Critical Perspectives on Language Teaching Materials

J. Gray, J. Gray

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137384263
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

ThisCritical Perspectives on Language Teaching Materials brings together a collection of critical voices on the subject of language teaching materials for use in English, French, Spanish, German and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms.

1

Introduction

John Gray

As I collated the bibliographies from the individual chapters in this volume to compile a single one for the whole book I was struck by the range of the references. As might be expected in a book on language teaching materials, there were repeated references to the core texts in the ever growing materials literature – that much was to be expected. However, it was the range of references to other literatures that caught my attention. Names such as Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu, John Dewey, Friedrich Engels, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, Paulo Freire, Anthony Giddens, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-François Lyotard and Edward Said (among others) were striking for two reasons. First, they were a clear indication that those writing about language teaching materials are drawing increasingly on a wider range of disciplines than has traditionally been the case – sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, political economy; and second, that the body of thinking these names represent is itself philosophically heterogeneous. It will be immediately obvious then that this book is a collaboration between a group of scholars who (given the book’s title) are united in thinking critically about language teaching materials, but who are (as will become evident) far from being as one in their intellectual take on the objects of their scrutiny – the materials themselves.

The chapters assembled here explore a range of language teaching materials for use in English, French, Spanish, German and content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms. Traditionally the materials literature has focused mainly on English language teaching (ELT) materials, no doubt on account of the size of the global market. By including chapters on materials for languages other than English, the present volume seeks to redress something of an imbalance, while at the same time allowing for the exploration of the commonalities and differences that might exist. As writers we bring a range of perspectives to bear – as applied linguists, as teacher educators, in some cases as materials writers, and all of us as users, at some stage in our careers, of materials of the kind we discuss here. The focus is predominantly on textbooks – a focus I see as justified, given their enduring centrality in classrooms around the world.

This introductory chapter aims to set the tone for the volume as a whole and begins by outlining some of the key assumptions which underpin the book (expanded on below) – namely that:

• Commercially produced materials such as textbooks, in addition to being curriculum artefacts, are also cultural artefacts which serve to make languages mean in particular ways.

• Representation and identity are key aspects in the creation of textual meaning.

• Commercially produced materials are core commodities in textbook publishing and that this commercial aspect cannot be ignored in seeking to understand their contents.

• Language teaching research (which includes materials research) is a form of ‘boundary work’ (Edge and Richards, 1998), which presupposes the need to conduct research that is more interdisciplinary in character.

• There is a need for more materials analysis to complement the work being done by colleagues in the field of materials development and evaluation.

In discussing these assumptions I will refer mostly to ELT materials (as this is my own area of expertise) – however, many of the points made are equally applicable to language teaching materials for other languages. The introduction then concludes by introducing the individual chapters and provides a brief overview of each one.

Curriculum and cultural artefacts

In a useful state-of-the-art paper on the language teaching materials literature (which I will refer to throughout this introduction), Brian Tomlinson (2012: 143) states:

Materials can be informative (informing the learner about the target language), instructional (guiding the learner in practising the language), experiential (providing the learner with experience of the language in use), eliciting (encouraging the learner to use the language) and exploratory (helping the learner to make discoveries about language).

And indeed, at their best, materials can and should be these things. This view of materials is one which sees them primarily as curriculum artefacts – key classroom tools which are designed to facilitate language learning, and which may be more or less useful in that endeavour. However, materials are also much more than this list would suggest. In addition, they are cultural artefacts from which meanings emerge about the language being taught, associating it with particular ways of being, particular varieties of language and ways of using language, and particular sets of values. At the same time, they are also ideological (in the Marxist sense) in that the meanings they seek to create tend to endorse and reproduce (although not invariably) existing power relations, particularly with regard to social class (Gray and Block, in press), and similarly with regard to race, gender and sexual orientation (see Chapter 3). This has sometimes been referred to as the hidden curriculum, which Elsa Auerbach and Denise Burgess (1985: 476) suggest ‘generates social meanings, restraints, and cultural values which shape students’ roles outside the classroom’, or at least has the potential to do so. From this perspective, students may learn more from the textbook than the subject being taught.

Of course the idea of the hidden curriculum is not unique to language teaching materials. When I think back to when I was a child, I learned to read using the ‘Janet and John’ and the ‘Dick and Dora’ books.¹ As curriculum artefacts these materials did what they were designed to do – I learned to read using them. But I also learned a lot of other things as well. Or perhaps more accurately, certain messages I was already in receipt of were reproduced and reinforced in these textbooks – for example, about how boys and men are supposed to be, and how girls and women are supposed to be. Here are two examples from Book 1 of The Happy Venture Readers (Schonell and Serjeant, 1958). In the first, Dick is engaged in the kind of sporting activity he is shown to enjoy throughout the book:

Dick will get his big bat. Dick and Jack run to the big tree to play. Dick has the bat. Jack has the ball. ‘I will throw my ball,’ said Jack. ‘I will hit it,’ said Dick. (p. 16)

Dora on the other hand, although she also participates in games, is frequently shown playing with her doll, Jane – an activity she shares with May, but not with Dick or Jack.

Dora will wash Jane. She is a rag doll, so Dora can wash her. Dora has a line by the tree. May sits on a seat to see Dora wash the doll. (p. 22)

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the message the book conveys about gender may appear old fashioned – boys are more physical than girls, they play with balls and get into scrapes, while girls are gentler, they play with dolls and they often watch boys and each other playing. However, the books reproduced the then prevailing gender normativities, while at the same time portraying an exclusively middle class world in which everyone spoke the standard dialect. Of course books for adults are different, and what is hidden can take a variety of forms. As Auerbach and Burgess (1985: 475) showed, ELT textbooks for migrants to North America from the mid 1970s onwards, while ostensibly produced to enable them to successfully enter the job market, actually tended to ‘prepare students for subservient social roles and reinforce hierarchical relations’, thereby betraying the producers’ view of the migrant as destined for low paid, low status work. It would appear that little had changed in nearly a century – just four years earlier, Jean Anyon (1981: 25), in her study of ideology in US history textbooks, reproduced part of a text from the early 1900s for the teaching of English to migrants, which was clearly designed to teach more than language:

I hear the whistle. I must hurry. I hear the five minutes whistle. It is time to go into the shop. … I change my clothes and get ready to work … I work until the whistle blows to quit. I leave my place nice and clean.

Whatever else it may have been, the text was also a primer in the basics of a spatiotemporal disciplinary regime appropriate to working in an industrialised setting. Although there has been a limited amount of attention to this aspect of materials analysis in our own field (e.g. Dendrinos, 1992; Chun, 2009; Gray, 2010a; Gray and Block, in press), research into the textbook as a cultural artefact has been more common in mainstream education (e.g. Preiswerk, 1980; Anyon, 1981; Stray, 1994; Provenzo et al., 2011). Even so, to date there is nothing in the Anglophone world like the Georg Eckert Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung (established in 1975) in Germany, which is dedicated to textbook research (mainly materials for history, geography and civic studies) and which is principally focused on the study of ‘concepts of identity and representations as conveyed through national education’ and ‘the question of what relationship textbook-conveyed interpretations and inventories of knowledge have to those concepts of identity that are offered by other educational media and players in the academic arena’ (www.gei.de). It could be argued that the language teaching materials literature has much to learn from such mainstream education research orientations, and it is hoped that the present volume will contribute to this in some small way.

Representation and identity

As has been argued elsewhere (Gray and Block, in press), at the heart of the language teaching textbook is a regime of representation which constructs the world of the target language for the student. Representation refers to the processes in which language and images are used to portray this world and as Michael Apple and Linda Christian-Smith (1991: 4) point out:

[These processes] embody what Raymond Williams called the selective tradition – someone’s selection, someone’s vision of legitimate knowledge and culture, one that in the process of enfranchising one group’s cultural capital disenfranchises another’s.

But this is not simply a matter of privileging the knowledge or the values of the powerful over those of the powerless or those deemed illegitimate in some way – representation has political and commercial implications of several kinds. On the one hand, there is the representation of geographical spaces. For example, UK ELT publishers ensure that materials designed for use in different national markets (e.g. Greece and Turkey) contain no references to contested territories lost by one country to another, or that countries which are seen as potentially lucrative markets (e.g. US) are not referred to critically. Such representational practices are commercially determined. On the other hand, there is the representation of people and the various identities that are relevant to them (see Chapter 1, on identity in ELT textbooks). As I argue elsewhere (Gray, 2010a), ELT textbooks in particular have changed significantly in this regard since the 1970s. One area in which change has been most thorough is the treatment of gender, a development which was driven largely by women within the publishing industry determined to root out the sexist representations which typified so many ELT publications in the 1970s and 1980s. Under the impetus of second wave feminism² (Mills and Mullany, 2011), and in particular the move towards feminist language reform (Pauwels, 1998), the pervasive sexism identified by early materials studies (Hill, 1980; Porreca, 1984) has become a thing of the past, at least in UK-produced materials. Materials today are typified by codified regimes of inclusivity whereby women in particular, but also people of colour, the disabled, the elderly and so on are listed as requiring non-stereotypical representation. Such practices, however limited and superficial, have their origins in a politics of equal rights in which issues of representation, identity, recognition and respect are central.

The struggle to be represented, or to be represented in particular ways, arises out of a response to the related politics of erasure and misrecognition. This is particularly relevant to certain categories of people, such as women, workers, ethnic minorities, religious minorities and those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) (see Chapter 3). Erasure refers to the systematic editing out of certain groups or identity positions (i.e. their non-representation) from officially endorsed versions of social reality, and the resulting denial of recognition. Good examples of this are the near total absence of the working class from twentieth century North American history books (Anyon, 1981), and the progressive eradication of working class characters and references to working class experience from UK-produced ELT materials from the 1980s onwards (Gray and Block, in press). Misrecognition, on the other hand, refers to demeaning or stereotypical representation, such as the sexist representation of women, or the representation of colonised or indigenous peoples in history or geography books as subservient, feckless, lazy or otherwise lacking in agency (see Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006).

Such practices are not without consequences. As Nancy Fraser (1998: 141) has argued:

To be misrecognised [ … ] is not simply to be thought ill of, looked down on, or devalued in others’ conscious attitudes or mental beliefs. It is rather to be denied the status of a full partner in social interaction and prevented from participating as a peer in social life – not as a consequence of a distributive inequity [ … ] but rather as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of interpretation and evaluation that constitute one as comparatively unworthy of respect or esteem. When such patterns of disrespect and disesteem are institutionalized, for example, in law, social welfare, medicine, and/or popular culture, they impede parity of participation, just as surely as do distributive inequities. The resulting harm is in either case all too real.

Responses from publishers to such charges, when they have been forthcoming, have often been far from unproblematic. As Apple and Christian-Smith (1991: 10) have pointed out with regard to mainstream US textbooks, ‘items are perhaps mentioned, then, but not developed in depth. Dominance is partly maintained here through compromise and the process of “mentioning”’. Their point is that ‘mentioning’ is frequently tokenistic, the previously erased group gets a name check but the issues surrounding its erasure or its members’ struggle for recognition on their own terms is not explored. (The value and the limitations of ‘mentioning’ are discussed in Chapter 3.) With regard to the representation of women in UK-produced language teaching textbooks, the removal of overt sexism did not presuppose any move towards serious engagement with the politics of feminism – rather gender equality tended to be presented as part of the lifestyle choices of individual women who simply chose to do the high-powered jobs they were frequently depicted as doing (see Gray, 2010a for fuller discussion).

The textbook as commodity

It will be clear from the discussion so far that textbooks are more than educational tools and cultural objects – they are also commodities to be bought and sold. As Marx (1867/1976) explained, the commodity has both use value and exchange value; that is, it exists to meet particular human needs and it can be exchanged for money. From the perspective of the producers, it is the exchange value of the commodity rather than its use value that is primary. In this respect, textbooks are no different from other commodities – ‘before anything else their prime function [is] to earn their producers a living’ (Apple, 1985: 149). More recently, Andrew Littlejohn (2012: 284) has made a similar point:

although materials are aimed at use inside a classroom, they will always bear the hallmarks of the conditions of their production outside the classroom. This is particularly the case with materials which are produced in a commercial context, where the need to maximise sales, satisfy shareholders, and achieve corporate goals may have a direct impact on the design of materials, quite distinct from their pedagogic intent.

For this reason, it is important to consider the particular kind of commodity the textbook is, because, as Chris Stray (1994: 4) put it some ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Telling Tales: Changing Discourses of Identity in the ‘Global’ UK-Published English Language Coursebook
• 3. LGBT Invisibility and Heteronormativity in ELT Materials
• 4. The ‘Neoliberal Citizen’: Resemiotising Globalised Identities in EAP Materials
• 5. ‘This activity is far from being a pause for reflection’: An Exploration of ELT Authors’, Editors’, Teachers’ and Learners’ Approaches to Critical Thinking
• 6. Critically Evaluating Materials for CLIL: Practitioners’ Practices and Perspectives
• 7. Communicating Constructions of Frenchness through Language Coursebooks: A Comparison
• 8. Spanish Imagined: Political and Subjective Approaches to Language Textbooks
• 9. Motivation, Authenticity and Challenge in German Textbooks for Key Stage 3
• 10. Resisting Coursebooks
• Bibliography
• Index