More than native speakers what our students need is having the possibility of inmersion in an English speaking country. If you are going to hire a native speaker to teach English you must be sure that this person holds a degree in Linguistics, ESOL or TEFL, otherwise, sometimes native speakers know the language but they do not have metalinguistic knowledge to teach English grammar for instance. I am a fluent and native speaker of Spanish and I have had the opportunity of teaching Spanish in USA. Although I am a native speaker of Spanish, it turned out to be difficult for me to explain grammar issues to the students.

Thank you Roxana. I totally agree with you . Some pedadogical knowledge must be a prerquisite. Opting for immersion can be determined by the goals why English is learnt.

On the other hand, a near-native, proficient non-native, qualified teacher may be able to teach better than a native, even qualified one since s/he her/himself has experienced learning that same foreign language and knows particular aspects that this culture and mentality usually has difficulties with in learning the foreign language.

In terms of teaching grammar, a qulified non-native might be more familiar with how to teach and where the challenges are. On the other hand, native speakers might be good patterns of pronunciation for the studens and the range of vocabulary they use and teach might be more authentic and useful for the everyday life usage. Both teachers have advantages and disadvantages which is not easy to judge.

Thank you Laura. I really appreciate your stance and respect and adopt your viewpoint.

I do agree with Laura. English is now not only one variety. There are many varieties of English in the world that defining one standard English is bias and we cannot say that which one has the priority . Who is the native speaker of English? Who can claim?Even in the Kachru's inner circle countries, there are varieties of English which have differences. So, the important point in TESOl is focusing on being internationally intelligible.

"internationally intelligible". I liked this phrase. Thank you Simin.

I believe that we still need qualified native speakers of English as teachers of the language. They have the advantage of studying and teaching a language thay have acquired and to a large extent may have no problems of interference. However, an L2 user of English (Kachru's expanding cirle) that is well trained is in my opinion better than an untrained smooth talking native speaker. The L2 user has the advantage of having a shared experience with the learners.

My experience indicates that the way L1 learners learn English is radically different from the way L2 learners handle it. In my house for example, when I look at my kids school work and ask them about classroom practice, I see a lot of differences between Nigeria (L2 context) and UK (L1 context). The UK employs a lot of literature in teaching English while in Nigeria, the emphasis is on linguistic rules first then use of the rules in practice.

Secondly, when I was doing my masters degree in the UK, my British and American classmates and others that grew up in these contexts could not understand tree diagrams used for sentence analysis while, L2 users handled this very well.

On the issue of immersion, I believe the people in FL contexts definitely need it while some in the L2 context may need it for specific purposes.

In view of the foregoing, the most effective and efficient teacher in my opinion is one who has a good mastery of the subject matter and the pedagogic knowledge and skills to move learners from a lower level of Linguistic ability to a higher one.

The native speaker teacher factor is to some extent a psychological thing in the mind of some administrators, parents and learners.

Apparently it is crucial. The person in charge in the place where I used to work declared proudly in a recent meeting that all his teaching staff are native speakers; thus, they are the best.  

Good question indeed! My views are in line with all of you. Non- native speakers and speakers of the same L1 as the students usually turn out to be more acquainted with the difficulties the students encounter, especially in early stages such as A1, A2 and B1 levels. 

So, the ones who are proud to declare that their staff is native, are underestimating truly teachers or linguists and giving priority to native speakers who may just be in the place for the occasion.

http://books.google.es/books?hl=es&lr=&id=DSpGAQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA5&dq=native+teachers+or+not%3F&ots=KpXZniA4pn&sig=tXz10kGqWy3SsSYxkW2PeR1va9M#v=onepage&q=native%20teachers%20or%20not%3F&f=false