Week 6 Critical Language Teaching

Dear all,

Following on from academic literacies where students should be empowered to question the need to mimic academic conventions, we now have to content with more questioning of our assumptions as a person as well as a teacher! To start, how can we not use our own culture as a starting point in our ability to teach, facilitate or coach? I believe it is dependent upon our experiences and dogma how we approach a lesson and the activities we share with the students. We are trained and taught according to our cultural background(s) and accumulate the “baggage” of the linguistic and cultural capital our background entails.

However critical language teaching has opened a black hole for the classroom where everything is “sucked in” to give meaning to the social context which students construct in the classroom rather than dictated due to say, power inequality arising from cultural or gender differences. Like Mike, I find it stimulating. Simply because, it allows us as teachers to be receptive as well, not just the students, to issues that arise in the classroom.

Street (2001) as cited in Canagarajah (2005) has conducted studies and notes how literacy pedagogical practices do not meet the students’ local usage and purpose. Further the students take what they want from the lessons and adapt it to their particular situation, it clearly suggests, whatever materials, or curriculum we are teaching require us to adapt to be relevant and appropriate to the needs of the learner. This is reinforced by addressing or at least thinking of the broader contexts and issues that exist in the world such as power and inequalities alongside the micro issues of connecting TESOL with the world it exist in (Pennycook,1999). Interestingly I can give many instances where the native speakers where I work take a position of power as they believe in their superiority over the non-native speaker, or more subtle the belief that the process approach to teaching is superior to product based approach without considering the students’ learning style or needs.

Therefore thinking about issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and violence assist in making our teaching role more engaging and enriching for all concerned. Although the experience we encounter from trial and error I believe are equally enriching. Mike has provided some fantastic experiences for any teacher’s memoirs. I have not experienced the need to have my soul saved but would try to learn from any such experience to understand differences that exist and sometimes implicitly ignored.

L8tr
Albert

References

Canagarajah, S. (2005). Critical pedagogy in L2 learning and teaching. In E. Hinkel (Ed.) Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (pp.931-949). Mahwah:Lawerence Erlbaum.

Pennycook, A.(1999). Introduction: Critical approaches to TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 33(3).