Beyond ELT: more than just teaching language
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Most people would agree that the world is currently facing significant problems: we have not yet recovered from a global pandemic, wars are killing thousands every day, climate change is starting to damage people’s livelihoods and well-being, wealth inequality is increasing, minority groups are being oppressed for a variety of reasons, the spread of disinformation and fake news makes it increasingly difficult to know what is true and what is not—the list goes on. While these issues are causing real concern for people’s current welfare and for the future of the planet, and are the focus of everyday discussion all around the world, whether they have a place in the ELT classroom seems to be a different matter. There have long been calls—including from academics within the native English-speaking ‘inner circle’—for issues such as these to be incorporated into ELT curriculum content (see, for example, Pennycook 1989), but these calls have tended to be stifled by an ostensible desire for the ELT profession to remain ‘politically neutral’. In recent years, however, the extent of the problems facing the world, and the sense of urgency that something needs to be done to reverse the current trajectory, have allowed discourses advocating more transformative pedagogies to move closer to the mainstream. To this end, a number of books have been published recently that explore some of the bigger issues of concern in the world today, and how they can (and, more to the point, should) be addressed in ELT. This survey review examines five such books, offering individual reviews of each one and considering the contribution they make towards a significant shift in ELT—one that moves away from the preservation of the status quo, and becomes focused on the promotion of a critically aware, transformative, social-justice-oriented agenda. As Pennycook (2021) suggests, since its emergence as an academic discipline, the dominant view in applied linguistics in the United Kingdom and the United States—which has tended to play a significant role in informing English language teaching practice—was that it was, or should be, a ‘value-free’ discipline. As such, it drew on theories in SLA to develop language teaching approaches and methodologies from a position of what was claimed to be ‘political neutrality’. This desire for an ‘unbiased’ approach manifests itself in the content of many widely recognized ELT teacher training courses, which historically have focused on methodology and classroom processes, but which devote less attention to discussion of, or reflection on, the impact that English language teaching can have on wider society. This ostensibly neutral position is also adopted by some of the bigger global publishing companies that produce ELT materials, which tend to focus on rather bland topics that are likely to be acceptable for discussion in any context or culture, such as sport, travel, and shopping. 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Source: ELT Journal
DOI: 10.1093/elt/ccae038
Author: Steve Brown
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $5,755
OpenAlex ID: W4402284186