However, perhaps it's a little short sighted to say that only native born speakers should be allowed to work as FTs. If you ask any Chinese employee at a foreign trade company who they do business with on a day to day basis they won't just tell you the English, Americans, etc. they say that they speak to Russians, Germans, people from the Middle East and so on and they do it all in English. Dealing with the little foibles of other non-native speakers is a reality that students will have to face if they choose to use their English skills in this way. Therefore is there an argument that they should be exposed to this in the classroom?

Interesting post. I think students will have enough enough to be getting on with being exposed to different accents from the English speaking world without Veladimir Putin sticking his oar in. However I have sat in on numerous FT's from American, Australia, Scotland ,Canada, and so on, and they all tend to teach good standard English, and the same English. They also know all the different ways of saying; and all our expressions, that Veladimir will not know so well. Whether it is car mechanics or a language you should as a student have a good grounding in the standard ways of doing things or saying things before you, in this case, do an extra course so you can speak to the Russians(or hundreds of others) when they speak English. Wherever you go to in the English speaking world, there may very well be a few idiosyncratics-but amazingly, considering the size of the language, it's all pretty much the same-let's keep it that way; and the only way to do that is to only use FT's from appropriate countries.