Context-Specific Legitimacy in English Language Teaching: Rethinking Nativeness in the Korean EFL Context

Although non-native English-speaking teachers now make up the majority of the global ELT workforce, perceived nativeness continues to function as an enduring filter in hiring and evaluation. This perspective paper examines how that filter operates unevenly across the institutional sectors of South Korea’s EFL labor market, arguing that Filipino English Teachers (FETs) face a distributive rather than a uniformly ideological inequity, with the biggest disadvantage concentrated in commercially driven private academies. Drawing on two companion studies of FETs working across Korean academic sectors (Magpale & Arcenal, 2025, in press) and integrating more recent scholarship on native-speakerism with comparative evidence from other large EFL countries, the paper develops the construct of context-specific legitimacy. Three sectoral logics are identified: credential legitimacy in higher education, relational legitimacy in public schools, and market legitimacy in private academies. The regional comparison further demonstrates that even systems with functional, non-nationality-based eligibility pathways have not displaced the symbolic hierarchies that continue to shape professional recognition. The paper concludes by arguing for sector-sensitive reform that evaluates teachers through demonstrable competence rather than identity-based proxies such as accent or nationality.