ENGLISH TEACHING IN THE AMAZON REGION: BELIEFS TOWARD NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE ENGLISH-SPEAKING TEACHERS

Resumo

This paper aims to identify and explore students' beliefs regarding native (U.S.) teachers and non-native (Brazilian) English teachers. In this sense, this work attempts to verify to what extent such beliefs are related to student’s motivation for learning the English language. Data have been generated from questionnaires, interviews with, and observation of students at Centro de Desenvolvimento Regional, Altamira, Brazil. Our theoretical references include Cook’s (2005), Nayar’s (apud MOUSSU, 2006), and Medgyes (2001) definitions of nativeness, as well as Barcelos’ (2001), Pajares’ (1992) and Dörnyei’s (2001) conceptions on beliefs and motivation, among others. Content analysis has been employed to scrutinize the data in accordance with Bardin’s (2008) procedures. Results suggest that most students think native speakers are better at teaching oral English in general. On the other hand, non-native speakers are believed to teach grammar/writing more effectively or successfully since they would have a deeper/technical knowledge of such a dimension. Furthermore, we realize that beliefs have a relatively high degree of influence over students’ motivation for learning a language. Therefore, we indicate that these beliefs positively and negatively affect students throughout the language learning process, especially in the way they represent and relate to both categories of teachers, Native and Non-native.

 Keywords: Native teachers. Non-native teachers. Beliefs. Motivation.