As a native English-speaking English teacher you are lucky as your profession is in demand. Furthermore you possess an innate knowledge, fluency and understanding of the English language and your accent makes you sound like an expert. You may also however be unlucky as on balance, you are likely to be monolingual (speaking only one language) and you will, in all probability have to learn English grammar before you can teach it.

Some of the reasons you are lucky to be a native English speaker.

The current global demand for learning English is unprecedented. 

In many countries English is seen as essential to further education, international business and careers in fields such as science and medicine. Social mobility itself in countless countries is often tied to a person’s ability in the English language.

Current estimates from the British Council (2013) are that more than two billion people are using or learning to use the English language and it is “now spoken by a quarter of the world’s population” (p. 16). This means that job availability for English language teachers has never been higher. 

You will be looked upon favourably in the employment market.

Employers abroad usually request ‘native-speakers’ even though some have altered this recently to request also speakers with ‘native-like proficiency’. Despite this, many still prefer that teachers come from countries where English is a first language such as the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

You will have an intuitive knowledge of what is correct and incorrect in the language.

Sentence structures, idioms and pronunciation will come naturally to you however you would still have had to work at school to develop ‘Standard English’ “the English language in its most widely accepted form, adhering to fixed academic norms of spelling, grammar, and usage” (Dictionary.com, 2021) because, by definition, it can only be developed through advanced education (Piller, 2001). 

You have an accent that many students wish to learn.

Many schools, parents and students talk about speaking English with a ‘native accent’. In an EFL context (learning English where it is not used in the community) this is actually very difficult because of the limited English language exposure. A native-speaker accent furthermore is unlikely after about the age of 10 (Dollmann, Kogan, Weißmann, 2020), so unless you are teaching very young learners, or your learners are actors and able to ‘put-on’ an accent, a native-speaker accent is an unrealistic language learning goal.

You probably won’t experience the feeling that your first language is less important.

Many students from diverse backgrounds in schools in the West experience discrimination and racism. Moreover the English-only approach to education means that these students receive attention and cultivation of their English-speaking selves whilst their other language-speaking/bilingual selves are cast out to be used and explored in other non-school domains. This has left many feeling as if their own first languages are insignificant in the academic realm and more generally, the wider English-speaking community. This contributes to speakers of other languages shifting to English and leads to the loss of the first language in future generations, including often even their own children. This can be devastating for families as these languages are often the languages of family, of community and intimacy and of affiliation (Fishman, 1991) and have vital roles to play in the construction of identities (Fielding, 2015; Fillmore, 2000).

Some of the reasons you are unlucky to be a native English speaker.

You might not speak another language.

Unlike the billions of other people on the planet you are possibly monolingual. The researcher Vivian Cook has stated that being a bi/multilingual is in actuality almost certainly the norm for humanity (2013). As a monolingual you won’t have experienced what it is like learning an additional language, an additional way to express yourself and you won’t be able to advise your students with your own experience of doing so. Furthermore you will probably be unsure as to how students’ languages can be utilised as resources and assets for learning English as a bilingual otherwise might.

You will probably have to learn English grammar so that you can teach it.

As a native English-speaker you would have learned at school how to read, write and spell in the English language and then probably progressed to studying English literature. At this level you would have read novels, examined the prominent themes in the stories, and explored how these related to your own life experience. As an English as an Additional Language teacher you will often be teaching how the English language works and how it can be used for communication in different situations. You will need to be able to explain types and characteristics of verbs, subject-verb agreement and how formal academic writing differs from informal conversational English whilst you may not have learnt this yourself at school.