ABSTRACT
Teachers differ in terms of how aware they are of the language they have to teach, but in principle it would seem obvious to expect them to have a minimum level of awareness that will guide their teaching decisions. Non-native teachers have been described by Medgyes (1994) and subsequent authors comparing native and non-native teachers (Bayyurt, 2006, 2017; Llurda, 2005, 2015; Moussu and Llurda, 2008) as possessing a high level of language awareness, due to their L2 learning process. Conversely, native teachers may differ a great deal as some will have gone through extensive linguistic training but many others are appointed to teaching positions by the sole virtue of their native-speaker condition. Some may have never gone through linguistic training and in the case of monolingual speakers will even lack the expertise acquired during the process of learning an L2.
