Are EFL pre-service teachers’ judgment of teaching competence swayed by the belief that the EFL teacher is a L1 or LX user of English?

The problematic issues surrounding Native-speakerism and the use of the terms native/non-native speaker (NS/NNS) have increasingly been the focus of academic work and debate (Aneja 2016; Holliday 2015; Kamhi-Stein 2016; Leonard 2018; Mahboob 2018; Richard 2017; Swan et al. 2015). Though the concept and the terms have been heavily criticized because they are simplistic and static (Faez 2011; Leonard 2018), researchers face a dilemma “because there is a necessity to use terms, ‘non-native speaker’ and ‘native speaker’, which should not be in use at all” (Holliday 2015: 12). Paradoxically, use of the terms even when defending the rights of the NNS may have contributed to perpetuating the use of the term. This study explores to what extent the terms ‘NS/NNS’ may elicit underlying biases among pre-service teachers in Germany and Austria judging a video-recording of an EFL teacher after being told that the teacher was a “native speaker” or a “non-native speaker” . Would the labelling of the teacher they were watching influence their judgment?