An exploration of the native speaker construct through the narratives of two Singapore English language teachers

The native speaker construct (or native-nonnative speaker dichotomy), especially surrounding the English language, is a pervasive ideology that has earned considerable scholarly attention in the realm of sociolinguistics research spanning several decades. This notion represents several untruths, encourages exclusivity, and others other variants of English not accepted as the so-called ‘standard’. Singapore English is one such variety othered by the native speaker construct (Davies, 2003). Singapore is a multicultural society that emphasizes ‘mother tongue’ over the ‘native speaker’ as the country’s language policies are constructed around the languages of major ethnic groups present in the Singaporean demographic. Though the language of administration and officiation has been English for many years, it has yet to be afforded the status of mother tongue. Singaporeans are also statistically highly proficient users of English, leading scholars to argue for English to be officially instated as a mother tongue in Singapore (Wee, 2002, 2013; Tan, 2014) to better suit the growing needs of the nation. This dissertation aims to understand through the lenses of two Singapore English teachers, if they consider themselves native speakers of the English language and the role it plays in their lives. This paper does this by adapting Tan’s (2014) four conditions for a language to be considered a mother tongue – language inheritance, language expertise, language function, and language identification - to answer the research questions of 1) What role does English play in the participants’ linguistic repertoire? What does it mean to be a speaker of English in the Singapore context from the perspective of the participants? 2) Do the participants consider themselves native speakers of English? If yes, why? If no, why? 3) Based on the narratives, how can the concept of a native speaker be reconceptualized in Singapore in a globalization era?

Semi-structured interviews were used to gather data, and a narrative inquiry method was employed for the analysis of the narratives obtained during the interview sessions. Open and In Vivo coding were used to organize data into categories for reconstruction of the participants’ narratives into comprehensible stories. This dissertation finds that both of the participants fulfill the conditions for English to be considered their mother tongue but lack the confidence in calling themselves native speakers due to linguistic insecurity, even though English plays an integral role, both personal and functional, in their lives. A reconfiguration of the ‘native speaker’ is suggested so that it allows for multilingual speakers in a globalizing world to be considered native speakers of multiple languages, including English.