From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship

Essays and Reflections

Michael Byram

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781847698834
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection of essays and reflections starts from an analysis of the purposes of foreign language teaching and argues that this should include educational objectives which are ultimately similar to those of education for citizenship. It does so by a journey through reflections on what is possible and desirable in the classroom and how language teaching has a specific role in education systems which have long had, and often still have, the purpose of encouraging young people to identify with the nation-state. Foreign language education can break through this framework to introduce a critical internationalism. In a 'globalised' and 'internationalised' world, the importance of identification with people beyond the national borders is crucial. Combined with education for citizenship, foreign language education can offer an education for 'intercultural citizenship'.

Chapter 1

Foreign Language Education in Context

Three fundamental functions of all national education systems, and of compulsory education in particular, are to create the human capital required in a country’s economy, to develop a sense of national identity and to promote equality or at least a sense of social inclusion. In various degrees and forms these have been educational aims since the foundation of national education systems in Western Europe and North America, and were exported, together with the forms of schooling, to other parts of the world by the colonial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. The learning of a foreign language was in the early stages of this development, rather anomalous. It was not essential to the economy since it was colonial languages that were used in trade, supplemented by a few intermediaries with knowledge of local languages. It did not function in policies of equality or social inclusion but on the contrary was antithetical to these since only an elite learnt foreign languages. And it was, if anything, a potential threat to national identity because it introduced learners to different beliefs and values. In practice the threat was minimised by teaching methods based on translation, which by definition involves seeing another language and the values and beliefs it embodies through the framework of one’s own language, and one’s own beliefs and values.³

Some of the purposes and forms of education remain unaltered and are from time to time re-asserted,⁴ but social changes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries which are encapsulated in the words ‘globalisation’ and ‘internationalisation’ have given new meaning and significance to foreign language learning. One example of this is to be found in Western Europe, and increasingly in Central and Eastern Europe. The creation of a single market by the European Union is a microcosm of globalisation and has led to increased mobility and frequent interactions among people of different languages. This in turn has led to a political will to develop a new concept of identity, a European identity, which is fostered by increased foreign language learning. A second example is China, where entry into the World Trade Organisation is creating a demand for language learning on a massive scale but where access to international communication, particularly through the Internet, is perceived as sufficiently threatening to national values and beliefs to lead to censorship.

Foreign language education is thus no exception to the need to locate all education in its social, economic and political context. There are factors to be considered in the educational purposes as sketched above (and developed in detail in Chapter 2), but there are also factors to be taken into account in the definition of ‘foreign’ language education.

Defining Foreign Language Education

From a psychological perspective on the processes of language learning, there may be no useful distinction between ‘second’ and ‘foreign’ languages, since it can be argued that the acquisition processes are identical. In an educational and political context, however, the status of a language in a given society is important, and the distinction significant. Consider the case of French. In the anglophone provinces of Canada, French is taught as a Second Language, being one of the two official languages of the country. Across the border in the USA it is a foreign language with no official status but considerable prestige. In Australia, too, it is a foreign language but its prestige is being threatened by other foreign languages from countries such as Japan, which are geo-politically more important to Australia than to France. In India, French is present in the curriculum of the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, the major university for languages, but with the exception of Pondicherry is not otherwise a significant language in India. On the other hand, in some African countries it is an official language. Yet in both India and Africa, French is clearly a non-indigenous language, in one ‘foreign’ in the other ‘official’. Finally, in France, Belgium and Switzerland, French is taught as the or a national language and assumed to be school pupils’ ‘mother tongue’, even though there are many French, Belgian or Swiss citizens for whom it is chronologically their ‘second’ language since they have learnt, for example, Arabic in the home. Furthermore, it may not be perceived by some French citizens as their ‘national’ language because they accord this status to Breton or another language of an indigenous minority.

Secondly, it is important to distinguish ‘learning’ from ‘education’. In most countries, people learn more than one language in the course of their lives. They do so in many settings, of which educational institutions are only one; they learn in many ways, of which being taught in a classroom is only one. What distinguishes foreign language education from learning is that it has social and political purposes reflected in the formalities of an educational institution and embodied more or less explicitly in the learning aims and objectives attributed to the institution by governments at local or national level.

As a consequence of globalisation and internationalisation, these educational policies and aims have changed, or more accurately the emphasis has changed. Although there was a famous call for change in aims in the late 19th century, when in the ‘Reform Movement’, Viëtor said ‘Der Sprachunterricht muß umkehren’ (‘Language teaching must start afresh’), the fresh start took almost a hundred years to be accepted. The change required was from aims of acquiring a foreign language for purposes of understanding the high culture of great civilisations to aims of being able to use a language for daily communication and interaction with people from another country. As this change became accepted, ultimately under the banner of ‘Communicative Language Teaching’, the aims of language teaching in educational institutions began to coincide with the aims of people who learn languages in many other ways and locations. Foreign language education is now largely focused on the purposes of language learning and these seem self-evident to learners – and to politicians – and thus foreign language education has to meet the expectations of success in foreign language learning. Those expectations are high because parents and politicians see people around them, especially young children, apparently learning languages quickly and successfully in non-educational settings, through interaction with other children, through exposure to mass media. To what extent their expectations are justified and how often they are fulfilled varies from country to country and is an issue to which I shall return below.

To what extent the shift of focus in foreign language aims is satisfactory is still under debate. The shift within compulsory education seems to be almost complete, even if the practice lags behind the policy at times. For example, in Japan in 1993, a Government Commission on Foreign Language Policy Revision for the Twenty-First Century (see Koike & Tanaka, 1995), proposed fundamental structural change in syllabus, teacher training, public examinations, exchange programmes and so on, to improve learners’ communication skills. In the USA, the publication in 1996 of Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century (NSFLEP, 1996) moved away from a framework of four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) where the focus is on language as a system to be acquired, and substituted goal areas (communication, cultures, connections, comparisons and communities) where the focus is on what can be accomplished through a foreign language. The underlying principles are provided by three modes of communication – interpersonal, interactive and presentational – which describe the ways of functioning in a language. Similarly, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (Council of Europe, 2001) developed by the Council of Europe in the 1980s and 1990s proposes an approach based on an analysis of how languages are used in communication, on the ‘functions’ people use them for, the ‘notions’ they use them to express and the ‘tasks’ they wish to accomplish with them, instead of an analysis of the grammatical system.

All of these are influential documents on which new curricula and teaching methods are being constructed in the new century throughout the first world. The second world of the former Soviet bloc is also quickly moving from traditions of language learning based on linguistic analysis and is in fact overtaking many first-world countries by moving more quickly to this new position without passing through intermediary phases of language teaching methods such as the audio-lingual method. Changes in the third world are however much slower. Communication-skills methods require hardware and teaching materials, which are costly. Methods that rely on minimal equipment and which can be used in large classes, with emphasis on grammatical analysis, are still widespread. On the other hand, ‘new’ methods of developing communication skills by using a language as a medium of instruction in other subjects, which are currently being (re)discovered in Western Europe and imported from immersion programmes in North America, have been current in Eastern European countries for decades. In many African countries too, bilingual education is common. Here it is a necessity rather than a choice because foreign, i.e. non-indigenous, languages (English and French above all) are the official languages of many African countries and therefore automatically the languages of instruction. Children acquire them as a consequence of attending school.

The shift of emphasis to communication aims goes unchallenged in compulsory schooling and vocational education but is disputed in university education. Language teaching in universities for non-majors is following the shift in emphasis on aims and methods with little hesitation and the formation of an association to support this kind of teaching in Europe (the Confédération Européenne des Centres de Langues dans l’Enseignement Supérieur) is a symptom of the recognition of this function of university education. On the other hand, ‘study’ of languages, as opposed to language learning, for language majors and their lecturers, seems to be caught between the poles of language as ‘a means to an end’ and language as ‘an end in itself’. When language is a means to an end, the purpose has traditionally followed that of the study of classical languages – Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic – i.e. to gain access to great texts, often literary but not exclusively so. In some countries, the literary canon has been expanded to include, or given way absolutely to, the study of cultures and societies, drawing on a range of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, economics and history, and not just literary history and criticism. Astriking example of this is the growth in interest in British/American/Canadian Studies – the study of life in Britain/USA/Canada from many disciplinary perspectives – in departments of English where previously the study of English literature was the norm, the literature of the ‘native’ anglophone countries or in more recent times all literature written in English whatever the country of origin of the author. Similar developments are taking place in other language ‘disciplines’ and have for example fostered a debate in German Studies in the USA about what should be taught and which are the reference disciplines (Schulz et al., 2005). One of the issues is precisely whether language study is a ‘discipline’ with a clear definition of an object of study, a methodology and an epistemology, or whether it is an ‘area’ whose boundaries are in fact ‘fuzzy’ and, in the contemporary post-modern world, appropriately so (Di Napoli et al., 2001). In this environment, people also ask whether language study develops ‘criticality’ in students in higher education, because criticality is a crucial characteristic of university education. That it is possible to develop criticality even in beginners courses at university has been shown in the teaching of Japanese at a British University (Yamada, 2008). If language study were to be found wanting in this respect, questions might be raised as to its appropriateness as a university ‘discipline’ (Brumfit et al., 2004).

Foreign Language Education Policies

As foreign language learning has become more important for societies responding to globalisation and internationalisation, governments have paid more attention to policy-making. In many cases, the focus is on the teaching and learning of English, and in many countries, particularly in East Asia, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is almost synonymous with Foreign Language Learning. This is a consequence of British colonialism continued by American dominance of world affairs.

The role of English thus often dominates the development of language education policies and the teaching of English has been a major influence on the methods of teaching all foreign languages. The most significant factor in policy-making for EFL is the relationship English has with native-speaker communities. As an ‘international language’, there should in principle be no priority accorded to British or US English, or in fact any other country where English is the national or official language. Yet there is still a strong tendency in many countries to pay allegiance by accepting British or US norms of language use, of pronunciation, of grammatical correctness and of dictionary definitions of meanings. Despite the special circumstances of English being spoken by many more non-native than native speakers, native speaker norms are still taken as international norms, in spite of the questioning of the whole concept of ‘nativeness’ in this sense, and in spite of the potential for an international English with its own norms of pronunciation and grammar (Jenkins, 2000; Seidlhofer, 2003; Davies, 2003). For example, in Singapore, the government has formulated an explicit policy of maintaining external norms against the development of Singaporean English, not least for fear of Singaporeans losing competence in the major medium of international trade.

Native speakers, and the governments and cultural institutes of native speaker countries, have a vested interest in promoting attitudes of deference to native-speaker norms in that they thereby continue to dominate communication and gain advantage in negotiation. There has been much debate about the argument that there is both conscious and unconscious ‘linguistic imperialism’ (Phillipson, 1992; Phillipson & Davies, 1997) beneath these processes. On the other hand there is growing evidence that the dominance of native speakers, for example as teachers setting and embodying linguistic and cultural norms, is being challenged (Medgyes, 1994), and international users of English are taking ownership of it for their own purposes (Canagarajah, 1999).

Other languages and their native-speaker communities have not been criticised as vehemently as English. Nonetheless the institutionalisation and promotion of French, German, Italian and Spanish (in the Alliance Française, the Goethe-Institut, the Istituto Italiana di Cultura and the Cervantes Institute) is an indicator of the significance of the teaching of their languages in the foreign policies of the countries in question. The Cervantes Institute, for example, was founded in 1991, embracing the aims of language teaching for communication, and the significance of Spanish continues to grow in the commercial development of South America and as the second language of the USA. The Goethe-Institut plays a crucial role in the teaching of German because in many countries German does not have a substantial place in school-level education, but is learnt by adults, and adult education is seldom a priority for governments. The Goethe-Institut thus offers a systematic base for the learning of German and it too has embraced communicative aims for language learning.

Policy responses to the evolving significance of language learning, and in particular the dominance of English, are mainly based on acceptance of the trend towards English. Avery striking example of this was presented in Japan in a ‘Report of the Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century’ (Kawai, 2007):

It is necessary to set the concrete objective of all citizens acquiring a working knowledge of English by the time they take their place in society as adults, organise English classes according to level of achievement, improve training and objective assessment of English teachers, expand the number of foreign teachers of English, contract language schools to handle English classes, and other general materials. In addition, the central government, local governments, and other public institutions must be required to produce their publications, home pages, and so on in both Japanese and English. … In the long term, a national debate on whether to make English an official second language will be needed. (Commission of Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century, 2000: 10)

The final statement caused uproar. The threat to national identity that has in principle always been present in the teaching of foreign languages but never in practice, suddenly loomed very large.

Politicians in democratic societies, at whatever level they operate, follow the perceived demands and needs of their publics, who seek every opportunity to learn English, to have English introduced to their children at an early age, to use English for work and leisure. These perceptions may not be as well-founded as they seem and the future of English may be less dominan...