English - A Changing Medium for Education

Constant Leung, Brian V Street

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781847697738
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Inglés

In this volume a range of authors from different international contexts argue that the notion of communicative competence in English, hitherto largely referenced to metropolitan native-speaker norms, has to be expanded to take account of diverse contexts of use for a variety of purposes. It also discusses the popular belief that language and literacy should simply be regarded as a technical 'skill' which confers universal benefits and that it should be replaced with a social practice view that recognises situated variations and diversity. This volume, we believe, provides a reference point for extended research and practice in these areas that will be of interest to wide range of people engaged in language and literacy education.

1 Introduction: English in the Curriculum – Norms and Practices

Constant Leung and Brian Street

Introduction

This book is concerned with English as a medium of curriculum communication, particularly in English as an Additional/Second Language (EAL) contexts. The spread of English in the world in the past 200 years, initially through British colonial expansion and through globalisation of business and industry in more recent times, has been accompanied by a huge demand for English Language Teaching (ELT) in a variety of contexts. EAL is taught and learned in many ways – as a subject in school, university and adult education settings in countries such as China and Brazil; as a language of instruction in English-medium education catering to speakers of other languages in places where English is an official language such as Singapore and Hong Kong and also in some international schools; as a language of schooling for linguistic minorities in countries such as Australia and the UK; and as a vehicular language in content-language integrated language teaching (generally referred to as CLIL) in some schools in Europe and elsewhere. All of this does not even include the vast number of students who travel to English-speaking countries for general and vocational education at all levels. According to Graddol (2006: 101) worldwide there are two billion (approximately) learners of EAL at the present time.

Given the scale and the international reach of this language teaching enterprise, it is important to ask how English has been characterised in the professional language teaching literature, and how far the established characterisation corresponds with the ways in which it is understood and used in contemporary contexts. These two questions are fundamentally related to a number of pedagogic issues such as the content, methodology and norms of teaching and assessment (see Nunan, 1991; Richards & Rodgers, 2001, for a discussion on the connections between teaching methodology and conceptualisation of language). In this introductory chapter we will look at the ways in which English language has been discussed in the professional literature with a view to exploring the possibilities for conceptual broadening. We will first focus on the emergence of the concept of communicative competence and how it has been a major influence on curriculum development and professional practice in ELT for the best part of the past 30 years. Next we will suggest that, in the light of our changing understanding of how language works and the diverse and dynamic ways in which English is being used as an additional language in the world, the notion of communicative competence, as understood in language teaching, should take greater account of a practice view of language use (instead of a norm-based view). By a practice view we are referring to an understanding that has emerged especially in ethnographic and sociological studies that addresses not only the form and content of languages but also the social meanings and uses associated with them.

Some of the developments in the related field of literacy studies are instructive here. Distinguishing between events and practices in the literacy field, Street (2000: 21) suggests that

the concept of literacy practices … attempt[s] to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy but to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind.

And part of that broadening involves attending to the fact that in a literacy event we have brought to it concepts, social models regarding what the nature of this practice is and that make it work and give it meaning.

In the sociological literature, the work of Bourdieu (1991, and also Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) has been particularly significant in challenging narrow models of language and events and replacing them with a broader conception of social capital and practice. As Grenfell (2012: 67) notes, earlier theorists

defined the study of language in terms of its formal, structural properties. Even the Chomskyan revolution of the 1950s is predicated on the notion of an ‘ideal’ speaker and, thus perfect competence. For Bourdieu, this model is simply something that does not exist. Moreover, the consequent methodology that seeks to see sense and significance in terms of an ‘internalist’ reading of language itself basically overlooks all the contextual (social, cultural) components that give linguistic events their meaning.

At first glance it may seem that in making this appeal to a more socially and culturally oriented approach to language and literacy, we are adopting an unnecessarily large canvass. However, as the classroom vignette in this chapter will show in a moment, what goes on when teachers and students engage in talk and in reading and writing is not a simple matter of manual driven didactic transmission. Indeed, the ways in which they use English to ‘do’ teaching and learning are unavoidably situated in a wider context of social norms and practices, curriculum affordances and constraints, and institutionally induced relationships, and at the same time, all the participants in the classroom activities are themselves social actors investing in particular social and cultural choices.

In the final section we will explore the conceptual implications of a practice-oriented notion of communicative competence for understanding the multifaceted manifestations of English in classroom and curriculum contexts. This discussion will draw on research in a number of related fields such as English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), language education and literacy studies (including NLS – ‘New Literacy Studies’). We will use EAL as a super-coordinating term to refer to English whenever the speaker/learner already has another language, but will defer to the relevant ‘native’ nomenclature such as EFL and ELF where appropriate, particularly in citations (see Dewey, Chapter 7 this volume, for a detailed discussion on diverse contexts of and labels for ELT).

Communication as Language

The focus on communication in ELT has been a relatively recent phenomenon. In the 1950s language teaching, particularly foreign language teaching, was predominantly concerned with grammar and lexis delivered through a variety of teaching methods, for example, grammar translation and the audio-lingual method. For reasons of focus and scope we will not be providing a discussion on the move away from grammar-oriented approaches (see Howatt & Widdowson, 2004: Chapter 19; Richards & Rodger, 2001, for a discussion). Suffice it to say that the limitations of the grammar-based approaches were increasingly discussed in the 1960s and 1970s, and the merits of more real life-oriented approaches received extensive attention in the language teaching literature during this period. Halliday (1973, 1975; also Halliday et al., 1964) and Hymes (1972, 1977, 1994) were among those whose work made a significant contribution to the shift from a grammar orientation. We will now provide a brief account of the influential work of Halliday and Hymes to provide a perspective on the intellectual sensibilities of the principles underlying ELT practice today. (For a synopsis of the key ideas that influenced this paradigm shift, see Canale & Swain, 1980a; Leung, 2010, for an account of the impact of sociolinguistics on language teaching.)

A key concept in the work of Halliday and his associates is function in language. By function is meant the relationship between meaning and language expression (of which grammar is a part), which ‘reflects the fact that language has evolved in the service of particular human needs … what is really significant is that this functional principle is carried over and built into the grammar, so that the internal organization of the grammar system is also functional in character’ (Halliday, 1975: 16). Seen in this light, meaning-making underpins the ways in which (any) language as a system is developed. More importantly for this discussion, meaning-making shapes the ways in which language is used. For Halliday language use can be broadly understood as serving three functional purposes, referred to as meta-functions in the Hallidayan literature:

• ideational – this meta-function is concerned with the use of language as a means to talk about the world and about oneself; it is instantiated whenever a ‘speaker expresses his experience of the phenomena of the external world, and of the internal world of his own consciousness’ (Halliday, 1975: 17);

• interpersonal – individuals, through language expressions, can adopt a role or a position in relation to other participants, express their own values and views; so language is a means ‘whereby the speaker participates in … [a] speech situation’ (Halliday, 1975: 17) and, at the same time, a means for entering into particular social relationships with others;

• textual – language is seen as an enabling means for ‘creating text’ (Halliday, 1975: 17); language is the linguistic means deployed by speakers and writers to form spoken and written texts to make meaning in context; vocabulary, grammar and discourse organisation are all part of the means to form a text (increasingly other semiotic means such as graphics and video are also seen as text-forming means, see Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001).

These three meta-functions are analytical constructs; in actual language use all three are co-present. For instance, verbs such as ‘argue’, ‘contend’, ‘express’, ‘think’ and ‘say’ could be used to represent the same speech event, but ‘she argued …’ has a very different discourse value than ‘she said …’. The two different lexical choices (textual meta-function) represent two different descriptions of a self-same event (ideational meta-function) indicating two different speaker positions. From a language teaching point of view this functional view of language and language use offers a propositionally and socially nuanced way of thinking about teaching content in relation to matching teaching focus to learner needs (see Schleppegrell et al., 2004, for an example of pedagogic application of this approach).

The work of Hymes on ethnography of speaking was also influential in the re-orientation of language teaching; indeed his work on the concept of communicative competence can be seen as a key influence on the development of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). For Hymes, when a child learns to communicate through language they have to learn how to use words (in utterances) in socially appropriate ways. So, having a grasp of words and grammar rules will not suffice; there are social conventions of use. By observing the ways in which language is used methodically one can build up a picture of language practice. The actual ways in which language is used in context can be arrived at empirically by asking these questions:

Whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible;

Whether (and to what degree) ...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1: Introduction: English in the Curriculum – Norms and Practices
• 2: What Counts as English?
• 3: The Rise and Rise of English: The Politics of Bilingual Education in Australia’s Remote Indigenous Schools
• 4: (Re)Writing English: Putting English in Translation
• 5: Multilingual and Multimodal Resources in Genre-based Pedagogical Approaches to L2 English Content Classrooms
• 6: Multimodal Literacies and Assessment: Uncharted Challenges in the English Classroom
• 7: Beyond Labels and Categories in English Language Teaching: Critical Reflections on Popular Conceptualizations
• Concluding Remarks
• Index