Against European legislation: native language as a job requirement?

[Torsten]

Hi,

I've read somewhere that it is against European legislation if a language school limits their job offers to native speakers only. In other words, according to European legislation, a language school is not allowed to post job offers that say "candidate must be a native speaker of English" for example. What do you think of this?

Thanks,
Torsten
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Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[Jamie (K)]

There are times when a native speaker's skills are necessary. For example, a lot of German engineers and business people need to go to places like Kentucky or Alabama to work, and they need to understand the dialect. I have never seen a non-native English speaker who can speak or imitate southern US dialects well enough to prepare such a student, but a native English-speaking resident of the northern US can fake it well enough so that instructor doesn't have to be a native southerner. However, the instructor has to be a native speaker, at least.

A better law would allow the language school to require a native speaker for a job but simply demand that the school be ready to justify the requirement for the particular position.

A native speaker isn't always needed at the lower levels of grammar and vocabulary instruction. One particular native-speaking individual may not be as good an instructor at that level as some particular non-native speaker. However, when the native and non-native speaker are equally qualified, the native speaker is usually a better choice. (I was in a situation once here in the US where two of three teachers were clueless, miserable instructors, and the only good instructor was from Russia.) On the other hand, sometimes the non-native-speaking instructor understands the student's mental processes better than the native speaker. I once tried to hand a student of German off to a native German speaker, and the student protested, claiming that I understood the reasons for her mistakes better than the native German did: "You can tell me how I got on the wrong track, but the native instructor just knows I'm wrong and no more."

Sometimes a native speaker is required because often a non-native speaker -- even one who's been resident in an English-speaking country for many years -- can't get the cultural cues right in authentic speech and text, and they can wildly mistranslate things in contexts where native speakers wouldn't. They might translate "plant" as "tree" where a native speaker would interpret it correctly as "factory". They might translate "park" literally, whereas a native speaker would find it obvious that the word means sitting in a car parked in some remote area and kissing.

Again, I don't think it's unreasonable for a school to require a native speaker for a job, but I don't find it unreasonable for them to be expected to justify the requirement. That would be too complex for the EU's usual meat-axe approach to regulation, however.