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Exploring How Non-native Teachers Can Use Commonalties with Students to Teach the Target Language


This article presents a qualitative study demonstrating how teachers who are non-native speakers (NNS) of the target language and who have learned the target language in a similar environment as their students can use their past learning experiences as pedagogical tools in their classes. An analysis of transcripts from classrooms with NNS and native speaking (NS) instructors determines that NNS instructors who share the same first language (L1) as their students have a keen ability to identify the learning processes of the students. Additionally, while NS teachers recognize difficult grammatical features in the target language with which students are likely to struggle, they are understandably unable to offer personal strategies for how they learned the target language. Furthermore, the results suggest that NNS teachers readily include themselves in the same speech and cultural community as their students, while NS instructors exclude the students when referencing themselves and other native speakers of the target language.