What English Language Teachers Need to Know Volume I

Understanding Learning

Denise E. Murray, MaryAnn Christison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351139823
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langue anglaise

Designed for pre-service teachers and teachers new to the field of ELT, What English Teachers Need to Know Volumes I, II, and III are companion textbooks organized around the key question: What do teachers need to know and be able to do in order for their students to learn English?

In the Second Edition of Volume I, Murray and Christison return to this essential question and call attention to emerging trends and challenges affecting the contemporary classroom. Addressing new skills and strategies that EFL teachers require to meet the needs of their shifting student populations who are impacted by changing demographics, digital environments, and globalization, this book, which is grounded in current research, offers a strong emphasis on practical applications for classroom teaching.

This updated and expanded Second Edition features:

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• a new chapter on technology in TESOL

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• new and updated classroom examples throughout

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• discussions of how teachers can prepare for contemporary challenges, such as population mobility and globalization

The comprehensive texts work for teachers across different contexts—where English is the dominant language, an official language, or a foreign language; for different levels—elementary/primary, secondary, university, or adult education; and for different learning purposes—general English, workplace English, English for academic purposes, or English for specific purposes.

Part I

IDENTITY AND CONTEXT

In Part I, we offer five chapters that explore the contexts for language learning and teaching. In order to develop the most appropriate language programs to facilitate learning, educators need to know about the characteristics of their learners and the aspects of their environments that affect student learning. We therefore begin with a chapter that examines what the research tells about learner identity and its impact on learning. The next two chapters explore broadly the three major contexts for English language teaching: (1) countries where English is the dominant language (e.g., New Zealand), (2) countries where English is one of several functional languages (e.g., Singapore), and (3) countries where English is taught in schools as a foreign language (e.g., Spain). The fourth chapter discusses the relationships between language, culture, language learning, and the roles that teachers and learners adopt in the language classroom. The final chapter in this section provides research methods and classroom activities that teachers can use to investigate their own contexts of teaching.

We begin with an exploration of the context because the learner and the learning environment are essential starting points for understanding language teaching and learning. Learning is more than the accumulation of knowledge and skills. Learning is a sociocultural engagement that transforms the learner. Further, language learning, whether it is a first or second language, is a process of socialization through which individuals in a society construct and reproduce dominant beliefs, values, behaviors, and role assignments. This socialization is also a site of struggle among competing beliefs, values, behaviors, and role assignments. In the classroom, therefore, the socialization in the home language and culture can come up against those of the new language being learned (English).

1

LEARNER IDENTITIES

VIGNETTE

In an interview about the settlement of young refugees from Africa in Australia, a Sudanese leader (Paul) talked about why he wanted to become a youth leader in his community. This young man was one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan”:

There is a lot of culture shock. The children go into a middle culture; they are not Australian, and they are not African. You know what they are? They are in the middle. They are confused. I have seen them. They need a coach to tell them how life is. Most young people want to adapt to American culture, and first we are not in America; and second youth are the bright future of our community. We need them to have a better understanding of how life should be. If I become a youth worker, I’ll know more about how I should deal with teenagers. Teenagers have problems—some of them are drug-addicted, some are into guns, and they need good care. Some young people came with a single parent. If a youth worker has been trained fully, and he has an organization that can work with them, you need to engage them so that they can have a good life. I have seen the needs of young African people here and thought, “Why should I not do this?” They have a lot of culture shock. They have a lot of new systems to understand. They want to get into new things that they do not belong to, like if you talk about the way they react in the school, the way they behave, it is different to the way white children behave. Before people came here, they have a high expectation: “I go there, I am free, free to do everything.” But freedom is different. Some people took it the wrong way rather than the right way.¹

Task: Reflect

1 How does Paul position himself in relation to the Sudanese community in Australia and the wider Australian community?

2 Why do you think some of these Sudanese young people want to be “American”?

3 Why do you think some of these Sudanese young people have the “wrong idea” about freedom in Australia?

4 What types of educational programs would help these young people who are in a “middle culture”?

Introduction

The young Sudanese man in the vignette above talks about his own identity—that of someone who identifies with his own Sudanese community in Australia. He also talks about the identity conflict experienced by other young people who want to assimilate and become Australian but who misinterpret some of the cultural values they see among their Australian-born peers. In fact, their identifying with these peers and copying some of their behaviors leads to conflicts with their parents, with school officials, and sometimes with the police. In this chapter, you will read about the various experiences that affect how language learners shape their identities.

While the development of identity among language users and learners has long been studied, earlier approaches saw the effects of context on language and language learning as essentially static and residing in the individual. For example, early work on dialect speakers by Ryan and Giles (1982) found that the patterns of language of the dominant group in a society are the model for social advancement, whereas varieties used by minority groups are considered less prestigious and result in their users being less successful. In a similar vein, work on attitudes and motivation by Gardner and Lambert (1972) identified two dichotomous types of motivation: integrative and instrumental. The former refers to learning a language in order to become a member of that community, that is, to identify with that language and its community. Instrumental motivation, on the other hand, refers to the need to learn a language for another purpose, such as study, with no desire to identify with the community. Schumann’s (1978) acculturation model of language acquisition also took this position. However, his model hypothesized that the distance in values between two cultures affected language acquisition, such that learners coming from a culture close to that of the language they were trying to learn would be more successful in acquiring that language. What all these approaches have in common is the belief that the choice is either/or: people either choose to assimilate to a group or nation, or they choose to keep their variety or language in order to identify with their native group. However, such views ignore the multiple group memberships that individuals have, such as gender, race, language, language variety, social institutions. Furthermore, research on language and learning that focuses on the social and interactive nature of both has shown that identity is dynamic, formed, and transformed through language and learning (Cadman & O’Regan, 2006; Mohan, Leung, & Davison, 2001; Norton, 2013).

Task: Reflect

Think of your own identity. List all the communities to which you belong. How do you position yourself differently in each of these communities? What different language do you use to express your identity? Do you express solidarity with the values of all these communities? Which values, beliefs, and behaviors do you ascribe to and which do you resist? Why?

What Is Identity?

What, then, do we mean by identity? It is generally agreed that identity is the view that individuals have of themselves and of their place(s) in the world in the past, now, and in the future. Teachers as well as learners hold views of themselves. However, in this chapter we will only discuss learner identities; teacher identities will be discussed in Chapter 2. We have called this chapter learner identities because learners’ places in the world are multiple, changing, sometimes conflicting, and influenced by the power relations in individual interactions and in society more widely. This influence may result in the desire to assimilate, adapt, or reject. As individuals construct their identities, they position themselves through their language (and non-verbal behavior); that is, they use language to let others know who they are and what their sociocultural allegiances are. At the same time, identities, both welcome and unwelcome, are imposed on individuals. Changing identities has been posited to explain why some learners may communicate effectively in some language situations, yet apparently fail in others. Both the power relations between the people interacting and the wider structural inequalities can lead to such differences (see, for example, Norton, 2000, 2013). Norton developed the notion of investment in the target language to explain the dynamic relationship between the learner and the social worlds in which they interact. When learners invest in acquiring a new language, they expect some return on their investment, whether it be education, jobs, friendship, or other advantages. How and what variety of English they invest in depends on what future identities they imagine for themselves. So, for example, learners may stay silent or appear less proficient, not because they are not motivated, but because they are resisting the identity being imposed on them. Learner investment, therefore, affects which of the “imagined communities” (Norton, 1995) they choose to participate in. One such community is the language classroom, where learners may not invest in the language practices of the classroom because they perceive them as inequitable, of not acknowledging their own lived experiences. Inherent in discussions of identity, then, is the concept of agency, that is, that people shape their identities as a result of what is important to them; they are not merely victims on whom identities are imposed. Furthermore, these identities are shaped through interactions.

One of the difficulties for language learners and those who teach them and interact with them is how to interpret learners’ language in any specific instance. We may not know whether they make their linguistic choices deliberately, or because they do not have the linguistic tools to express the position they wish to take. For example, a learner in class may choose not to use a modal to mitigate a request, using Open the window in preference to Could you open the window? in order to express displeasure with a classmate who has been deliberately baiting her by opening the window near her desk on very cold days. However, the cause may be an imperfect acquisition of modal questions.

Learners’ past and present experiences can influence how they understand their relationship to the society and culture of the language they are learning and, therefore, how they utilize, resist, or even create opportunities to use the language. In TESOL, then, it is crucial to investigate and analyze the experiences and social structures that influence learner identity, their acquisition of English, and so the enterprise of English language education. These past and present experiences include nationality, race, and ethnicity; gender; family role, and bi- or multilingualism. These experiences are inevitably intertwined; however, for clarity of discussion, we will discuss each of these facets of learners’ lives separately.

Nationality, Race, and Ethnicity

Often, nationality is the silent identifier in much of the literature, especially in ESL situations, where race and ethnicity are more often cited as sites of struggle. Race and ethnicity are both sociological constructs, with little objective, physical evidence for their assignment.

Nationality, also a sociological construct, is as well a political construct with the physical evidence of assignment of citizenship by birth or naturalization. All three terms are highly contested. Rarely are nationality, race, and ethnicity singular in one setting. A particular ethnic group may include people of different races and vice versa. We have, therefore, discussed the three concepts as separate sections within a larger whole.

Nationality. Defining oneself within one’s larger social context is fundamental to human life and one such social context is one’s national identification. However, nationality is often not examined in the work on learner identity because it is assumed that race and ethnicity subsume nationality. A further reason why nationality is often ignored is because it is considered to have little role in the construction of identity in an era of intense globalization. For English language learners around the world, different national identifications are available, depending on whether learners are learning within their own country, are immigrants or refugees to a new country, or are sojourning in a second country for study or work purposes.

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