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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Language, Culture and Diversity
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1473353

Who Gets to Be An ELT Course Book Author? Native Speakerism in English For Specific Purposes And Business English Course Books

Provisionally accepted
Marek Kiczkowiak Marek Kiczkowiak *
  • Academic English Now, Jackson, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Native speakerism has a profound influence on many aspects of ELT, for example negatively affecting job opportunities of those perceived as 'non-native speakers'. Nevertheless, little is known about the effect of native speakerism on the recruitment of course book authors (CBAs). Therefore, this study analysed the linguistic and ethnic representation of 161 CBAs of 77 business English business English and English for specific purposes English for Specific Purposes course books (CBs) published globally by Pearson, OUP, CUP, Macmillan and NGL.The data clearly show that publishers tend to hire white 'native speakers' from the UK as CBAs. More specifically, 90% of all CBA slots were taken by 'native speakers', 95% by white CBAs, and 78% by CBAs from the UK. This indicates a profound native speakerist bias among publishers against not only 'non-native speakers', but also those 'native speakers' who are not white or do not come from the UK. It is thus suggested that business English and English for Specific Purposes publishers pay greater attention to the diversity of the author teams they hire.

    Keywords: native speakerism, Course books, Non-native speaker, teaching English, native speaker

    Received: 30 Jul 2024; Accepted: 24 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Kiczkowiak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Marek Kiczkowiak, Academic English Now, Jackson, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.