Classroom Interactions as Cross-Cultural Encounters

Native Speakers in EFL Lessons

Jasmine C. M. Luk, Angel M. Y. Lin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351571715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Classroom Interactions as Cross-Cultural Encounters is about native English speakers teachingEnglish as a global language in non-English speaking countries. Through analysis of naturally occurring dialogic encounters, the authors examine the multifaceted ways in which teachers and students utilize diverse communicative resources to construct, display, and negotiate their identities as teachers, learners, and language users, with different pedagogic, institutional, social, and political implications. A range of issues in applied linguistics is addressed, including linguistic imperialism, post-colonial theories, micropolitics of classroom interaction, language and identity, and bilingual classroom practices. Intended to help TESOL professionals of different cultural backgrounds, working in different sociocultural contexts, to critically understand how non-assimilationist, dialogic intercultultural communication with students can be achieved and built on for mutual cultural and linguistic enrichment and empowerment, this book:
*emphasizes the sociocultural meanings and micropolitics of classroom interactions that reveal the complex realities of power and identity negotiations incross-cultural interactions in ELT (English Language Teaching) classroom contexts;
*revisits and reconstitutes thenotion of native-speakerness and repositions the roles of native and non-native English teachers in the TESOL profession in the contexts of decolonization and globalization;
*highlights the need to mobilize intercultural communicative resources for global communication;
*addresses two major concerns of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classroom researchers and teachers: student resistance and learning motivation; and
*examines and analyzes the changing ideologies (both explicit and implicit) of teachers and students about English learning in the context of a post-colonial society, and how these ideologies are being enacted, reproduced, but also sometimes contested in EFL classroom interactions.Each chapter includes Questions for Reflection and Discussion to promote critical thinking and understanding of the issues discussed. Tuning-In discussion questions are provided in the three chapters on classroom data analysis to activate readers interpretive schemas before they examine the actual classroom episodes. The data are from an ethnographic study in post-colonial Hong Kong secondary schools involving four native English-speaker teachers and two bilingual Cantonese-English speaking teachers engaged in intercultural classroom dialogues with their Cantonese Hong Kong students. The rich, naturally occurring classroom data and in-depth analyses provide useful pedagogical materials for courses in EFL teacher education programs on classroom discourse analysis from sociocultural perspectives.

1

Introduction

The following incident happened 7 years after Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony in 1997: Due to declining birth rate, dozens of publicly funded primary schools in Hong Kong could not recruit enough Year One (aged 6) students and were closing down. A couple of such schools appealed and obtained special approval from the education authority to run the schools in a self-financed mode. Press releases by these schools highlighted one major measure to prove to the public the schools’ determination to provide quality education—the hiring of several more “native-speaking” English teachers (termed NETs in Hong Kong) to teach English in the new school term. Media coverage of the new student orientation day of one of the schools highlighted one major event—three to four NETs were playing games with a group of 6-year-old schoolchildren. There were smiles on the students’ faces. The television coverage has sent out a strong unspoken message to the public. The parents have made the right choice to send their children to the school because students there would receive the best possible type of English language education (which is the greatest concern of most parents in Hong Kong)—to be taught by NETs who have a reputation for being able to teach the language in authentic, lively, and innovative ways. The availability of NETs is the strongest warranty of quality education that the schools have pledged to provide. The generous recruitment of NETs is believed to be something that would make the schools stand out from the rest, a promising step toward becoming a prestigious school.³

The incident previously described reflects the symbolic (or perhaps consensual or hegemonic) status and value of NETs in a post-British colonial, as well as a cosmopolitan city such as Hong Kong. To most schools in Hong Kong striving to survive or maintain the established reputation, NETs seem to have become an essential trademark of quality English language education that is highly priced and valued by the whole society. NETs are also the main characters of this book. However, the term “native speakers” in the book title does not only refer to native “English” speakers but also to “native” speakers of Cantonese⁴—the local students and English teachers with Chinese parentage, born and raised in Hong Kong.

The reader might be interested to know why the authors, two female ethnic-Chinese English language teachers and teacher educators born and raised in Hong Kong, wanted to write this book and what our stance is in the controversial issue of the power and status of NETs in EFL settings. Some readers might suspect that from their local sociopolitical positions, the authors might hold the view that NETs are not better than LETs (local English teachers). In fact, we are going to show that the scenario is much more complex than can be reduced to any simple binary sets of conclusion (e.g., “good” or “bad”). To help readers better understand the background of this book, let us begin with the authors’ experiences of learning English.

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THE AUTHORS’ EXPERIENCES OF LEARNING ENGLISH

Jasmine Luk

My path in learning English was nothing unusual. I was born to a working class family with virtually no English-related linguistic and cultural capital. Like the majority of children born in the 1960s, English entered into my life at the age of 4, when I attended kindergarten. The only person I could turn to for problems about English was my eldest brother who began learning the language 7 years earlier than me. Throughout my primary and secondary schooling, I had not been taught by any native English teachers.

Because my results in English and math in the Secondary School Entrance Examination⁵ were not outstanding, I was allocated a school place in an academically average secondary school close to the government-subsidized public housing estate⁶ where I lived. The school was run by a Chinese Buddhist Association. Perhaps due to this religious background, the English learning culture was not strong compared with that in Christian and Catholic missionary schools in Hong Kong. There were seldom any activities to promote an English-speaking culture in the school. Even though most of the English teachers were well qualified to teach English and used almost 100% English in the lessons,⁷ English remained a language inside the classroom for purely study and examination purposes. In the corridors and on the playground, seldom a word of English was heard among the teachers and students. At the end of my matriculation, I obtained distinctions for all my Chinese language-related subjects in the advanced level examination whereas my use of English was just a good pass. None of my classmates received a distinction or a good credit for their use of English in that examination. To sum up, although I have both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to learn English, my investment in learning English from primary to secondary schooling was solely driven by a desire to pass examinations, and to climb up the social ladder by entering the English-medium university.

Close “Encounter”⁸ of a Cross-Cultural Kind

Despite my average result in English,⁹ I was admitted to the University of Hong Kong, the most prestigious English-medium university at that time because of my good results in other subjects. After entering the university, I took English as my major in the university even though I attained excellent grades in the Chinese subjects in the A-Level examination. The sociopolitical situation of Hong Kong in the early 1980s convinced me that obtaining a degree in English would furnish me with, in Bourdieu’s (1991) terms, more economic, social, and cultural capital for my future development than majoring in Chinese. Due to the university policy that English should be used as the medium of instruction for all disciplines other than Chinese, I obtained more opportunities to use English to express myself. However, the most remarkable experience for me was a 15-minute casual conversation I had with an expatriate lecturer from Britain. To use English to answer questions and express myself was, of course, not a novel experience. What is most intriguing about the effect the interaction had on my subsequent development as a language learner lies in the fact that the lecturer and I shared information and exchanged views over topics arising from our respective “culture.” We talked about differences in forms of address in the kinship systems in British and Chinese cultures, and how addressing someone inappropriately might result in embarrassment. For the first time in my life, I saw the value of knowing a foreign language. If I had not known English, I would not have been able to introduce and explain the intricacies of my own culture to a “foreigner.” I saw how my knowledge in a foreign language has opened up and widened my capacity for social interaction. The ability to converse successfully over spontaneous issues other than those related to academic studies has also increased my confidence in my English proficiency.

Angel Lin

I do not belong to the small number of people in Hong Kong who have been born into families and communities that provide them with ample English linguistic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991; Delpit, 1988) to succeed in school in a British colony, where English is the key to academic success, overall success, and socioeconomic advancement. My parents do not speak any English. People we know all speak Cantonese, which is our daily language. I grew up in a home and community where few had the linguistic resources to use English at all, and even if anyone had, she or he would find it extremely socially inappropriate (e.g., sounding pompous, putting on airs) to speak English.

My chances for learning and using English hinged entirely on the school. However, I lived in a poor government-subsidized apartment building complex (called “public housing estate”) in the rural area (the New Territories) in Hong Kong, where schools were mostly put up in the early 1970s and they neither had adequate English resources (e.g., staff well versed in spoken English) nor a well-established English-speaking and English teaching and learning tradition or school culture.

My parents were poor manual workers. They put all their hopes and expectations in their children: Illiterate in English as they were, they did not fail to be keenly aware of the fact that their children’s future depended on doing well in school, and doing well in school depends on mastering the English language in the Hong Kong schooling system. They have passed on the work ethic to their children. We were urged day and night to “study hard” and especially to study English hard.

Upon leaving the primary school, I got good results in the secondary school entrance examination and got admitted to an English-medium secondary school. I would spend hours and hours looking up in the dictionary all the new words of my textbooks and writing down their pronunciations (in phonetic symbols), meanings, and examples in a vocabulary notebook and read them whenever I had time.

Constructing Alternative and Expanded Selves in English

In my circle of girlfriends in my secondary school, having pen pals had become a topic and practice of common interest. Through organizaions such as Big Blue Marble or International Youth Service, I got penfriends from England, Austria, Canada, and the United States and we communicated regularly in English by air mail letters. Sending letters to our overseas penfriends and waiting eagerly for their replies had become our everyday hobbies.

I also started to write my own private diary in English every day about that time. I started this habit when a pen pal sent me a diary book as my birthday present and suggested writing a diary as a worthwhile activity to me. I chose to write my diary in English because someone (a teacher? I don’t remember now) had told me that finding a chance to use English daily would improve one’s English. I felt that I could write my feelings more freely when I wrote in English—less inhibition and reservation—I seemed to have found a tool that gave me more freedom to express my innermost fears, worries, anger, conflicts, or excitement, hopes, expectations, likes and dislikes, or my alternative selves, without constraint or inhibition—as if this foreign language had opened up a new, personal space (a “third space,” so to speak, see related discussion in chap. 10), for me to more freely express all those difficult emotions and experiences (typical?) of an adolescent growing up, without feeling the sanctions of the adult world. I guess I was creating an expanded self in English, and English seemed to provide me with the additional resources I needed to explore myself in a somewhat different manner, in a somewhat different value system, one that appeared to be less prohibiting than my native language in some areas, for instance, in the area of explicitly articulating one’s emotions like anger.

English, it seems, had opened up a totally new space for me to express and entrust my secrets and innermost feelings—I felt safe to confide in Gretchen, my U.S. pen pal, and to my diary. I also felt that English had provided me with a tool to broaden myself, to reach out to new friends in new lands, to invent and recreate for myself a somewhat different self from the one my parents knew. It gave me excitement when new and lasting friendships across cultural and geographical boundaries were formed, and it gave me satisfying feelings like those that an adventurer would have exploring a new land and new culture.

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THE CULTURAL CHEMICAL REACTION THROUGH CROSS-CULTURAL CONTACTS

There are indeed a lot of similarities between the English-learning histories of the two authors. The most significant similarity lies in the opportunities to interact with speakers across cultures in the language that they were learning to acquire. Such experie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents in Brief
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Native-Speaking English Teachers (NETs) in Postcolonial Hong Kong
• 3 The Native-Speaking English Teachers in the Global ELT Industry
• 4 Culture and Studies of Interaction
• 5 Understanding Cross-Cultural Classroom Interaction—An Ideological Framework
• 6 The Participants in Context
• 7 Making Sense in the Lessons
• 8 Having Fun in the Lessons
• 9 Performing “Teachers” and “Students”
• 10 Implications—Toward a Pedagogy of Connecting for the Development of Intercultural Communicative Resources
• Notes
• Appendix: Conventions of Transcription
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index