Race and native speakers in ELT: Parents' perspectives in Hong Kong

English is used as an important means of international and intercultural communication around the world more than ever. Because of its widespread use in the global context, non-native speakers of English around the world outnumber native speakers by far (Crystal, 1997). According to Kachru and Nelson (1996: 79), ‘accepting even cautious estimates, there must be at least three nonnative users of English for every old-country native user’. A similar phenomenon is also observable in the English Language Teaching (ELT) profession, with the vast majority of teachers of English as a second and foreign language in the world being non-native speakers.