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Showing posts from January, 2023

Those Pesky Native Speakers....AGAIN!

The question I most frequently get asked - probably because I grew up speaking English myself and my daughters went through the Swiss public school system - is “how do I deal with native speakers in my classroom?” I will discuss this below starting with my own experiences and then generalize those points to some more practical tips. First of all, I would like to state that I get irritated by the question. Teachers in Switzerland have a 3-year degree in education and a lot of fieldwork. In every subject there will be learners who are more or less motivated, more or less interested, and have had more or fewer experiences in a subject. So when I get asked about native speakers, I think “have they not learned how to differentiate instruction?” and that they have it wrong. Teachers are not responsible for teaching native-level English (they cannot), but they ARE responsible that every child has an active, positive experience where they make progress. They ARE responsible for not just “follo