Values in English Language Teaching

Bill Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135632113
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book offers a new perspective on language teaching by placing moral issues--that is, questions of values--at the core of what it is to be a teacher. The teacher-student relation is central to this view, rather than the concept of language teaching as merely a technical matter of managing students' acquisition of language. The message is that all language teaching involves an interplay of deeply held values, but in each teaching situation these values are played out in different ways. Johnston does not tell readers what to think, but only suggests what to think about.

Values in English Language Teaching explores the complex and often contradictory moral landscape of the language classroom, gradually revealing how teaching is not a matter of clear-cut choices but of wrestling with dilemmas and making difficult decisions in situations often riven with conflict. It examines the underlying values that teachers hold as individuals and as members of their profession, and demonstrates how those values are played out in the real world of language classrooms. Matters addressed include connections between the moral and political dimensions in English language teaching, and between values and religious beliefs; relationship(s) between teacher identity and values; the meaning of professionalism and how it is associated with morality and values; the ways in which teacher development is a moral issue; and the marginality of English language teaching.

All the examples are taken from real-life teaching situations--the complexity and messiness of these situations is always acknowledged, including both individual influences and broader social, cultural, and political forces at play in English language classrooms. By using actual situations as the starting point for analysis, Johnston offers a philosophy based in practice, and recognizes the primacy of lived experience as a basis for moral analysis. Examples come from teaching contexts around the world, including Brazil, Thailand, Poland, Japan, Central African Republic, Turkey, and Taiwan, as well as various settings in the United States.

This book will change the way teachers see language classrooms--their own or those of others. It is a valuable resource for teachers of ESL and EFL and all those who work with them, especially teacher educators, researchers, and administrators.

1
The Teacher as Moral Agent

English language teaching (ELT), that is, the teaching of English as a second or foreign language, is usually portrayed in the professional literature as being primarily concerned with the mental acquisition of a language. This book offers an alternative perspective. My central thesis here is that in fact language teaching and learning are shot through with values, and that language teaching is a profoundly value-laden activity. This thesis can be broken down into three basic ideas.

1. The essence of language teaching, like the essence of all teaching, lies in values: That is, it is moral in nature. I define exactly what I mean by moral later in this chapter.
2. The morality of teaching is highly complex, paradoxical, and saturated with important and difficult dilemmas.
3. The moral dimension of teaching has rarely been talked about, and most of the time teachers are not consciously aware of it; yet there is a great need to uncover and examine the values that inform teaching, in the interests both of the professional development of teachers and of the practice of language teaching.

The main purpose of this book is to explore the specific ways in which values underlie various aspects of language teaching. I look at what those values are, explicate the moral dilemmas that we as teachers face at every step, and suggest ways of thinking about these dilemmas that may help teachers to deal with them.

I begin this chapter with a real-life story that exemplifies the kinds of dilemmas I am talking about. I use the story to introduce some of the beliefs and values that underlie what I have to say in this book. The rest of the chapter lays the groundwork for what follows. I first outline my understanding of the nature of morality in teaching, and I explain how morality relates to values, ethics, and ideology. I describe what I see as the limitations of the majority of philosophical analyses and introduce the work of Nel Noddings and Zygmunt Bauman as central in my own philosophical foundations. I proceed to survey what has been written about the morality of teaching both in general education and in ELT, and I enumerate some of the particular moral issues that distinguish our field from other educational settings.

Without further ado, let me open the discussion with an example of the kinds of moral dilemmas I will be investigating throughout the book.

INTRODUCTION: PETER’S STORY

Some years ago my friend Peter was teaching English to a senior class of Palestinian and Jordanian students in a college of education in Jordan. One of his students was uncooperative and unfriendly; despite both encouragement and warnings, he did little work and made hardly any progress. When the end of the year came, and following a dismal performance on the final examination, Peter did not hesitate to give this student a failing grade. After Peter had completed his grading, he met with the head of his department to go over the grades assigned. When the case of the weak student came up, there was a long silence. The head of department eventually said something like, “Well, if that’s the grade you’ve assigned….” There was another silence. Peter asked what he meant. The head of department explained, all the while asserting his respect for Peter’s decision, that a failing grade would mean that this student, a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank who had been away from his family for 4 years, would now have to return to Israel and would not be allowed to leave the country again. His chances for employment would be severely affected. “However, this is your decision,” said the head of department. Peter resolutely refused to change the grade, saying, rightly, that the student did not deserve a higher grade. A series of long, uncomfortable silences ensued. At no point did the head of department threaten or challenge Peter. In the end, however, Peter changed his mind and gave the student a passing grade.

This story is an example of the centrality of values in second language teaching. I believe that every teacher will recognize in this story the elements of situations they themselves have experienced. In a literal sense, many of us have found ourselves giving a student a grade different from that which the student deserved. More generally, I believe that every one of us has experienced situations in which the values that we hold turn out to be in conflict. (Incidentally, though I have changed Peter’s name, this story, and every other example given in this book, is taken from real life. I have not made up any examples for the purpose of illustrating a point—rather, I have taken the stories themselves as starting points.)

In this particular story, it seems to me that two of Peter’s most profoundly held beliefs are in conflict. On the one hand, he holds a professional belief (which I think many teachers will recognize and share) that it is right and good to give students a score or grade that accurately represents their level of achievement, and that it is morally wrong to give a student a grade (whether higher or lower) that he or she does not deserve. But another value that Peter holds dear (and which I would also want to claim for my own) is that, whether as a teacher or as a person, it is good to help others in whatever way one can, and it is bad to create problems for someone or cross his or her plans when one is in a position to be of assistance. In the story about the Palestinian student, these two values are in conflict; whatever the solution, Peter’s values will be denied in some way. In addition, of course, this rendering of the issue is grossly oversimplistic. In reality, Peter found himself dealing with a vast array of factors, including the personality of the student in question, his relations with his director, his relations with his other students, and the entire complexity of the social and political context.¹

For me, stories such as this one go to the very heart of the work of teaching. I am fascinated by this kind of story, and I have found that other teachers too find them compelling; they somehow capture a deeply meaningful aspect of what we do. Yet although many, many teachers I have spoken to remember incidents like this with extraordinary clarity and regard them as crucial in their own professional development, such stories, and the conflicts of values they raise, are never mentioned in books on language teaching methodology—for example, the kinds of books one reads and studies in methods courses during teacher education programs. These books show us good ways to encourage fluency in our students, teach us useful techniques for reading activities or how to use video, and help us think about motivating our learners, but they never address the kinds of tough decision that Peter faced.

Part of the reason for this is that it is very hard to write or speak about such situations. They are highly complex and fraught with ambiguities; furthermore, unlike certain aspects of language pedagogy, it is impossible to produce generalized solutions—each individual situation has to be understood in its own terms. Moreover, in most situations of this kind the application of logic or of “scientific” knowledge is of limited use. To put it plainly, no amount of empirical research will ever answer the question of what Peter should have done. The solution has to be an individual one, dependent on this particular teacher in this particular context, and it rests ultimately not on logic or propositional knowledge but on belief: the teacher’s belief that he is doing the right thing.

I cite Peter’s reflections at such length both because they are intrinsically of great value and because they remind me of how hard it can be to speak for others accurately and fairly.

I believe that this kind of story is in fact central to language teaching and to the lives of teachers. Important as teaching methods are, teaching is not ultimately just about methods or the efficient psycholinguistic learning of the language by students. Rather, as Peter’s story suggests, it is about our relation with our students as people, with the way we treat them. I have been a teacher myself for twenty years now; the more I teach, and the more I work with teachers and talk with them, the more firmly I have come to the conviction that what we do in classrooms (and outside of them) is fundamentally rooted in the values we hold and in the relation we have with our students.

In this book, then, I aim to explore this dimension of language teaching, which is central to our work but has gone largely ignored until now. I look at the ways in which values, and clashes of values, inhere in everything we do as teachers. I try to provide a language with which to talk about these values and these clashes. And I will encourage you, the reader, to become aware of the values implicit in your own work and to examine these values critically in light of your teaching situation.

The topics I raise in this book are very difficult and very personal; they are likely, as the phrase has it, to push some buttons. I make no apology for this, because I believe that, although these are difficult and controversial issues, they are also essential for a full understanding of our work as language teachers. I believe that a significant part of professional growth comes from the courage to tackle difficult topics, for these are of-ten also the topics that are most important to us. This book is my attempt to sustain such an engagement and to share it with fellow professionals.

At the same time, I acknowledge that my own take on these matters—for example, on situations such as Peter’s dilemma, or the many other stories I tell in this book—is highly personal. I want to state clearly that I do not have an agenda in terms of specific values; I do not write from a particular religious or ethical standpoint. I simply believe that these matters are worth talking about. My agenda, then, is to open up aspects of our work to discussion that I believe have been ignored until now in the professional discourse of ELT. In this book I suggest many aspects of language teaching that I believe you ought to think about, but I will not tell you what to think about them. In doing so I also wish to try to reclaim the use of the term moral by those of us who think in moral terms yet do not necessarily align ourselves with particular religious or political factions. My goal is to reveal the value-laden nature of our work in the language classroom and to provide tools for analyzing that work. It is my firm belief that each individual teacher must face her own moral dilemmas in her own way. By the same token, I am not recommending or arguing for any particular teaching methodology but for a way of seeing the classroom. Whether change follows as a result of this different way of seeing is a matter for the individual teacher to know.

To state my basic case very briefly, language teaching, like all other teaching, is fundamentally moral, that is, value laden, in at least three crucial ways. First, teaching is rooted in relation, above all the relation between teacher and student; and relation, in turn—the nature of our interactions with our fellow humans—is essentially moral in character. This was seen clearly in Peter’s dilemma. Second, all teaching aims to change people; any attempt to change another person has to be done with the assumption, usually implicit, that the change will be for the better.² Matters of what is good and bad, better or worse, are moral matters. Third, although “science” in the form of research in various disciplines (second language acquisition, education, sociology, etc.) can give us some pointers, in the overwhelming majority of cases it cannot tell us exactly how to run our class. Thus, the decisions we make as teachers—what homework to assign, how to grade student writing, what to do about the disruptive student in the back row—ultimately also have to be based on moral rather than objective or scientific principles: That is, they have to based on what we believe is right and good—for each student, for the whole class, and sometimes for ourselves. I elaborate on each of these arguments in the course of the book; each, I believe, applies to teaching in general. In addition, as I explain later, language teaching in particular has its own characteristic moral issues with which to deal.

THE NATURE OF MORALITY IN TEACHING

Before I go on, I should clarify what I mean by morality. This is a notoriously difficult and dangerous term, all the more so because it is used so widely, and, as with any term or concept, once academics get their hands on it the picture becomes even murkier.

In this book I shall follow my earlier work on morality in teaching (e.g., Buzzelli & Johnston, 2002). I use morality to refer to that (whether more or less coherent) set of a person’s beliefs which are evaluative in nature, that is, which concern matters of what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong. I further take morality to be both individual and social. It is individual in that all moral beliefs are mediated through particular people—there is no “morality” without it being instantiated by individuals. It is social in two important senses. First, strong social forces operate on individual moralities, in the form of religious, political, and other beliefs that are shared to a greater or lesser extent by groups of people and encoded in various forms—for example, in religious texts. Second, although the moral values that a person holds may in some abstract sense be independent of those around her, in practice our morality becomes interesting only when our values are played out in social settings—when our inner beliefs are converted into actions that affect others.

Rather than worrying about the extent to which morality is individual or social—that is, seeing this as an either-or choice—I suggest that in fact morality exists precisely in the interplay between the personal and the social.

In this respect, my vision of morality is reminiscent of recent accounts of culture (e.g., Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Strauss & Quinn 1997) in which culture, traditionally an impersonal thing outside the individual, is instead seen as both a cognitive and a social force. Strauss and Quinn (1997), for example, argued that cultural meanings cannot be explained “unless we see them as created and maintained in the interaction between the extrapersonal and intrapersonal realms” (p. ); they wrote further that although “the dynamics of these realms are different,” the boundary between them is very much “permeable” (p.). My view of morality offers a parallel with Strauss and Quinn’s vision of cultural meanings: I see morality as neither a purely individual nor a purely social phenomenon but as existing at the meeting point between the individual and the social, of cognition and community. Furthermore, also like culture, it is not a fixed set of values but, while it may have certain relatively firmly anchored points, to a significant extent it is negotiated both within the individual and between individuals. This was clearly the case in Peter’s dilemma: His decision was a moral one, but it emerged from the interplay between the beliefs and values that he brought to the situation and a highly complex set of factors arising from the social and political environment in which he found himself.

This brings me to another characteristic of morality as I conceive it in this book. Although certain beliefs may be absolute, I see most moral issues (dilemmas, conflicts, problems) as being fundamentally dependent on context; that is, because morality exists at the intersection between inner beliefs and social situations, the nature of those situations is of crucial importance. I follow Nel Noddings (1984) in believing that morality is deeply colored by “the uniqueness of human encounters” (p.). In this book, the discussion of moral values centers around real-life situations from the work of language teachers. I believe strongly that morality cannot in any interesting or meaningful sense be reduced to unconditional rules of the type “always do X” or “one should never do X to Y.”

Let me give an example of the way in which moral judgments are fundamentally affected by context. A few years ago, a Korean woman whom I will call Hae-young took my methods class. Hae-young chose to write her final paper on whole-language instruction. Though I take a process-writing approach with assignments such as this one, Hae-young was very late in giving me even the first draft; it was almost the end of the semester. The paper she gave me was perhaps two thirds taken word for word from the sources she had used, often without acknowledgment. In other words, it seemed to be a clear case of plagiarism. I had encountered a similarly egregious case a couple of years before, in which a Japanese student had copied long passages from a textbook. I was angry with that student and, generally speaking, I have little sympathy for those guilty of plagiarism. But I somehow felt that Hae-young’s case was different. I called her to my office and explained the problem with her paper. Hae-young seemed genuinely surprised by what I had to say; though I cannot prove it, I was convinced that her bewilderment was real. She truly did not understand the American requirement that the language of a paper be her own, especially since she was largely just reporting on the research and opinions of others. She had time to go through one round of revisions before the end of the semester. The new version of the paper was still 50% acknowledged or unacknowledged quotations.

At this point, the deadline for final drafts was well passed, yet something led me to continue working with Hae-young. We met again, went through more revisions, then again, and then again. In all, Hae-young went through five or six versions of her paper, as our work together extended way beyond the end of the class; both of us seemed determined to get it right. In the end, Hae-young finally produced a paper that was, in my estimation, her work rather than a patchwork of the work of others; both of us breathed a sigh of relief.

The reason I tell this story now is to show what I mean by the contextually dependent nature of moral decision making in teaching. If I had acted according to the university regulations—which from a moral standpoint represent a way of treating all students equally—or if I had followed the ethical guidelines relating to plagiarism, I would not have given Hae-young an extra chance. I did what I did because from all that I could see, Hae-young’s failure to write in the required manner was due not to laziness or a desire to deceive but to a genuine ignorance of U.S. academic expectations. (Pennycook [1996] has laid these issues out very clearly in an article published since the incident with Haeyoung took place.) I made a moral decision to give her some leeway because I saw it as an educational opportunity, a chance for her to learn those expectations. For me, the educational value of leading Hae-young to this understanding outweighed the value of fairness in dealing with all students equally. In doing what I did, I had to accept that Haeyoung could develop only from whe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 The Teacher as Moral Agent
• 2 Morality in Classroom Interaction
• 3 Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching
• 4 The Morality of Testing and Assessment
• 5 Three Facets of Language Teacher Identity
• 6 Values in Teacher Development
• 7 Dilemmas and Foundations in English Language Teaching
• References