And from yesterday's Guardian...
"...
The Home Office said it would be wrong to assume applicants from English-speaking countries had workable English. "Just because someone's born in an English-speaking country doesn't mean to say they're exempt from these standards of proof," the spokesman said. ..."
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Any serious linguist would be scratching his or her head at this nonsense. Here are a couple of quotes from an article by a sociolinguist on the significance of the concept of "native speaker":
'Linguists ... have long given a special place to the native speaker as the only true and reliable source of language data' (Ferguson 1983: vii).
The native speaker is relied on to know what the score is, how things are done, because s/he carries the tradition, is the repository of 'the language'. The native speaker is also expected to exhibit normal control especially in fluent connected speech (though in writing only after long schooling.), and to have command of expected characteristic strategies of performance and of communication. A native speaker is also expected to 'know' another native speaker, in part because of an intuitive feel, like for like, but also in part because of a characteristic systematic set of indicators, linguistic, pragmatic and paralinguistic, as well as an assumption of shared cultural knowledge."
The fact that someone was born [and grew up in] in an English-speaking country, and learnt English from earliest childhood, is, ahem, the official DEFINITION of the status of "native speaker of English". There are books written on the subject, folks.
It's the Home Office being bend-over-backwards contorted-in-knots politically correct and xenophobic AT THE SAME TIME...
I suggest every applicant, when submitting such evidence as the asinine Home Office may direct, also address an official complaint against this xenophobic and insulting policy.
