Ambiguities and Tensions in English Language Teaching

Portraits of EFL Teachers as Legitimate Speakers

Peter Sayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415897730
• eBook ISBN: 9781136635427
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The central theme of this book is the ambiguities and tensions teachers face as they attempt to position themselves in ways that legitimize them as language teachers, and as English speakers. Focusing on three EFL teachers and their schools in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca,  it documents how ordinary practices of language educators are shaped by their social context, and examines the roles, identities, and ideologies that teachers create in order to navigate and negotiate their specific context. It is unique in bringing together several current theoretical and methodological developments in TESOL and applied linguistics: the performance of language ideologies and identities, critical TESOL pedagogy and research, and ethnographic methods in research on language learning and teaching.   Balancing and blending descriptive reporting of the teachers and their contexts with a theoretical discussion which connects their local concerns and practices to broader issues in TESOL in international contexts, it allows readers to appreciate the subtle complexities that give rise to the "tensions and ambiguities" in EFL teachers' professional lives.

1

Exploring the Contradictions of Language Teaching

Setting the Scene

The bus grinds and lurches as the driver gears down to coax it up one more hill. Outside, it’s total blackness except for the beams of the headlights bouncing through the dust. Through the cracked side window, we peer into nothing; the narrow dirt road drops immediately into the pitch dark over the cliff ledge. Soon, lights appear ahead, dogs are barking, and the people on the bus start to stir as we lumber into the village of Tlaxcaltepec. Six hours of bumping and jostling are suddenly over as the old rig pulls up next to the cement basketball court in the middle of town. Even before the bus stops, the passengers are gathering their bags and bundles, speaking in Spanish and the local language, Chinanteco. Rocío announces: “We’ve arrived.”

Rocío is the English teacher at the local lower secondary school in Tlaxcaltepec. Each week, she takes the long bus trip up into the mountains from her house in the capital city of Oaxaca in the southern Mexican state of the same name. The village is isolated; there is only one dirt road in, and only a few phone lines. The children walk down steep mountain footpaths to get to the local lower secondary school located near the bottom of the village. They arrive chatting in Chinanteco, and switch easily to and from Spanish during the day. Every student receives three English as an additional language (EAL) lessons per week, taught from the government-issued textbook. The book presents English as an international language, as a medium for exploring cultural practices in diverse countries. The words and worlds presented in the book are foreign and distant. Yet the village is globally connected; there is a small cyber-café open now: it has three dusty machines with dial-up modems and there are plastic chairs and an unfinished concrete floor.

The village is transnational, and even those who have never physically left the region talk frequently to sons and fathers and brothers who come and go from the United States. The lessons Rocío teaches move between Chinanteco, Spanish, and English, and are experienced by the students and teacher through not just the official curriculum but also the connection between Tlaxcaltepec, Oaxaca, and places like Long Beach, California, where many of the villagers now live.

Central Questions

This book explores the question: why teach English in Tlaxcaltepec? The answer, on the one hand, is the same reason that is given for teaching English everywhere else that is aspiring to be part of the developed world. Conventional wisdom is that international English is the linguistic engine of globalization, and a country with lots of English speakers has more fuel for the engine, as it were. English language education in developing countries like Mexico is predicated on the idea that creating more English speakers will better position them to participate in the global marketplace. Pennycook (2007b) argues that this is a “Malinowskian charter myth” that links learning international English to alleviating poverty in the “rather bizarre [...] belief that if everyone learned English, everyone would be better off’ (p. 102). At a broader level, we can see that international English is a linguistic commodity that has some special characteristics. Unlike other resources, using it does not use it up, but rather increases its value: the more it is used in diverse domains and the more widespread it becomes, the more value it has (in this sense, the ecological metaphor does not fit languages particularly well [ Myers-Scotton, 2006 ]). Second, its value as symbolic capital in a country like Mexico is actually inversely proportional to how many can speak it. That is, if everyone knows English, then for a given individual speaking English doesn’t make you special or open any new doors of opportunity that others don’t have access to. Yet paradoxically it is precisely the fact that lots of people do use it around the world that makes it an important form of cultural capital for emerging markets.

The larger question then is what the real effects of English education are (Pennycook, 2007b). Does teaching English help Mexicans improve their material conditions? Or does it actually exacerbate existing social inequalities? The answer I will suggest to both questions is “yes,” although in rather surprising and unstraightforward ways. As the title of this book suggests, the role and impact of English language education, especially when zooming in to consider how ordinary teachers think about their practice at the classroom level, are best characterized as a set of interrelated contradictions. Making sense of our daily activities is a basic human disposition, and teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) naturally want to attach meaning to the task in which they invest so much energy. The “ambiguities and tensions” the title of the book refers to are those that arise as a result of the teachers’ meaning-making attempts. For example, we shall see that Rocío, who works with adolescents who are often keen to challenge or even undermine her, needs to position herself as a legitimate speaker of English. If they perceive her as a speaker of “real” English, she will have their respect, and as a young woman that respect will give her authority in the classroom. However, she cannot draw on sources that typically confer legitimacy upon speakers: most often native speaker status or special cultural knowledge and linguistic ability gained from prolonged exposure to the “target” culture in a foreign country. In fact, Rocío has never travelled outside Oaxaca and she herself learned EAL from Mexican teachers and speaks it with a Mexican accent. Furthermore, several of her students have recently returned to the village after living for years in California and attending American schools, giving the class a ready point of reference from which to critique their teacher’s communicative competence in English.

In the following chapters, we will see how teachers confront various situations like this. From a post-structural perspective, the analysis of these sorts of contradictions does not attempt to resolve them or explain them away. Rather, they are interesting because they represent the seams or fault lines in our stitching together of our social reality. As social scientists, we study the places where the seams do not line up very well, where the fabric is frayed or overlaps, because it tells us something unusual is happening there. There is a place where we are likely to encounter a “rich point” (Agar, 1996) that will point us towards some new understanding or way of looking at something. The overarching problem this book explores, then, is the question of how individuals confront contradictions in teaching and using English as they endeavor to construct themselves as legitimate speakers and teachers.

The Theoretical Approach

This book presents an account of teaching, learning, and coming to terms with English in southern Mexico, as told through the experiences of three EFL teachers: Carlos Gutiérrez, Rocío Arroyo, and Hilario Santibáfiez. The stories, descriptions, and analysis in the following chapters are the result ofprolonged ethnographic fieldwork, or “deep hanging out” as Rosaldo is said to have called it (Wolcott, 1999), over six years from 2005 to 2010, with most of the events related here taking place during the 2006—07 school year. My main purpose was to gain insights into the everyday lived experiences of Oaxacan English teachers from their own points of view, and to reframe questions of second language (L2) learning and teaching through the perspective ofthese classroom teachers. The account is therefore a particularly local one; however, as we will see, the teachers themselves demonstrate the critical “capacity to ‘shunt’ between the local and global” (Luke, 2004, p. 14). The narratives do not neatly separate theoretical issues from practical ones. Also, while I do hope to tell the reader something about how people confront problems related to learning English, I will for the most part ignore the controversies in applied linguistics between competing views of what constitutes the proper object of study of L2 acquisition research (cf. Larsen-Freeman [2007] for a “taking stock” overview of the debate). So I will refrain, for instance, from trying to distinguish certain problems in the ethnographic data as being an issue of language learning or of language use as Watson-Gegeo (2004) argues, and instead offer this work as a contribution to the growing body of literature that brings a “social turn” to the study of L2 learning (Block, 2003). I characterize this work simply as a sociocultural approach, which as explained in chapter four encompasses language ecological (Leather & van Dam, 2003), L2 socialization (Duff, 2008; Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2002), and critical applied linguistic perspectives (Pennycook, 2001; Norton & Toohey, 2004), as well as those that seek to connect concerns in language learning and teaching in local settings to wider social concerns (e.g. Canagarajah, 2005 ; Higgins, 2009 ; Pennycook, 2010).

I should caution that this book does not focus on the outcomes of English teaching so much as the processes. I have not measured, for example, how much English proficiency a typical student in Tlaxcaltepec acquired as a result of EAL classes and whether that afforded her greater social mobility. That would be a fine but completely different way to look at the “why teach English?” question. Rather, I have approached the “why?” of teaching English from the vantage point of the EFL teachers. From this perspective, the question may be better phrased as: “What does it mean to teach English in Oaxaca?” When posed in this way, the question can best be studied by watching and listening carefully to the teachers themselves. I began this close observation of teachers and their teaching with two presuppositions. I started from the idea that teaching English is a social practice the meaning of which is embedded within the language ecology of the social milieu. Next, I conceptualize the milieu or context of language teaching and learning as a site that exists as a contested historical, social, cultural, and political space.

In order to understand how teachers engaged with the contradictions of English and teaching EAL, I use two main theoretical concepts. These concepts and the theoretical framework to which they belong are implicit in the descriptive chapters (two and three) in that they informed how the portraits of the teachers and classrooms are represented. In the subsequent chapters, I use the framework more explicitly in the analysis. The first concept is legitimacy. The notion of legitimacy and legitimate speakers draws on the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and provides a powerful lens for looking at the contested nature of language learning. To say that language learning is contested means that for a given situation not all the social actors involved agree on what things mean, or how power should be exercised and by whom. For instance, as we will see in subsequent chapters, adolescent students of English in Oaxaca may judge the legitimacy oftheir teacher’s English based on their perception ofher accent, her displays of cultural knowledge like how to cross the border in the Arizona desert, or her ability to translate and explain the meaning of popular American song lyrics. One’s legitimacy as a language user (and in this case as a language teacher) is closely associated with one’s identity, or what Bourdieu calls habitus. Since the late 1990s and drawing on cultural studies and post-colonial theory, applied linguists have recognized that an examination of L2 learning needs to expand beyond a view of interlanguage development and contemplate the central part that identity plays in shaping the processes and outcomes for L2 users (cf. Block, 2007a; Clarke, 2008; Norton, 2000). Canonical concepts in second language acquisition (SLA) and language teaching, most notably the dichotomy of native/ non-native speaker, have been interrogating, with a view towards replacing fixed categories like nativeness with ones that recognize the negotiate and emergent nature of language learning and use: language expertise and language affiliation ( Leung, Harris & Rampton, 1997).

The second concept is symbolic competence. Kramsch and Whiteside (2008) situate a theory of symbolic competence within the broader scholarly concern for developing a language ecological perspective for researching multilingual contexts. They define symbolic competence as “the ability to play with various linguistic codes and with the various spatial and temporal resonances of these codes. [It] is the ability not only to approximate or appropriate for oneself someone else’s language, but to shape the very context in which the language is learned and used” (p. 664). They explain that symbolic competence is distributed, in the sense that language use is a social encounter that is inter-subjectively constructed, and hence one’s linguistic ability does not operate independent of her interlocutors. They identify four characteristics of symbolic competence: (1) subjectivity or subject-positioning, (2) historicity, (3) performativity, and (4) reframing. While the conceptual framework will be developed in chapter four, it should be clear that casting learning and teaching EAL in terms of legitimacy and symbolic competence is an attempt to understand how the process is profoundly shaped by the complex interactions between an individual and her local context.

I use context throughout this book with some reservations, because it seems that the use of this term is one place in particular where applied linguists from different theoretical approaches tend to misunderstand and talk past each other. Pennycook (2010) suggests the term locality, and argues that

being local is not only about physical and temporal locality; it is also about the perspectives, the language ideologies, the local ways ofknowing, through which language is viewed. [...] Locality is thus far more than context, and language as local practice is very different from language use in context, which rests on the questionable assumption that languages are akin to tools employed in predefined spaces. Looking at language as a local practice implies that language is part of social and local activity, that both locality and language emerge from the activities engaged in. (p. 128)

Both legitimacy and symbolic competence become useful concepts for reconcep-tualizing context as locality, and for recasting language use as local language practices. The quote also reminds us that language practices are framed within a locality, but the various ways that people act up their world through language also shapes their locality. The reciprocal relationship between the individual and her locale, and the mediating role of language in this relationship, is a theme that returns at various points. The notion of performativity, for instance, casts the relationship between one’s identity and her language practices as mutually constitutive. That is, we find that the teachers’ use of English in Oaxaca reflects their identities as EAL professionals who have had access to advanced language training, while at the same their identities are continually being (re)formed by the ways they use English. Again, the dialectic view of the relationship between people, practices, places, and language allows us to account for both the ways in which institutional and ideological structures constrain people’s ability to act upon the world in their own interests, as well as how individuals can exercise agency and (albeit limited) change despite those constraints. In the most general sense, we need to account for how power tends to reproduce the social conditions of the field, but also understand the mechanisms that allow for meaningful change.

Locating the Study: A Brief Background on Oaxaca

It should be clear then that place is important in this book. Oaxaca is a remarkable place. Geographically, culturally, linguistically, it is diverse and complex. It has captured the imagination ofwriters like Italo Calvo and D.H Lawrence, and produced both the most revered president in Mexico’s history, Benito Juárez, as well as one ofthe most vilified, Porfirio Díaz. During the later part of the 18th century, Oaxaca enjoyed a briefperiod (1750—1810) as a major regional economic power, thanks to the vibrant red dye produced by harvesting the cochineal insect from the prickly pear cactus ( Dalton, 2004). Since then, however, its geographical isolation has largely relegated it to a colonial backwater, with the exception of the petroleum refineries in the isthmus and the recent efforts to put the city of Oaxaca and the coastal resort tow...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Ambiguities and Tensions in English Language Teaching
• Esl & Applied Linguistics Professional Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 Exploring The Contradictions of Language Teaching
• 2 Three English Teachers
• 3 Squeezing More Juice: Portraits of Local English Teaching in Oaxacan Communities
• 4 Legitimacy, Symbolic Competence, and Teaching English
• 5 So They Can Defend Themselves a Little: The Meanings and Contradictions of Teaching English
• 6 Hey, Take it Easy!: Ambivalence and Language Ideologies
• 7 I Lasted One Day and Then I Was Gone: Performing Legitimacy
• 8 Conclusions: (Re)legitimizing Through Tensions and Ambiguities
• Appendix Doing Ethnography with Language Teachers
• Notes
• References
• Index