The native/non-native debate: A practitioner responds

It is, perhaps, with some surprise that I find the native/non-native divide again attracting attention. The first I remember of this being an issue was when we were informed that the native speaker was dead (Paikeday, 1985). Needless to say, to those of us who did not feel at all deceased, this came as a surprise, but the announcement certainly attracted attention. The next contribution to the debate that I remember was Peter Medgyes's (1992) question regarding whether native or non-native was worth more. And so the dispute has continued spasmodically until the present, when we find two pieces on the subject within two recent issues of Language Teaching (Llurda & Calvet-Terré, 2024; Selvi et al., 2024).