Native Speakers as Teachers in Turkey: Non-native Pre-service English Teachers' Reactions to a Nation-wide Project

Although English is now a recognized international language and the concept of native speaker is becoming more doubtful every day, the empowerment of the native speakers of English as language teaching professionals is still continuing (McKay, 2002), especially in Asian countries like China and Japan. One of the latest examples showing the empowerment of the native English speakers comes from Turkey planning to embark on a project to hire 40.000 native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) to collaborate with the local nonnative English teachers (NNESTs) in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in Turkey. This study tries to reveal the preliminary reactions of preservice NNESTs about this project through data obtained from open-ended surveys. The content analysis of the data showed that even before the project was initiated, most of the participants objected to it. Although some of the participants favored the project as they believed that the NESTs might be more helpful for students to improve speaking skills and to increase their cultural awareness, the majority of the participants held negative attitudes towards the project mainly because of employment and pedagogical concerns.