Bloomsbury World Englishes Volume 3: Pedagogies

Yasemin Bayyurt, Mario Saraceni

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350418394
• eBook ISBN: 9781350065901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Bloomsbury World Englishes offers a comprehensive and rigorous description of the facts, implications and contentious issues regarding the forms and functions of English in the world. International experts cover a diverse range of varieties and topics, offering a more accurate understanding of English across the globe and the various social contexts in which it plays a significant role. With volumes dedicated to research paradigms, language ideologies and pedagogies, the collection pushes the boundaries of the field to go beyond traditional descriptive paradigms and contribute to moving research agendas forward.

Volume 3: Pedagogies addresses the teaching of English as a world language. Chapters in this volume consider the teaching and learning of English(es) from a range of perspectives and on the basis of experiences and research from many parts of the world.

PART ONE

General Principles

Chapter 1

Incorporating Ontological Reflection into Teacher Education about English for Global Learners

A Rationale and Some Guiding Principles

Christopher J. Hall

1 Introduction

In teacher education for English language teaching (ELT), much more attention is paid to pedagogical knowledge and practice than to the nature of the subject to be taught (cf. Marr and English 2019). A recent review of trends in ELT teacher education (Barahona 2018), for example, refers to the importance of developing new ‘teacher conceptualizations of pedagogical practice and of how a language is learnt,’ (p. 13) but not of ‘the language’ itself. This imbalance is unfortunate given several decades of research in World Englishes (henceforth WE) and related approaches that have questioned conventional conceptualizations of English and have recognized the new realities of its global learning and use. Although there has been considerable attention to English teachers’ language awareness or ‘Knowledge about Language’ (KAL; cf. Andrews 1999; Bartels 2005), the obvious connection to Global Englishes remains unmade, and it is taken for granted that knowledge about grammar means knowledge about ‘the’ grammar of ‘Standard (native-speaker) English’. The disconnect is evident, for example, in Johnson’s (2016) overview of ELT teacher education, which contains several references to ‘disciplinary knowledge about language’, but does not link them to the section headed ‘Which English should teachers teach?’.

Sifakis and Bayyurt (2015) correctly identify teacher education (henceforth TE) as the appropriate ‘intermediary’ for adapting pedagogical practice to the realities of Global Englishes. Their work on TE from the perspective of ‘E[nglish as a ]L[ingua ]F[ranca]-inspired pedagogy’ (Sifakis and Bayyurt 2018) is part of a growing body of scholarly proposals for TE in what Rose and Galloway (2019) call ‘Global Englishes for Language Teaching’ (GELT); see, for example, Brown (1993), Bayyurt and Akcan (2015), Kumaravadivelu (2012), Marr and English (2019), Matsuda (2017) and Sifakis (2007). Most of these proposals focus on the importance of raising teachers’ awareness of the diversity of global Englishes and of the contexts in which they are used, emphasizing the argument that claims to ownership legitimately extend beyond native speakers. They also advocate a concentration on socially embedded communicative function over the acquisition of linguistic form. In line with the ‘social turn’ in second language acquisition (SLA) in the 1990s (Block 2003), they associate the latter with cognitive orientations, and view these as reinforcing monolithic, monolingual approaches in which native speaker models of Standard English (henceforth SE) are the only legitimate measures of ‘ultimate attainment’.

But studies consistently report that teachers demonstrate a reluctance ‘to set aside their traditional EFL practices of teaching standardised, or native English’ (Sifakis and Bayyurt 2015: 472). This suggests that awareness of Global Englishes, their impact on teaching and why this matters in specific communicative contexts is not enough to effect the kind of change required (cf. also Suzuki 2011; Timmis 2002; Young et al. 2016). I argue in this chapter that there is another, more fundamental, link in the chain of issues and principles mediating theory and practice, which also needs to be addressed at the TE stage. This is the issue of ontologies of English—that is, beliefs about the nature of its existence. Generally, ontological analysis of language and languages has been confined to philosophy and theoretical linguistics. But since Pennycook’s (2007a) penetrating critique of the ‘myth of English as an International Language’, the ontological status of the language has started to be addressed more explicitly, especially in work on Global Englishes and GELT. Rose and Galloway (2019), for example, rightly assert that ‘GELT requires a new ontological stance, or understanding of language’ (p. 91). They pinpoint the Standard Language Ideology as a major barrier to this understanding, and perceptively locate ontological stance as the key issue: ‘if teachers’ ideology does not match a new ontological stance, it is more likely that TESOL practitioners will reject the changes’ (p. 91). I will go further in this chapter, to suggest that the ideological barrier can only be shifted, and therefore GELT fully embraced, if teaching of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) practitioners’ ontological beliefs change. Accordingly, a key step in educating teachers to understand and adopt GELT is to help them reflect on and reshape their ontologies of language and of English.

The argument can be articulated in terms of the relationship between five domains of language-focused activity. As indicated by the arrows in Figure 1.1, I see these domains as mutually informing, in a chain of interdependence. The argument goes as follows, starting with the key domain of learning and working back to linguistic theory:

FIGURE 1.1: Chain of language-related educational domains which motivates the incorporation of language ontologies into teacher education.

1 Learning: Too few learners of L2 English are developing the communicative resources, strategies and ideological awareness they need to enable them to use English appropria tely and effectively in the increasingly globalized and diversified contexts in which they will all, to a greater or lesser extent, be involved.

2 Teaching: Learners will have little opportunity and/or incentive to develop the necessary resources, strategies and awareness unless doing so is part of the curriculum and/or is facilitated deliberately, sensitively and effectively by teachers.

3 Teacher Education: Research suggests that current attempts to incorporate awareness of Global Englishes into TE are stymied by pre- and in-service teachers’ entrenched ideological and ontological beliefs about (and investment in) orientations to ‘accuracy’ in SE, especially at the grammatical level.

4 Applied Linguistics: TE must inform and be informed by an applied linguistics which effectively responds to teachers’ entrenched beliefs about language as normative system, by mediating conceptualizations of English which not only recognize the social and political realities of Global English practices but also teachers’ commitment to, and learners’ expectation of, the development of English as individual linguistic resources (especially at the grammatical level).

5 Linguistics: Language theorists need to theorize (ontologies of) language and (ontologies of) English more clearly, going beyond the postulation of idealized systems of forms associated with uniform native speaker or user communities, to account for the individual, flexible, dynamic, cognitive resources which L1 and L2 learners and users develop, in interaction with other linguistic and semiotic resources, through social usage. Such theory must be kept ontologically distinct from sociopolitical conceptualizations of the named monolithic system ‘English’.

In this chapter, I thus call for a renewed focus in TE on the language itself, in which teachers are invited to reflect on their own conceptualizations of English and to construct their own personal ontologies of English for global learners. This requires explicit incorporation of language ontology into TE, an enterprise I will call ‘Teacher education about English for global learners’ (TEEGL).

The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a brief overview of work on language ontology for ELT and summarizes the framework for ontological analysis that I will be applying. Subsections address conceptualizations of English in three ontological categories: (i) as normative system (the prevailing conceptualization); (ii) as social practice (the conceptualization prioritized in current work on GELT); and (iii) as cognitive resource (a conceptualization that, I argue, requires rehabilitation). Section 3 sets out six principles to guide the design and implementation of TEEGL content and activities.

2 Ontologies of English for language learning and teaching

Until recently there has been little analysis of, or discussion about, ontological issues in applied linguistics. Makoni and Pennycook’s (2007) volume, Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, might in future be identified as the critical publication which initiated an eventual ‘ontological turn’ in applied linguistics. Their volume challenged applied linguists to interrogate the easy acceptance of conventional wisdom about the existence of named languages, highlighting their sociopolitical nature and the ways that uncritical belief in such concepts has distorted mainstream linguistic analysis and therefore helped to perpetuate global inequalities. In the same vein, Toolan (2009) presented a collection of papers addressing the pedagogical implications of Harris’s (1981) Integrational Linguistics, which departs from the ‘myth’ that separate languages exist as fixed codes. Toolan pointed out (2009: 11) that language-teaching programmes ‘are conveying . . . a powerfully general misrepresentation of the nature of the language, what is entailed in knowing it, and what the basis for projecting and maintaining a standard language is’. From another perspective, Widdowson (e.g. 2012) has highlighted the ontological challenges to conventional views of English represented by ELF research, criticizing theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics alike for the (tac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• PROLOGUE
• Introduction
• Part one General Principles
• Part two Native-Speakerism
• Part Three English as a Medium of Instruction
• Part four Focus on Specific Contexts
• Index
• Copyright