Future Directions for English, English Language Teaching and Research
...ng countries. Next, he criticizes four current principles of English learning teaching (ELT) which is supported by British and American ELT industry. Then he suggests his new four principles as a replacement in which he emphasizes the validity of well-trained local teacher. Further, he outlines the future for teacher development courses and research, in which the teachers need to know the requirements of learners and understand the roles and status of English compare to other languages. Finally he recommends that Australia should be leading the way in development of ELT professional development course which is suitable to cultural and situation of Asian regional countries by setting the standard throughout the East and South East Asian region. One positive aspect of this article is that it explains convincingly the reason why the trained non-native speaker English teacher (NNST) is better than native English speaker teacher. The trained NNST and students with the same source language have a plentiful linguistic resource (p.32). Trained NNSTs can explain accurately the uses of vocabulary, grammatical structure and provide more relevant model of English for learners (p.32). Moreover, trained NNSTs understand difficulties which students can cope in the process of learning foreign language, so they can share their experience and introduce to students effective strategies (p.32). This experience is very useful to students and motivates them in their learning. This good explanation of valuable local teachers is informative for Asian governments in order to plan the training of local teacher instead of hiring native English speaker teacher. However, the article contains some negative aspects. One weakness is poor comparison and false analogy. The author provides two CV of English teachers to prove that NNST is better native English speaker teacher. CV1 presents for perfect NNST, CV2 presents for inexperience native English speaker teacher (p.31). These examples are much exaggerated and unfair comparison. This bias weakens the author’s argument. In another example the author claims that Malaysia and Singapore were former colonies of British and part of a federation, as result, the spread of English in these countries would be similar (p.29-30). This is a faulty analogy because today they are two countries separately with their own different politics and policies. Consequently, the spread of English in these countries were not in the same way. Another negative characteristic is the lack of statistics to support his argument. In the beginning of the article, he states that “Asian governments have routinely expressed fears that the learning of English will lead to the adoption of so-call ‘Western’ cultural values” (p.28). However, the author does not provide the source of this information and no statistics as well. The reader does...