I was a little amazed by the responses to my post in that if one considers things very carefully and avoids generalizations about "the typical amount of culture taught by most FT's" and the student "desire to learn about Western Culture-it's simply from a postion of interest rather than practical economic reasons", that's flat wrong since it is obvious that almost 100% of the texts used to teach Engish in China comes from US or UK authors. Additionally, the interest is for practical economic reasons. Is the Chinese Stock Market and it's present market driven economy anything other than Western. I guess some of you either can't read or can't understand what you have read. I said 25% of the content of my courses were culture-related. But take a moment and reflect on what you taught today, was it anything other than Western oriented? Were the dialogues or texts used developed by non-native educators? Was the language patterned after anything other than Western? Did the students want to learn or sing anything other than Western songs? Was the grammer anything other than Western? I could go on and on to the point that my 25% becomes way too low, it's probably more like 90%. Take a breath, think about it and I'm sure you'll agree that these are the reasons the preference is still Natve Speakers. Of course all the tapes used in listening tests like IELTS and BEC are either British or American English. CALL (computer assisted language learning) is exclusively Western and is the wave of the future. Students and Administrators in China prefer neutral, native English accents and even if we think it's unfair it remains a FACT. I'm wondering that in your own country do the schools hire non-native English teachers? OK boys, back to your keyboards, can't wait to see how you try to refute this. Please avoid the generalizations, try to base any response on FACTS