Towards a New Paradigm for English Language Teaching

English for Specific Purposes in Asia and Beyond

Hajime Terauchi, Judy Noguchi, Akira Tajino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429753572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

This book proposes a new paradigm for English language teaching based on concepts from English for Specific Purposes (ESP) research and applications as well as from growing evidence relating pattern recognition to language learning ability. The contributors to the volume argue that learners should not try to become proficient all-around users of 'idealistic native-like' English, but instead should be realistic about what they need to acquire and how to go about achieving their specific goals.

The book discusses the present situation by describing the status quo of English language education in Japan, taking into consideration recent trends of CLIL (content and language integrated learning), EMI (English medium instruction), and TBLT (task-based language teaching) as well as the work done on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). It introduces new movements in ESP in Japan and in other Asian regions, covering topics ranging from genre analysis to corpus linguistics, and presents application examples of ESP practice in a range of educational situations in Japan from the graduate school level to elementary and middle school contexts. It also offers readers application examples of ESP practice in a range of business settings and expands the discussion to the global sphere where EAP and ESP are gaining importance as the number of ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) speakers continue to increase.

The book will be of great interest to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students working in the fields of EFL and ESL.

Part 1

Key concepts in ESP

1 ELT

Past, present and future

Judy Noguchi

A brief review of the history of English language teaching

Over the past century, the teaching of English as a second or foreign language has become increasingly important with the rapid globalization of the world that needed a lingua franca. According to a report on the World Economic Forum Global Agenda site, there are about 1.5 billion speakers of English of which only 375 million are native speakers (Myers, 2015). This is in contrast to the second most commonly used language of Chinese, which has 1.1 billion speakers, of which 982 million are native speakers. These numbers clearly show how extensively English is used as a second or alternative language by speakers of many languages.

Such a need to communicate in a common language has led to an overwhelming demand for effective language teaching. This, in turn, has brought on wave after wave of “innovative” approaches to counter Grammar-Translation and the Direct Method: the Audiolingual Method, the Silent Way, Total Physical Response, the Natural Approach and the Communicative Approach. The list continues but becomes more complex as today there are approaches that include the content to be taught in addition to the language that needs to be acquired, such as EMI (English as a medium of instruction) and CLIL (Content and language integrated learning). What these approaches have had in common is the native speaker of English as the model target.

Howatt and Smith (2014: 76) state that this “procession-of-methods” has not had “an impact on professional discourse” and has tended to result in comparison with past methods to favorably present the new. Howatt and Smith (2014) criticize this emphasis on “paradigm shifts” in place of continuity, the absence of recognizing “relative historical importance”, and attempts to claim universality rather than acknowledge “historically constituted phenomena”. To remedy the situation, they propose categorizing the various methods into periods within the two stages of “Modern Language Teaching in Europe (1750–1920)” and “English Language Teaching beyond and within Europe (1920–2000+)” (Howatt and Smith, 2014: 77). Stage I is composed of the Classical Period (1750–1880) which focused on the classical languages being taught by the Grammar-Translation Method and the Classical Method. This was followed by the Reform Period (1880–1920) which emphasized the teaching of spoken language through the Natural Method, the Berlitz Method and the Direct Method. Until the 1920s, the focus was mainly Europe but this began to shift to address the need to teach English to speakers of other languages, especially in Asia. This heralded the advent of Stage II (1920~) which called for a scientific approach to language teaching in order to be able to justify concepts arising from the newly launched social sciences, such as linguistics and psychology. In Japan, Harold E. Palmer introduced the Oral Method and the Multiple Line of Approach, while Hornby, who had worked with Palmer in Tokyo, developed the Situational Approach. There were also the Oral Approach of Fries in Michigan and the Audiolingual Method developed to teach American military forces during World War II (Grantz, 2014). The most recent Communicative Period (1970–2000+) has aimed at teaching for “real-life communication” and is associated with Communicative Language Teaching and Task-based Language Teaching (Howatt and Smith, 2014:78).

Timeline of English language education

English education up until the 1960s

The “grammatical syllabus” was the center of education in the 1960s and the primary teaching methods were “grammar translation” and “audio-lingual.” English as spoken by native speakers was the target model.

English education from the 1970s to 1990s

In 1976, Notional Syllabuses, proposed by Wilkins, arose from the emerging communicative movement. According to Tono (2013), Wilkins argues that the basis of language education lies in developing communicative ability. By dividing language resources into notions and functions, Wilkins introduced the concept of preparing a syllabus by taking an integrative approach to language resources. Such a syllabus led to an approach in which expressions were chosen according to situation and interlocutors (e.g., pragmatics and a task-based approach). This led the basis for a communicative approach to language teaching.

Another important concept was that of Threshold Level English, proposed by van Ek and Alexander in 1975. Its full revised version, Threshold Level (J.A. van Ek and J.M. Trim, Council of Europe, 1991), had a significant impact on what would later develop into the Common European Framework of Reference of Languages (CEFR) (Tono, 2013). The “threshold” described in this work indicates what and how much learners would need for effective communication and where the threshold should be set to achieve specific goals (Tono, 2013). The Threshold Level would later become the B1 level in CEFR.

Although the learning model was still based on native speakers of English, the focus now was on the functions of language. The idea of shared text was established, leading to the concept of genre and attention to the discourse community.

English education in the 2000s

English language education in the 2000s can be described as the era of CEFR. For about 30 years from the 1970s, van Ek, Trim, and others worked on establishing CEFR. One of the important principles is plurilingualism which refers to “language ability that enables individuals to build mutual relationships by communicating in different languages in different situations” (Tono, 2013: 18) It also refers to the “ability that individuals understand plural cultures in different situations to understand culture and relation of each other and interact with each other.” Learners are considered participants in these social actions where language plays an important role in fulfilling specific purposes. This plurilinguistic ability can be nurtured via language awareness, language strategies, and metalinguistic ability. Simply learning multiple languages simultaneously is not equivalent to plurilinguistic ability.

CEFR was developed by the Council of Europe based on a three-language policy, which calls for European citizens to learn and use two languages other than their mother tongues. This policy, clearly proclaimed in the Barcelona Declaration of 2002, promotes the language policy of plurilingualism. The common framework was developed as a tool to spread and implement that policy across Europe. Specifically, the framework consists of three levels composed of two subdivisions: A, Basic user; B, Independent user; and C, Proficient user. The six level categories starting with A1 at the lowest level culminates with C2 at the upper end. In the CEFR 2018 revised version, what the language users are able to do with the language at each level is given as descriptor scales for reception (listening comprehension, reading comprehension, audio-visual reception), production (spoken and written production and their strategies), interaction (spoken, written and online interactions and their strategies), and mediation (of texts, concepts and communication, including translation, construction of meaning and facilitating communication in delicate situations). Using the CEFR enables us to compare communication levels of different languages for the same individual as well as with other people. For example, one could be at B2 level for English reception skills and at A1 for French receptions skills.

While the 2001 CEFR used the native speaker as the standard model, the 2018 revised model has replaced all mention of “native speaker” with “speaker of the target language.” This indicates the growing awareness of the use of English as a lingua franca and a need to legitimatize its usage by speakers from a wide range of backgrounds.

Awareness of cultural diversity

The above synopsis shows that the basic concepts and ideas of language teaching, especially of English, originated from Europe and the United States. Even in Japan, where Palmer worked as an adviser to the Department of Education before World War II, the method he used was based on a synthesis of the concepts of the Reform Movement and the Berlitz Method (Howatt and Smith, 2014: 85). Thus, teaching English has usually meant acculturating non-English speakers to an English language view of the world, from situational dialogues between native speakers to its ways of thinking and acting, such as being able to do critical thinking, conforming to the western-based logic system, and actively voicing individual opinions.

With the rapid rise in the number of those using English around the world, “Kachru’s Three Circles model of World Englishes … provided a valuable counterpoint to Quirk’s ‘deficit linguistics’, by calling for a ‘liberation linguistics’” (Park and Wee, 2009: 389). As reviewed by Kachru (2011), the Inner Circle was composed of countries where English was used as the native language, i.e., the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, while the Outer Circle comprised countries where colonialism had institutionalized the use of English, such as India, Singapore and India. The third was the Expanding Circle of countries such as Japan, South Korea and China, where English had no official status but was being used to participate in international communication. Kachru regarded the non-native forms of English as different but not deficit in opposition to the view of Quirk who considered them invalid as models for teaching English because of the need for a central standard (Takatsuka, 2008). This application of “exonormative Inner Circle norms to ELT classrooms in diverse multilingual societies” led to “a major controversy in the fields of World Englishes (WE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF)” (Chan 2016: 372).

McKay (2011: 122), in discussing the pedagogy of English as an international lingua franca, views “globalization as a reformulation of social space in which the global and local are constantly interacting with one another; in addition, I will argue that neither one should be afforded a dominant position”. In other words, she points to the need to develop language teaching curricula that are relevant to the local linguistic ecology with a respect for the local culture of learning. Here, let us next explore the relationship between language and culture.

Relationship between language and culture

In 1987, Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr., an American educator and academic literary critic, who coined the word “cultural literacy”, published the bestseller Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987). In 1989, he published A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy for children, which included entries on proverbs, idioms, literature, mythology, music, art, sciences and technology, as well as The Bible. While this idea of cultural literacy is helpful when trying to understand a culture, in this case “American culture” at a certain point in time, it has been criticized as being biased, ignoring minorities and other cultural backgrounds (Lo Bianco, 2007). What is important for us to consider is the relationship between “culture” and “literacy”.

Culture is difficult to define. Much has been written about it. CARLA (Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition) at the University of Minnesota presents various definitions of culture on its website but gives the following as the one adopted for the purposes of their research:

culture is defined as the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group.

(CARLA, 2018)

Thus, culture is closely related to language because when the members of the group share “patterns of behaviors and interactions”, they are likely to do so using language.

Language embodies the values of the culture and takes on communication patterns of speech styles and ways of listening as well as concepts of space and time, as described by the Lewis Model (Lewis, 2018). Richard Lewis, who visited 135 countries and worked in more than 20, concluded that humans could be divided into three categories based on their behavior: Linear-Active, Multi-Active, Reactive. As can be seen from Figure 1.1, which presents the characteristics of these categories, styles of communication (in bold lettering, my emphasis), and therefore the language used to realize this, has an important role in realizing the concept of culture.

Figure 1.1 Categories of the Lewis Model (emphasis mine)

Source: www.crossculture.com/about-us/the-model/

The Lewis Model, which is often presented as a triangle with the three categories as the points, classifies people from different countries as tending to display the characteristics of one of these categories. For example, people from the United States are categorized as Linear-active together with those from Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom. Multi-active people tend to be from Italy, Spain, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Columbia, Peru and Bolivia. Those classified as Reactive are people from China, Vietnam and Japan. People from other countries appear between these points on the triangle.

While recognizing that people do not fit neatly into categories, the model does tell us that there are differences in communication styles for people from different cultural backgrounds. These differences should not be considered barriers but rather opportunities to experience a variety of communication sty...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Why this book now?
• PART 1: Key concepts in ESP
• PART 2: ESP in East Asia: Overview and examples
• PART 3: ESP practice: Suggestions from Japan
• Epilogue: New horizons for ESP
• Index