African Immigrant Teachers Teaching Young EFL Learners: A Racial Discrimination Study

Abstract

Teaching English language to young learners in an English as a Foreign Language/English as a Second Language context could be challenging especially for African immigrants, as they face varying arrays of challenges ranging from low wages, staff abuse, and other racial discriminations. A lot has been written about racially related issues in our school system yet there are limited works of literature that focus on the challenges of African immigrant English as a Second Language teachers with regards to racial discrimination. To investigate this, a mixed-method research design was used to elicit information from 68 African immigrant English as a Second Language teachers, teaching young English as a Foreign Language learners in 3 countries. The participants were purposively chosen after obtaining written and oral consent from them. A structured questionnaire and semi-structured interview questions were instruments for data collection. Reliability and validity checks were carried out before administering the questionnaire. After analysis, a notable finding was that African immigrant teachers felt unaccepted by the host communities and this made it difficult for the English as a Second Language learners to listen to classroom instructions given by these immigrant teachers. Again, the parents of these learners find it difficult to accept African immigrant teachers teaching their children as they deemed them incompetent to teach them. Other findings of the study were vital in making pedagogical conclusions on racial discrimination issues encountered by African immigrant English as a Second Language teachers. The ways forward for an all-inclusive educational system devoid of ethnic, religious, sexuality and racial issues were suggested.