The native speaker model and language learners: developing a measurement instrument

ABSTRACT

This article describes the development of an instrument designed to measure language learners’ attitudes toward native and non-native speakers, and localized Englishes, which may have been shaped by the continued prevalence of the native speaker model of English (NSM) in their learning context. After reviewing the literature regarding the NSM in relation to both teachers and learners, the article describes the development process, including two large administrations, to first-year tertiary students in Japan. Principal component analysis was used with data from a large pilot study (N = 610) to reduce the number of items, providing a shorter instrument that was administered to a separate group of 568 learners. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted on the resulting data to create an instrument containing three factors describing different aspects of learners’ attitudes. Finally, these factors were analyzed for reliability with Cronbach’s alpha and inter-item correlation.

KEYWORDS:

• native speaker model
• localized models of English
• english as a lingua franca
• measurement
• survey design

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Emeritus Professor Andy Kirkpatrick for his advice on early version of this article and Professor Paul Leeming for his feedback on an early version of the ALE survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author

Notes

1. The term ‘native speaker’ (along with its inevitable inverse ‘non-native speaker’) has been the subject of debate for many decades, as it is argued to not only be vague, but also relegates (by nature of the prefix attached) a deficit view of the ‘non-native speaker’ as someone who is ‘lacking’ something. There have been arguments made for using different terms such as ‘expert speaker’ (Rampton, 1990) or L1/LX user (Dewaele 2018). Indeed, what exactly constitutes a ‘native speaker of English’ in the twenty-first century grows harder to define as speakers around the world use English in myriad ways, and the binary distinction between the two has been challenged (Brutt-Griffler & Samimy, 2001). For the purpose of this article however, I still refer to ‘native speakers’ and ‘non-native speakers’ when citing previous research that has used those terms, and also for the purposes of the measurement instrument described, given that in Japanese society the terms are in popular use, and are therefore transparent for the student participants. Finally, as I am problematizing the ‘native speaker model’ itself, I use them elsewhere in that ‘problematic’ sense, aware of the issues surrounding their continued use.

2. Giles and Billings (2004) trace interest in language attitudes back to the 1930s when the BBC elicited listeners’ opinions on various British dialects, but this was not necessarily part of a ‘research tradition’.