World Language Education as Critical Pedagogy

The Promise of Social Justice

Timothy G. Reagan, Terry A. Osborn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367465216
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000172072
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Accessible and cutting-edge, this text is a pivotal update to the field and offers a much-needed critical perspective on world language education. Building off their classic 2002 book, The Foreign Language Educator in Society, Timothy G. Reagan and Terry A. Osborn address major issues facing the world language educator today, including language myths, advocacy, the perceived and real benefits of language learning, linguistic human rights, constructivism, learning theories, language standards, monolingualism, bilingualism and multiculturalism.

Organized into three parts – "Knowing Language," "Learning Language," and "Teaching Language" – this book applies a critical take on conventional wisdom on language education, evaluates social and political realities, assumptions, and controversies in the field. Each chapter includes questions for reflection and discussion to support students and educators in developing their own perspectives on teaching and learning languages. With a critical pedagogy and social justice lens, this book is ideal for scholars and students in foreign/world language education, social justice education, and language teaching methodology courses, as well as pre- and in-service teachers.

1 Introduction

World Language Educators Still Need Critical Pedagogy

Almost twenty years ago, in our book The Foreign Language Educator in Society: Toward a Critical Pedagogy, we wrote that:

Critical reflection … thus becomes prerequisite to the critical pedagogy that we are advocating here. Teachers who cannot reflect critically possess little hope of providing their students meaningful opportunities to reflect on the issues of language diversity and critical language awareness … criticisms that critical pedagogy is not applicable to the real world of the classroom teacher, go far beyond a simple lack of understanding about critical pedagogy. Those who doubt the practicality of using critical pedagogy in teaching are also extremely likely to have an overly constrained understanding of the profession of teaching. Simply put, teaching is much more than the conveyance of material to be memorized and regurgitated. It is … an art and science of engaging students intellectually and emotionally in their understanding of the world.

(Reagan & Osborn, 2002, p. 84)

When we wrote these words, we did not know that the journey on which we had begun, and which we were encouraging others to undertake, would prove to be as difficult and challenging as it has been. At the same time, we did not have any sense of how successful world language educators across the United States, and indeed around the world, would be in devising and implementing creative, innovative and effective ways to incorporate critical pedagogy in world language education. There is a great deal for those committed to critical pedagogy in world language education to celebrate, and much for which we can be grateful. If the journey is well under way, though, it is not a journey with any end in sight, and many barriers remain – some of them much greater than any we expected or foresaw twenty years ago. The very concerns that first led many of us to critical pedagogy are still present, and while we have been successful in challenging many of these, others continue to dominate much of public education. We still need critical pedagogy, arguably more now than ever.

Language is at the core and heart of the human experience. It is not only what makes us unique among our fellow beings on our planet, but it is arguably the single most important tool that we use in creating and maintaining human societies and civilizations. It is the glue that holds virtually everything else that we value together. Without language, there could be only fairly rudimentary human relationships, little technology, and at best incredibly limited political, economic, social, religious and cultural systems. To be sure, one can imagine communication without language – a dog is certainly capable of conveying feelings, needs, desires, affections, and so on, and many species have evolved fairly complex systems for communicating both within their own species and between themselves and other species. Such communication, though, is far more limited and restricted in nature than is human language.

We have spent our lives studying, learning, teaching, and thinking about languages; the love of language runs deep in us both. As world language educators, we have not only an affection for the languages that we study and teach, but also a desire to share that affection with our students, colleagues and friends. We have found, however, that outside of a fairly small circle of bilingual and multilingual individuals we know in our own society, apathy (and even sometimes antipathy) are by far the more common responses among our fellow citizens toward foreign languages and foreign language study. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, for instance, found that 47% of white Republicans in the United States indicated that “it would bother them some or a lot to hear people speak a language other than English in a public place” (VOA News, 2019). It would be easy to minimize the importance of this finding by pointing out that this resistance to foreign languages was mitigated by age, education and ethnicity, and further, that while Democrats were far more open to hearing foreign languages spoken around them, it was still the case that some 18% of Democrats – that is, nearly one-fifth of Democrats – also found such situations to be uncomfortable. This hostility to the language use and choices of other people strikes us as remarkable – and as remarkably worrying, as well. It reflects not only the growing anti-immigrant sentiments in many parts of the U.S. population, but also the continuing failure of the public schools to teach English native speakers languages other than English.

There is another aspect of the resistance to languages other than English in the United States, and that is an ideological division first identified by Jeannie Haubert and Elizabeth Fussell. They argued that our society is characterized by two very different ideological groupings, which they label the “cosmopolitan” and the “parochial” (Haubert & Fussell, 2006). The fundamental difference between these two groups is that “parochials, are more likely to identify with the nation and take an ethnocentric stance on public issues … [while] cosmopolitans are more open to the virtues of other nations and to criticism of their own” (Bean, 1995, p. 32). Not surprisingly, cosmopolitans tend to be better educated, hold white-collar jobs, reject ethnocentrism and racism, hold liberal political views, and to some extent are likely to have lived in other countries (see Haubert & Fussell, 2006). As Emanuel Alvarado has noted:

Individuals in America with a higher level of proficiency in a foreign language may hold more positive views toward immigrants because they are more familiar than individuals who only speak English about the socio-historical and socio-economic circumstances that drive people away from their home countries into the U.S. In essence, the more fluent individuals become in a language other than English, the more likely they are to acquire knowledge of foreign cultures and societies and perhaps also the more likely they are to conceptualize the entrance of immigrants to the U.S. as an opportunity rather than an economic or cultural threat.

(Alvarado, 2009)

The overwhelming majority of native speakers of English in the U.S. have never learned another language; indeed, most have never even tried, and of those who studied a language in school, most have had unsuccessful experiences at doing so. Not only has the study of foreign languages not been a terribly successful or rewarding experience for many, but further, the lessons that seem to have been learned about language are problematic. Many, perhaps even most, people in our society have fundamental misconceptions about the nature of language, the attributes and characteristics of language, the social and cultural functions of languages, and the role of language in human society. All too often these misconceptions and misunderstandings are found not only among those whose language learning experiences have been unsuccessful, but also, ironically, among the smaller group of people who have met with some degree of success in language learning. As Humphrey Tonkin (personal communication) once observed, linguistic chauvinism is by no means necessarily counteracted by bilingualism or even by multilingualism. A further point that should be raised here, since our primary audience is an American one,¹ is that monolingualism is not, in fact, “normal,” but is profoundly unusual. As John Edwards noted:

To be bilingual or multilingual is not the aberration supposed by many (particularly, perhaps, by people in Europe and North America who speak a “big” language); it is, rather, a normal and unremarkable necessity for the majority in the world today. A monolingual perspective is often, unfortunately, a consequence of possession of a “language of wider communication,” as English, French, German, Spanish and other such languages are sometimes styled. This linguistic myopia is sometimes accompanied by a narrow cultural awareness and is reinforced by state policies which, in the main, elevate only one language to official status.

(Edwards, 1994, p. 1)

This book seeks to address the social context of language, language teaching and language learning in the United States. Its emphasis is on what pre- and in-service teachers of world languages in this country ought to know and understand about language, language attitudes, language practices, language rights, language policy, and so on. More to the point, however, we are committed to advocating not simply for the teaching and learning of foreign languages in our society, but also for critical perspectives and approaches in the teaching of such languages. We hope that World Language Education as Critical Pedagogy: The Promise of Social Justice will encourage world language educators to broaden their conception of our discipline, and to do so in ways that will make language study both more relevant for students and more critical with respect to its value in the development of the “educated person” in a democratic society.

A Word about Terminology

The use of the phrase foreign language to refer to any language other than English in the United States has a long and well-established history, but in recent years it has also come to be seen as not only dated, but also potentially misleading. By labeling a language like Spanish foreign, one suggests that it is alien to the United States. This is, of course, clearly untrue. Spanish has been spoken in North America longer than has English, and large numbers of individuals in the United States speak it as their native language. This latter point is true as well for French, German, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and virtually any other language that is likely to be taught in a public school. It is also obviously true for American Sign Language (ASL), not to mention, in an even stronger sense, for Native American languages such as Navajo and Mohawk. By using the term “foreign,” one can credibly argue that we are establishing a false bifurcation between “Us” and “Them,” and further, that we are suggesting that languages other than English are not part of our society or history. Both of these points are valid ones.

The alternative terminology to “foreign language” that has gained widespread acceptance in the United States has been to speak of “world languages” and of “world language education.” In dealing with the problem of what to call such languages, in Canada the choice has been to talk about “second languages” and “second language education,” while in Australia the more common terminology is “Languages Other Than English” (or LOTEs). We welcome the recognition that such terminological debates suggest, and agree that speakers of the various languages that are commonly (and less commonly) taught in U.S. schools do indeed have local speaker communities; indeed, we have advocated connecting with those communities as a means of both increasing language awareness and making the target language more topical and relevant for students (see, e.g., Osborn, 2006).

When we wrote our book The Foreign Language Educator in Society: Toward a Critical Pedagogy (Reagan & Osborn, 2002), the phrase “foreign language” as the marker of the kinds of languages being taught had already become uncomfortable for some in the profession. Yet, by consciously choosing to continue to use the term “foreign language,” we decided to make use of that discomfort to serve as a reminder of the work still before us as a field. In other words, we deliberately chose a term that, though widely accepted in the past, was on its way to becoming less so – and so it served, in the tradition of critical pedagogies, to disrupt that which had become comfortable to the field despite being demonstrably misleading at the least, and prejudicial at worst. Political correctness and word games with nomenclature changes could not solve the challenges before us, we believed. That hasn’t changed.

We also believed then, and continue to believe, that the meaning of “foreign language” was that the language being learned was foreign to the learner. This way of talking about “foreign languages” and “foreign language education” works very well, of course, until one considers the case of English Language Learners (ELLs) learning English as a second language in the U.S. context. For such students, English is the “foreign language” being studied, and yet there is virtually no tradition of including this use of the term in our discourse. Indeed, this is a distinction that is made not only in our everyday language, but in terms of teacher preparation, professional organizations (e.g., ACTFL versus NABE versus TESOL), and a host of other ways. This particular differentiation simply reinforces the fundamental point that we are attempting to make here: there is an ideological component to the use of the phrase “foreign language,” but the effect of that usage can be reversed if it is recognized and discussed as problematic. An additional problem with the use of the term “foreign” in this context is that it involves a clear identification of the target language of the classroom as “Other” (see National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015; Osborn, 1998). Recent efforts to change nomenclature, utilizing the term “world languages” in place of “foreign languages” have, we would agree, to some extent addressed such concerns, but only at the level of what might be termed “articulated bias.” Regardless of what they are called, in U.S. schools languages other than English are in fact perceived, by both adults and students, as “foreign.” As we have already noted, this perception is only strengthened by encouraging the use of what is often seen as merely a politically correct label such as “world languages.” The risk with such word games (for such they are), as Michael Apple noted, is that “historically outmoded, and socially and politically conservative (and often educationally disastrous) practices are not only continued, but are made to sound as if they were actually more enlightened and ethically responsive ways of dealing with children” (Apple, 1979, p. 144). We accept Apple’s point, but have also, after some twenty years, decided that this is a battle that is probably no longer worth fighting. To be sure, our earlier deliberate use of the term “foreign language” was a way of emphasizing rather than hiding the hidden agenda that goes with the concept of “foreign-ness” in American society, but in this book, we have decided for the most part to simply accept the common use of “world language education” to refer to our field and profession (though we have kept “foreign language” where it seems most appropriate).

What this Book Is Not about

Given the primary audience for which this book has been written – pre- and in-service world language educators – a few words here about what this book is not intended to provide or accomplish are probably appropriate. There are many issues that are often covered in both introductory and advanced courses in world language education, including topics such as classroom management, writing lesson plans,² different approaches to teaching world languages, designing classroom tests, the effective use ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Author Biographies
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: World Language Educators Still Need Critical Pedagogy
• PART I: Knowing Language
• PART II: Learning Language
• PART III: Teaching Language
• Index