Students’ Situated Preferences for ‘Native’ and ‘Non‐Native’ English‐Speaking Schoolteachers and Private Tutors in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

English private tutoring (EPT) has become a major site of English learning for students in many examination‐oriented societies, yet world Englishes scholarship has rarely looked inside shadow education. This article compares how the same learners reason about their preferences for so‐called native and non‐native English‐speaking teachers (NESTs and NNESTs) across two coexisting educational contexts: mainstream schooling and EPT. Drawing on focus‐group interviews with 64 senior secondary students from 16 tutorial schools in Hong Kong, the study finds a relatively balanced orientation in mainstream schooling, where students value NESTs for immersion and prestige and NNESTs for Cantonese‐mediated comprehension and empathy. However, there is a pronounced preference for locally experienced NNESTs in EPT, where the decisive criterion shifts from nativeness to demonstrable command of the local examination. A telling case is a NEST chosen because he had himself sat and excelled in the public examination, suggesting that what learners prize is contextual, examination‐specific expertise rather than nativeness as such. Reading these patterns through a world Englishes lens, the article argues that shadow education is a revealing site in which the native‐speaker ideal is reshaped by examination capital, and that learners’ situated reasoning is more nuanced than the native/non‐native binary implies. The study contributes a comparative, learner‐side account of teacher preferences and brings the under‐explored context of shadow education into the purview of world Englishes.