Native and non-native: what can they offer? Lessons from team-teaching in Japan

This article discusses the contribution that joint instruction by a native-speaking teacher and a non-native-speaking teacher can make to classroom language learning. By reviewing the last decade's team-teaching practice in Japanese secondary school EFL classrooms, it explores how two teachers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds can work together to provide students with more opportunities to improve their communicative competence. The article suggests that team-teaching may be most effective when it is ‘team-learning’, in which all the participants, teachers as well as students, are encouraged to learn from one another by exchanging ideas or cultural values. By clarifying the notion of ‘team-teaching’ and the nature of the ‘team’ itself, it is also able to propose ways in which the team could be reformulated to promote authentic communication in the classroom and so improve students' linguistic and interactional competencies.