reclaim self-understanding. In Mirene Arsanios’s chapbook “Notes on Mother Tongues: Colonialism, Class and Giving What You Don’t Have,” Arsanios describes being unsure which language to speak with her son. Her mother, from Venezuela, spoke Spanish, her father, from Lebanon, spoke French; neither feels appropriate to pass on. “Like other languages originating in histories of colonization, my language always had a language problem, something akin to the evacuation of a ‘first’ or ‘native’ tongue — a syntax endemic to the brain and to the heart.”

Is the answer a multitude of languages or a renunciation of one? “Having many languages is my language’s dominant language,” she writes. She must become comfortable with the idea that what she is transmitting to her son is not a single language but questions and identities that are never quite resolved. At the end of the text, she describes speaking with her son “in a tongue reciprocal, abundant and motherless.”

The scholars I talked to stressed that each bilingual speaker is unique: Behind the general categories is a human life, with all its complications. Language acquisition and use may be messier than was envisioned by rigid distinctions of native and nonnative and, at the same time, more individual.

My own grandmother, my mother’s mother, grew up speaking German in Vienna in what was itself a multilingual household. Her mother was Austrian and her father, born in what is now Serbia, spoke German with a thick Hungarian accent. She and her family moved throughout Europe during World War II; to Budapest, Trieste, Lille and eventually escaped through Portugal on a boat carrying cork to New York.

When they arrived in the United States, her mother did not want her to speak German in public. “She felt the animosity to it,” my grandmother recently told me. But my grandmother still wished to. German was also the language of Schiller, she would say. She didn’t go out of her way to speak German, but she didn’t forget it either. She loved German poetry, much of which she still recites, often unprompted, at 95.

When I mentioned Schmid’s research to her, she was slightly dismissive of the idea that her own language use might be shaped by trauma. She said that she found the notion of not speaking German after World War II somewhat absurd, mostly because, to her ear, Hitler spoke very bad German. She berated me instead for not asking about her emotional relationship to French, which she spoke as a schoolgirl in Lille, or Italian, which she spoke in Trieste. Each was the source of memories that might wax and wane as she recalled the foreign words.

Recently, she reconnected with an old classmate from her childhood in Vienna, who also fled Europe during the war, after she recognized her friend’s picture in The New York Post. They speak together in English. Her friend Ruth, she notes, speaks English with a German accent, but does not speak German anymore.

Madeleine Schwartz lives in Paris, where she is founder and editor in chief of The Dial, a magazine of international reporting and writing. She was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2023 and teaches journalism at Sciences Po Paris.

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Narration produced by Tanya Pérez

Engineered by Brian St. Pierre

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The language gap: Hidden struggles of the non-native speaker

My first experience of education in the U.S. was a two-week English as a second language course at the University of Chicago. There I learned that "clothes" was pronounced "close" and squash is a kind of vegetable. I was told that I use too many redundant words that are hardly necessary (yes, like that). After two weeks, our international cohort was informed that we were good to go. But were we?

Every year, about half a million students travel to the U.S. to study science, technology, engineering and math subjects. An overwhelming majority of these students are non-native speakers of English, the lingua franca of the scientific enterprise. This is the same group that ultimately will comprise half of the country's postdoc pool and one-fourth of the STEM faculty in a few years' time. These favorable outcomes suggest that the system really works for international students, but does it?

Concerns about the gender gap, race gap and wealth gap in STEM have permeated public consciousness in recent years thanks to efforts by universities, funding agencies and scientific bodies, but the language gap for non-native speakers hardly is discussed.

Louder than actions

Classes were taught in English in my school back in India, but all my interactions outside those few hours in school were in my mother tongue, Bengali. When I got to the University of Chicago to work on a Ph.D. in chemistry, my adviser's job was to train me in scientific research; I was expected to be proficient in English. In my early years in grad school, I had a hard time penetrating the dense scientific literature I had to read for my research.

When it came time for my first research paper, I realized how difficult scientific writing could be. The research was done, and we were satisfied with our results, but preparing the manuscript took close to a year. Like most Ph.D. students, I had no training in technical writing, so my first draft was a mess. Because English is not my first language, I had a hard time finding the right words to describe my results, and my sentences were awkward and long-winded. My adviser, busy with other priorities, edited the draft heavily. The edited manuscript read better, but I didn't know why. Even when I finally could bask in the glory of my publication — we had discovered the structure of an RNA molecule that also behaves as an enzyme — a nagging inner voice reminded me that the process would be almost as tedious the next time around.

With my paper submitted, I registered for my first scientific conference. While preparing, I soon realized that, unlike writing, my talk would not be edited. In my first poster presentation, my interactions with others were less spontaneous than the American presenters', even after considerable preparation. I have become a more confident speaker since then, but at every conference I attend I meet non-native presenters struggling to convey their hard-earned results. Student talks rarely last more than 15 minutes, which calls for precise communication. As a listener, I don't know how many times I've given up on a talk because I couldn't understand the speaker's words or I found their monotone soporific. Though I use a script, I aim to write a talk that sounds spontaneous by using short, direct sentences, pausing to emphasize important points and keeping my tone conversational. I also have found that using questions as segues increases audience engagement.

Bridging the gap

Like most non-native speakers who join the U.S. academic workforce, I was aware of the language gap before I came here. And I don't think the solution lies in critiquing the linguistic hegemony of English over the sciences. It lies in rethinking graduate training.

Universities should offer a semester-long course on science communication to first-year grad students, with special attention to non-native speakers. The writing component should include exercises in summarizing scientific findings or reviewing scientific literature. Students should be introduced to the phrases and terminology commonly used in scientific writing, taught how to synthesize related ideas into concise sentences, and provided with a primer on technical writing. Impromptu group discussions, flash presentations and practice talks could be included in the oral component. Through mutual critique and suggestions, all new grad students soon would gain the confidence to approach scientific communication with excitement instead of unease.

Of the six courses I took in graduate school, only two were even remotely related to my Ph.D. work, whereas a communication course would have been useful to the entire entering class, irrespective of their field of research. Such courses probably don't exist because university administrators are unaware of the difficulties I've outlined. After joining a lab, most students have little communication with the department administration. We don't like to complain, so our struggles remain siloed.

From the student's perspective, I can see how fitting such a course into an already packed first year might be difficult. In most schools, including mine, teaching assistant duties take up most of the week. My primary concern in the first year was to find a suitable research group. Busy students may not consider such a course a priority, but I think this initial time investment would pay high dividends in a few years.

A course would be an excellent starting point, but I have found that self-improvement is the only way to level the playing field. A healthy reading habit has done wonders for my language skills. I have benefited especially from science writers such as Richard Dawkins and Paul Davies. When my busy schedule does not permit additional reading, I find that listening to narrative podcasts, even those that have nothing to do with science, is a great way to learn effective sentence construction. I suggest podcasts by the Parcast network as examples of effective storytelling.

Non-native speakers have been and continue to be successful because we power through uncomfortable experiences. That's what learning is. I present my story as an example of countless stories. I believe universities can do much more to empower one of the most productive groups in American science and technology.

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Saurja DasGupta is a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital.

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Native Speaker Quotes

By chang-rae lee.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

“One day Lelia came home from work and said she was burning out. She said she desperately needed time off. She worked as a speech therapist for children, mostly freelancing in the public schools and then part-time as a speech and hearing clinic downtown.” Henry Park

Lelia’s busy schedule which is characterized by long working hours contributes to her burnout. Taking a break would be helpful for her to relax and release the pressure which is inherent in her job. Continuing with work, in the face of her burnout, would be detrimental to her health. No amount of monetary compensation would eliminate the burnout because it relates to her body.

“ I asked if she had enough money. She said her savings would take care of her. I thought they were our savings, but the notion didn’t seem to matter at the moment. Her answer was also, of course a means of renunciation, itself a denial of everything else I wasn’t offering.” Henry Park

While at the International Departures, Lelia demonstrates that her resolution to travel is not a attributed to burnout only. She avoids the pronoun ‘our’ to show Henry Park that they are no longer a couple. Deciding to travel is a move which would smooth their separation. Accepting Henry Park’s help would give the impression that she acknowledges him as her husband. Clearly, Lelia has independently resolved to separate from Henry Park.

“ For the first few years she thought I worked for companies with security problems…I let her think that I and my colleagues went to a company and covertly observed a warehouse or laboratory or retail floor, then exposed all the cheats and criminals. But I wasn’t to be found anywhere near corporate or industrial sites, then or ever…I lied to Lelia. For as long as I could I lied.” Henry Park

Henry Park’s blatant confession affirms that their matrimony was founded on lies. He strives to give a better impression to Lelia, but it is not sustainable in the long term for she decides to leave him. Deception is not a guarantee to a blissful matrimony, because sooner or later, the deceived party realizes all the deceptions.

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Native Speaker Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Native Speaker is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for Native Speaker

Native Speaker study guide contains a biography of Chang-Rae Lee, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Native Speaker
• Native Speaker Summary
• Character List

Essays for Native Speaker

Native Speaker essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee.

• “Necessary Fictions”: Negotiating Identity Through Storytelling in Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker
• The Relinquishing of Roots
• Manipulation of the Spy Novel in Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker
• The Similar Effects of Audience Reception in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity-Narrative and Equiano’s Slave-Narrative.
• Attempted Assimilation: Immigrant Inclusion and Outsiderness in Native Speaker

Wikipedia Entries for Native Speaker

• Introduction
• Major themes
• Awards and nominations

AI Detectors Discriminate Against Non-Native Speakers, Says Stanford Research

The AI detectors got it wrong more than half the time when evaluating writing from non-Native English-speaking students, recent research found. For native English speakers, the findings were still far from perfect.

A group of Stanford researchers recently decided to put AI detectors to the test, and if it was a graded assignment, the detection tools would have received an F. 

“Our main finding is that current AI detectors are not reliable in that they can be easily fooled by changing prompts,” says James Zou, a Stanford professor and co-author of the paper based on the research. More significantly, he adds, “They have a tendency to mistakenly flag text written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated.” 

This is bad news for those educators who have embraced AI detection sites as a necessary evil in the AI era of teaching . Here’s everything you need to know about how this research into bias in AI detectors was conducted and its implications for teachers.  

How was this AI detection research conducted?  

Zou and his co-authors were aware of the interest in third-party tools to detect whether text was written by ChatGPT or another AI tool, and wanted to scientifically evaluate any tool's efficacy. To do that, the researchers evaluated seven unidentified but “widely used” AI detectors on 91 TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) essays from a Chinese forum and 88 U.S. eighth-grade essays from the Hewlett Foundation’s ASAP dataset. 

What did the research find?  

The performance of these detectors on students who spoke English as a second language was, to put it in terms no good teacher would ever use in their feedback to a student, atrocious. 

The AI detectors incorrectly labeled more than half of the TOEFL essays as “AI-generated” with an average false-positive rate of 61.3%. While none of the detectors did a good job correctly identifying the TOEFL essays as human-written, there was a great deal of variation. The study notes: “All detectors unanimously identified 19.8% of the human-written TOEFL essays as AI-authored, and at least one detector flagged 97.8% of TOEFL essays as AI-generated.” 

The detectors did much better with those who spoke English as their first language but were still far from perfect. “On 8th grade essays written by students in the U.S., the false positive rate of most detectors is less than 10%,” Zou says. 

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Why are AI detectors more likely to incorrectly label writing from non-native English speakers as AI-written?  

Most AI detectors attempt to differentiate between human- and AI-written text by assessing a sentence’s perplexity, which Zou and his co-authors define as “a measure of how ‘surprised’ or ‘confused’ a generative language model is when trying to guess the next word in a sentence.” 

The higher the perplexity and more surprising text is, the more likely it was written by a human, at least in theory. This theory, the study authors conclude, seems to break down somewhat when evaluating writing from non-native English speakers who generally “use a more limited range of linguistic expressions.” 

What are its implications for educators?  

The research suggests AI detectors are not ready for prime time, especially given the way these platforms inequitably flag content as AI written, and could potentially exacerbate existing biases against non-native English-speaking students. 

“I think educators should be very cautious about using current AI detectors given its limitations and biases,” Zou says. “There are ways to improve AI detectors. However, it's a challenging arms race because the large language models are also becoming more powerful and flexible to emulate different human writing styles.” 

In the meantime, Zou advises educators to take other steps to try and prevent the use of AI to cheat by students. “One approach is to teach students how to use AI responsibly,” he says. “More in-person discussions and assessments could also help.” 

• Best Free AI Detection Sites
• My Student Was Submitting AI Papers. Here's What I Did

Erik Ofgang is a Tech & Learning contributor. A journalist,  author  and educator, his work has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and Associated Press. He currently teaches at Western Connecticut State University’s MFA program. While a staff writer at Connecticut Magazine he won a Society of Professional Journalism Award for his education reporting. He is interested in how humans learn and how technology can make that more effective. 

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