How is EFL Writing Teacher Education Shaped by Teachers’ Unique Local Contexts?

This month we published EFL Writing Teacher Education and Professional Development edited by Estela Ene, Betsy Gilliland, Sarah Henderson Lee, Tanita Saenkhum and Lisya Seloni. In this post the editors explain the importance of studying local contexts and how they shape the pedagogical landscape of EFL writing teachers.

What do geopolitics and socioeconomics have to do with the English classroom and the skill of teaching English language writing? In our recently published book with Multilingual Matters, EFL Writing Teacher Education and Professional Development, we go beyond the traditional boundaries of English writing education to investigate how diverse regions that are mostly underrepresented in the research literature shape the pedagogical landscape of EFL writing teachers. 

Well over a billion individuals speak English as a foreign language around the world today. There are millions of English language teachers globally, working in schools, language institutes, universities, online platforms, and private tutoring settings. It is important, therefore, to document EFL experiences of learning and teacher education and allow them to inform theories and practices of second language writing that are still US-centric. It is to these less represented narratives, research, and stories that we need to listen to gain a deeper understanding of local practices and eventually work to develop a sustainable and ecologically responsible writing curriculum. 

This timely collection sheds light on often-overlooked areas of the globe, exposing how local settings from Rwanda to Japan, Kazakhstan, and Argentina present distinct challenges and opportunities for EFL teaching and the training of EFL writing teachers. We hope to foster a deeper, more inclusive narrative of EFL writing education by weaving together the stories of practitioners and researchers from all backgrounds – one that respects and represents the diversity of voices contributing to this subject. 

Our book offers teacher reflections, action research, and models of resources that can be adapted to other contexts. Chapters illustrate how educators modify their approaches to fit within the educational, cultural, and political contexts in which they work. In doing this, they also challenge the status quo and overcome the challenge of having to be the main drivers of their own professional development. For example, teachers of minority students in China show how they move away from exam-focused instruction, negotiating the advantages and disadvantages of this shift. Teachers in Japan, Chile, and Algeria reflect on their personal journeys toward student-centered, real-world writing pedagogies. A teacher educator in Turkiye describes activities that engage learners in exploring written genres through creativity. Iranian English teachers reveal that given the political and educational environments in two eras of Iranian history, primary and secondary school students have limited opportunities to learn how to write for communicative purposes. These and many other chapters illustrate the breadth of innovation and investment teachers and teacher educators have made in EFL writing across the globe.

Our book invites academics, policymakers, and educators to take a more comprehensive look at the global scene of EFL writing instruction. It is an appeal to acknowledge and honor the various ways that educators worldwide are advancing the subject of EFL writing, frequently under challenging situations and with limited resources. 

For individuals fascinated by the complicated dance of teaching writing in various global contexts, our book provides a glimpse into EFL educators’ innovative and resilient practices worldwide. We invite you to go through these pages, as each chapter demonstrates the ingenuity and passion of teachers who shape the next generation of English authors. 

If this topic speaks to you, or if you have your tales about the problems and triumphs of teaching EFL writing, we would love to hear from you. Let us continue to learn from one another, forming a worldwide community of educators united in our dedication to developing proficient, confident writers across boundaries. 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Second Language Writing Instruction in Global Contexts edited by Lisya Seloni and Sarah Henderson Lee.

Getting Inside “Measuring Second Language Pragmatic Competence”

This month we published Measuring Second Language Pragmatic Competence by Rod Ellis, Carsten Roever, Natsuko Shintani and Yan Zhu. In this post Rod introduces us to the book.

There is a background to the writing of any book which often goes unstated. In my blog post I’d like to take you inside the book by telling you a bit about why and how it got to be written. I will explain who the authors are, what motivated the writing of the book, what research it was based on and what I see as the uses of the book.

How did I come to work with my co-authors on this book?

The real starting point was a research study I completed more than fifteen years ago investigating the measurement of second language (L2) grammatical knowledge. This research drew the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge of an L2 and involved the development of a set of tests designed to provide separate measures of these two types of grammatical knowledge. The results of this research project were reported in a book called  Implicit and Explicit Knowledge in Second Language Learning, Testing and Teaching published by Multilingual Matters in 2009. My idea was to extend this earlier research by investigating whether it was also possible to develop tests that would provide separate measures of implicit and explicit L2 pragmatic knowledge (i.e. the knowledge we use to communicate smoothly and appropriately).

I decided therefore to put in an application for a Discovery Research Grant from the Australian Research Council, drawing on my experience of the earlier project. My own expertise lay in second language acquisition research but I recognized that I also needed expertise in L2 pragmatics. I approached Carsten Roever, who had published widely in L2 pragmatics, to see if he would be interested in joining in the project. Carsten was an ideal co-researcher because he also had experience in language assessment. Together we developed a research proposal, which was successful. We now had the funds we needed for the project.

Our original aim was to investigate different populations of L2 learners – both EFL and ESL. After designing a battery of tests, we started by collecting data from L2 university learners in China and Japan. To help in this we were joined by two other researchers – Yan Zhu, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, and Natsuko Shintani, a professor at Kansai University in Osaka. Unfortunately restrictions arising from the Covid epidemic in Australia made it impossible to continue by collecting data from ESL learners.

The research team, then, comprised myself, Carsten, Yan Zhu and Natsuko. This team has remained with the project throughout and many of the chapters in the book involved all four authors.

Why was it important for us to take a psycholinguistic perspective?

By ‘psycholinguistic perspective’ I mean an approach that is founded on the psychological underpinning of linguistic rules and processes. In the case of language testing, this involves considering the mental processes involved when completing tests. While there are a number of different psycholinguistic perspectives, the one we drew on was based on the implicit/ explicit distinction. From this theoretical perspective, when learners complete a test they can draw on their implicit knowledge (i.e. knowledge that they have no conscious awareness of and can be accessed automatically) or their explicit knowledge (i.e. knowledge they are conscious of and that is only accessible slowly after reflection). The implicit/explicit distinction is a fundamental distinction in current thinking theorizing about an L2 but, surprisingly, it has not figured in research on the testing of L2 pragmatic competence. In fact, many of the popular ways of testing L2 pragmatics really only measure explicit processing and thus tell us nothing about learners’ ability to process their pragmatic knowledge implicitly even though, arguably, it is implicit abilities that are essential in everyday communicative situations.

All research needs to focus on how it can build on and extend existing research. By adopting a psycholinguistic perspective, we hoped to fill a gap in current research on the measurement of pragmatic competence.

How did we develop the tests that featured in the book?

The development of any test requires making decisions about what to test and how to test it. Our starting point was to decide what aspects of pragmatics to measure. A study of the L2 pragmatics literature led us to identify three aspects: metapragmatic awareness, implicature, and conversational structure. In deciding how to assess these aspects, we tried to design tests that would tap either learners’ implicit pragmatic processing abilities (i.e. responses made rapidly and without time for reflection) or explicit processing abilities (i.e. responses made without time pressure and that favoured reflection).  We ended up with two tests involving explicit processing, two tests more likely to favour implicit processing, and a test of the ability to comprehend irony where we were unsure of the kind of processing it would most likely elicit. These tests also differed in terms of whether they involve comprehension/perception or production.

The initial tests were designed by myself and Carsten Roever, piloted on a small group of ESL learners, revised, and then administered with the help of Yan Zhu and Natsuko Shintani in China and Japan respectively. One of our aims was to carry out a careful evaluation of the tests and there are chapters in the book that report the results of the evaluation of each test. Not unexpectedly, we did not find that all the tests worked as well as we had hoped! Subsequently, we redesigned some of the tests and used them in a final study where we investigated the effects of instruction on the development of the two types of knowledge.

What do we hope readers will take away from the book?

We envisage that the main readers of our book will be second language acquisition researchers interested in pragmatics. An abiding issue in SLA research is how learning is measured and we hoped that the tests we developed would help in designing studies that investigate how different conditions of learning impact on the kind of the learning that results. Two chapters in our book illustrate how the tests can be used in this way. In one chapter, we report a comparative study of L2 learners who completed a one-year study abroad and learners who received language instruction while staying in their home country. In another study, we used the tests to investigate the effects of different kinds of instruction on the acquisition of implicit and explicit L2 pragmatic knowledge.

We did not write the book for teachers. But the perspective that informs the book is one that teachers need to consider. Any time teachers set their students a test they need to consider what kind of knowledge the test is measuring.

What are we working on next?

The tests provide the tools we need to investigate the pragmatic competence of L2 learners and how learning conditions shape the kind of learning that take place. We are already embarking on two other studies investigating this. In one study (involving myself and Scott Aubrey), we are comparing the pragmatic competence of students in Hong Kong and Shanghai universities to see if there are differences in these groups of learners. In the other study with Natsuko Shintani, we are investigating how the interactive experiences of Japanese students on a study abroad shape the kind of pragmatic abilities they develop.

Rod Ellis

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting you might also like Assessing Speaking in Context edited by M. Rafael Salaberry and Alfred Rue Burch.

What are the Main Issues Within ELT Today?

In this post Rod Bolitho and Richard Rossner, authors of our book Language Education in a Changing World, answer some questions on the issues within ELT today and how things have changed since the pandemic.

How did the two of you come to collaborate on this book?

We have worked together before and have shared ideas about language education. We felt that there were few recent and accessible books that explore the broader picture of how language education, including learning of the language of schooling, has developed in response to changes in society and due to ‘globalisation’. Working together enabled us to pool and synthesise our accumulated experience.

Your book was published right at the start of the pandemic, and obviously a lot has changed in language education as a result of Covid. What would you add to the book now? 

One of us (Richard) was closely involved in a European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) initiative on the impact of the Covid emergency on foreign language education. The results of the various surveys and consultations undertaken are described in a recent publication called Rethinking language education after the experience of Covid. In general, while the experience was traumatic for many learners and for some language teachers, language education professionals adapted quickly to the challenges of online language teaching and to using the various internet resources that are available. The publication contains ‘guidelines’ arising from the research which highlight the importance of greater flexibility and of developing a willingness to experiment and adapt methods and resources to circumstances, while at the same time giving attention to the individual and collective well-being of learners and teachers, especially (but not only) during periods of crisis, like the pandemic. We might well have wanted to bring some of these points to the fore if the book had been published later.

What fundamentals of language education haven’t changed over the past three years?

The general neglect of language issues in school curricula and especially in teacher education. Despite isolated initiatives, mainly in parts of Europe, there is still no widespread acceptance of the fact that every teacher is effectively a language teacher, or of the need for teacher education to take this fully into account. Teachers of any subject working online with their learners during the pandemic must have felt this even more keenly than they had during face-to-face teaching.

What do you think is the main issue ELT faces today?

An issue that ELT has faced for many years but has never really confronted is the status of English as (currently) the dominant foreign language, and the impact that this has on the status of other languages, particularly those that are under threat. The fact that, for a large majority of speakers of English in the world, it is not their first language, has implications for the ‘ownership’ of the language and what versions and varieties of the language should be considered acceptable. Moreover, the dominance of English has tended to lead to lack of collaboration and interaction between teachers of English and teachers of other languages, and perhaps less attention to, and regard for, other languages in the practice of ELT.

One of the main goals of the book was to influence positive change, from classroom practice to policy. Do you see any signs that this is happening?

There are some signs of positive change that we are aware of. These include reflections on what all teachers including language teachers had to do to cope with the constraints arising from Covid, and national and international initiatives to promote language sensitivity across the curriculum, which is the topic of our most recent book and is the focus of an ECML project called ‘Building Blocks for planning language-sensitive education’. But we can’t yet claim that Language Education in a Changing World has played a role in these developments.

What are the key messages that you hope teachers and teacher educators might take away from the book?

The main ones are that all stakeholders in education, including especially teachers and also decision-makers and parents, should understand the critical importance of the role of language and communication as the lifeblood of any educational process. This has implications for pre-service teacher education as well as for the continuing professional development of all teachers, and for the way it is organised and resourced.

What are you working on at the moment (separately or together)?

As mentioned, we have already collaborated intensively on a new book published in late 2022 called Language-Sensitive Teaching and Learning. This is a resource book for teachers of all subjects and for teacher educators containing well over 100 tasks of different kinds focusing on language, mainly in educational settings. These are accompanied by commentary and discussion of what we see as the key practical implications of language-sensitive teaching and learning. In addition, Rod is working on a book of ‘Case Studies in CPD’ with Amol Padwad in India. Meanwhile Richard continues as a member of a Council of Europe team working on resources for use by those providing language support to migrants.

Rod Bolitho and Richard Rossner

For more information about this book please see our website.

How to Teach Adult Second Language Learners with Limited Literacy

This month we published Teaching Adult Immigrants with Limited Formal Education edited by Joy Kreeft Peyton and Martha Young-Scholten.

Adult education for learners of a new language has always been an extremely diverse sector, with classes taught in different contexts, from universities and community/further education colleges to community and faith-based organizations. Adults also have many different life situations along with varying goals, aspirations, and needs. Most diverse are adult immigrants with respect to their home language as well as educational background and literacy skills. Their diversity presents challenges for teacher training and professional development, challenges which are greatest for full-time teachers as well as part-time teachers and volunteer tutors who work with adults with limited formal education and literacy.

A practitioner survey was conducted by the 2010-2018 EU-Speak Project. Results revealed that limited opportunities exist in most countries for dedicated training or professional development to impart the knowledge and develop the skills needed for effective work with these learners, and it was on this basis that EU-Speak designed six online modules in five languages. These modules continue to be offered by a post-EU-Speak project team and are self-standing and independent of the volume emerging from the project, Teaching Adult Immigrants with Limited Formal Education, which provides readers with more in-depth coverage of module topics, particularly in terms of relevant research. Readers of the volume will discover that there is a dearth of research on these immigrant adults’ language acquisition and, to a somewhat lesser extent, their literacy development. An expectation of the editors and chapter authors is that the volume will inspire readers to contribute to this research base. Accordingly, the online modules facilitate contact with chapter authors, who are also module designers and lead modules when they are delivered.

When all six modules were offered twice from 2015 to 2018, feedback from practitioners was as the EU-Speak team had hoped. Module participants reported that they felt “compelled to explore and research each of the topics” and “happy with the possibility of sharing the resources I found and that some people liked”. They found the content that addresses “the phonological components of language and the books for pleasure reading” especially useful. And they noted they feel much better prepared for their work and have more confidence and more tools.

The project ended in August 2018 and, since then, the EU-Speak team has continued to deliver modules. Most recently (winter 2019), the team delivered ‘Acquisition and Assessment of Morphosyntax,’ adding a sixth language, Italian. Egle Mocciaro, who recently completed her PhD on the Italian morphosyntax of immigrants with limited literacy, helped lead the module with chapter authors and module designers Martha Young-Scholten and Rola Naeb. From May to July 2020, ‘Reading in a LESLLA Context’ is being delivered, led by chapter author and module designer Marcin Sosinski, assisted by Enas Filimban (whose recent PhD addresses immigrant adults’ early reading development in English) and Martha Young-Scholten. Fall 2020 will see ‘Bilingualism and Multilingualism,’ led by chapter author and module designer Belma Haznedar; and in winter 2021, ‘Vocabulary Acquisition’ will be offered, led by chapter author and designer Andreas Rohde with his team in Cologne.

Larry Condelli says about the book, “While there is voluminous research on how children learn to read in their native language, [research on] the learning process for adult second language learners with limited literacy is sparse. [… ] Those who work with adult migrants, to improve their literacy and language skills and integrate them in their new countries, need research-based knowledge to understand how to teach these learners and help them improve their lives. The chapters of this book provide current and insightful research on the reading development process for adult migrants with limited literacy. Each chapter brings to light new research and unique insights into the reading process and fills a void in previously unexamined areas for migrant adults with unique characteristics.”

Martha Young-Scholten, Newcastle University, martha.young-scholten@newcastle.ac.uk

Joy Kreeft Peyton, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC, joy@peytons.us

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Educating Refugee-background Students edited by Shawna Shapiro, Raichle Farrelly and Mary Jane Curry.

Behind the Books: Language Education in a Changing World

In the second video in our Behind the Books series Rod Bolitho and Richard Rossner talk about their new book, Language Education in a Changing World, with Maria Heron.

Language Education in a Changing World is available now on our website. Enter the code BTB30 at the checkout to get 30% off!

L2 Writing Teacher Education in EFL Contexts

We recently published Second Language Writing Instruction in Global Contexts edited by Lisya Seloni and Sarah Henderson Lee. In this post the editors reveal what to expect from the book.

This book explores the complexity of L2 writing teacher education in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts where teachers face a number of challenges to enhance learners’ opportunities to write in their L2 based on the disconnect between mainstream English as a second language (ESL) pedagogies around writing instruction and the local needs of students, language policies, and language practices in EFL contexts. By highlighting L2 writing teacher literacy across 12 countries, we aim to expand the current, but limited, discussion on what it means to teach L2 writing in contexts where writing is often perceived as a tool to develop language (specifically grammar and vocabulary) by both teachers and students. Doing so allows us to move beyond the monopoly of related research conducted in English-dominant contexts and re-envision L2 writing teacher education as contextually and culturally appropriate.

The chapters of this book, written by L2 writing specialists and practitioners across the globe, share local voices from contexts where the teaching of writing is not always prioritized and draw readers’ attention to various theoretical and pedagogical issues related to the realities faced by language teachers in non-English dominant contexts when it comes to L2 writing instruction, including teacher expertise, teacher preparation and development, L2 writing feedback, and contextual variations. Through the detailed account of language policies, curricular guidelines, teacher knowledge and classroom practices around L2 writing, we demonstrate the significant differences that exist between English-dominant and non-dominant countries in terms of teaching L2 writing. We do this by showcasing challenges and opportunities experienced around L2 writing teacher preparation and development and making L2 writing teacher education in such contexts more visible in the broader literature.

It is our hope that readers will journey through the complete collection and discover the particularities that inform English teachers’ beliefs, attitudes, and practices related to L2 writing instruction in global contexts and move away from “the uncritical embracement of Western-based L1 or L2 writing pedagogies” (p. 2). Moreover, we hope this book promotes the reflective practice required for positive change by encouraging readers to consider the unique realities and needs of their own language teaching and learning contexts and possible research agendas that would make L2 writing teacher education in their context more visible.

 

For more information about this book please see our website. 

If you found this interesting, you might also like L2 Writing Beyond English edited by Nur Yiğitoğlu and Melinda Reichelt.

The Increasing Importance of Learning English and Chinese for Young People

This month we published Learning English and Chinese as Foreign Languages by Wen-Chuan Lin. In this post the author talks about the themes explored in the book.

This book compares English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching and learning in Taiwan with Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) education in England and highlights how classroom activities are embedded within ethnic or social group cultures, family resources and school visions or goals. From Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theory and a cross-cultural comparative angle, I hope to highlight the following themes and critical issues in foreign language education:

• The impact of globalisation on EFL/CFL: There is a growing impact of globalisation on foreign language education and I would argue for a future need to view foreign language learning from traditional ‘knowledge value’ as school subjects or ‘use value’ to ‘exchange value’ and ‘intercultural value’.
• Elite social status of EFL/CFL: There are similar emerging social issues such as elitism and inequality in language learning identities that affect both EFL and CFL practice in Taiwan and England. This social inequality has the potential to persist if certain attitudes remain; such as the English educational myth that ‘only intelligent students can learn languages well’.
• Pedagogical ‘cultural bridging’ and ‘sociolinguistic bridging’: Those Taiwanese teachers who employed students’ ethnic culture or mother-tongue in dialogical interactions were able to create a psychological co-membership and enhanced students’ EFL learning, while in England similar interactional use of students’ everyday culture or teacher’s own background culture were also detected in Chinese classrooms. In teaching CFL, an emerging form of culturally responsive pedagogy – using learners’ existing sociolinguistic knowledge of English to learn Chinese – was found to be useful in helping young people who are native speakers of English.
• ‘Knowledge-based’ EFL vs. ‘activity-based’ CFL pedagogy: Among the differences of interactional styles evident in schools in both studies, the most pervasive general pedagogical pattern was of ‘knowledge-based’ grammar teaching in Taiwan in contrast to ‘activity-based’ pedagogy in England despite the fact that the class sizes are different – on average 30-40 in Taiwan and 10-15 in England. It could be argued that an ‘activity-based’ pedagogy would help students to move from a traditional view of foreign language learning as ‘knowledge value’ to one of ‘exchange value’ and ‘intercultural value’ in an era of rapid globalisation.
• Emerging social issues in EFL and CFL: Both EFL and CFL practices are not isolated from the influence of socialisation and enculturation. Emerging social issues such as resource-divide and social gender identities were discovered in learning these two foreign languages that must draw our attention at personal, interpersonal and policy level if we wish to encourage students to access them without excluding those who are not provided with appropriate cultural resources.

It is my hope that this book will provide pedagogical insights for foreign language teachers to take into account classroom pedagogy that incorporates both cultural and sociolinguistic bridging in order to motivate learning; and provide theoretical and methodological insights for researchers to look at young people’s foreign language learning processes that take place within social, cultural and historical contexts.

Wen-Chuan Lin, Department of English, Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages, Taiwan

97072@mail.wzu.edu.tw

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Soft Power and the Worldwide Promotion of Chinese Language Learning by Jeffrey Gil.

What Makes a Good EFL Teacher and How Can Teacher Educators Best Support Them?

This month we are publishing Early Professional Development in EFL Teaching by Chitose Asaoka. In this post the author explains how she came to study student teachers’ professional development in a Japanese EFL context.

Over the last twenty years, I have worked as a teacher educator of English as a Foreign Language in Japan. In order to become a secondary school teacher in Japan, you need to attend a teacher certification programme offered at a university and acquire a teaching qualification upon graduation. As a teacher educator in one such programme, I have always tried to mentor and accommodate student teachers (most of whom are native speakers of Japanese) through many situations and contexts.

In a teacher certification programme, student teachers learn about up-to-date approaches and methods of teaching English, such as communicative practice and student-centred approaches. They also learn how to use English effectively as a medium of instruction, which is one of the most-recently introduced education policies in Japan. During a three-week period of teaching practice at schools, however, many of the student teachers face the reality of the classroom and are asked to adjust to school contexts. Thus, they often cannot freely put what they have acquired into practice. For example, I frequently hear post-practicum stories from them, where they are asked to teach with the grammar-translation method, since passing the entrance exam is still a big priority for students. Moreover, they are not often allowed to teach in English, for various reasons, which is different from their pre-practicum expectations.

In many such cases, student teachers are often isolated and struggle to resolve the challenges by themselves. I am also remote from their actual school-based experiences and can only monitor their development through their teaching logs or stories when they come back to the university. Thus, questions were raised in my mind, and I started to feel the necessity to re-examine the process of student teachers’ professional development in a Japanese EFL context, as well as the kinds of experiences and challenges that they typically go through. For them to become good English teachers, what qualities are necessary, and what kinds of support can we provide as teacher educators? These questions inspired me to embark upon an empirical study in which I monitored how student teachers developed their teacher expertise, how their views on what makes a good English teacher shifted and developed, and what factors had an impact on their learning-to-teach processes.

Through detailed case studies created from interviews and reflective journals, this inquiry delves into the particular context of initial teacher education in Japan and draws out unique perspectives on student teachers’ professional development in initial teacher education. This book also shows the possible need to intervene at various stages of language teacher education, which is highly relevant for other settings of initial teacher education programmes beyond Japan. I hope that the findings presented in this book will be of interest and value to future teachers, in-service teachers, teacher educators and researchers interested in teacher education and the professional development of foreign language teachers.

Chitose Asaoka
casaoka@dokkyo.ac.jp

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Reflective Practice as Professional Development by Atsuko Watanabe. 

A Tour of English Learning and Teaching Around the World

We recently published Conversation Analytic Perspectives on English Language Learning, Teaching and Testing in Global Contexts edited by Hanh thi Nguyen and Taiane Malabarba. In this post the editors take us on a world tour of English learning and teaching…

This book offers a tour around the world, but unlike the casual tourist, you will get right into the scenes that take place daily at each stop. So, put yourself in the shoes of the people there to appreciate for a moment the constraints they are under, and the possibilities they find.

In Denmark, you are a child in an integrated-grade class of first- and second-graders. Your government has just mandated that students must learn English from first grade. First grade! You’re barely finding your way around in class, and now you’re learning a foreign language. But your teacher is creative – she has a game for the children. You and a classmate walk outside while the other kids stay inside and each chooses a clothing item drawn on the board (later you hear that some kids try to choose a diaper and a jockstrap, but the teacher doesn’t allow those!). When you and your partner come back in, you have to name two clothing items on the board, in English, and the two kids who chose those items are supposed to swap seats. It turns out that you mostly learn “swap seats,” and how you acquire this phrase reveals quite a lot about how language is learned.

In Vietnam, you are a hotel staff member in charge of escorting guests to their rooms. You need to tell them about the WiFi in the hotel, but the problem is, every time you pronounce “password,” people seem really confused! How you ‘crack the code’ here shows the creativity that users of English as a lingua franca exhibit on a daily basis as they learn language ‘in the wild.’

In China, you’re teaching a large high-school class of 70 students. Keeping them focused and engaged requires clear routines. Yet, you need to encourage their participation as well. How you approach this dilemma exemplifies the tricky balance between structure and expansion.

In Turkey, you are a teacher in training. You have your lesson plan all laid out and you have prepared your instructions in advance. But what to do when your students say, “Sorry, what are we doing?” or “We don’t understand!”? You soon realize that the lesson’s success depends more on how you respond in these moments than on the lesson plan in your mind.

Image derives from original world map in acrylic by Lara Mukahirn, photograph by Nicolas Raymond, http://www.freestock.ca

In Japan, you teach engineering students, and you need to assess their speaking abilities. So you ask your students to tell you how to draw geometric shapes in English, step by step. What you then wonder is, whose competence is being assessed? Yours or theirs? In another class, also to assess speaking abilities, you ask your students to talk in pairs. To be fair and to manage your class time, you put a timer in front of them. It turns out that they pay a lot of attention to the timer, and you are surprised to notice how the timer has become an integrated part of their interaction.

In South Korea, you are an American co-teacher assigned to assist a Korean host co-teacher. This co-teaching business is tricky since there are no clear rules about who’s supposed to do what. One moment you are giving out heart sticker awards to student groups and the host teacher says something. Another time you tap a student on the head with a folder and the host teacher says something (well, maybe he has a point there, but you are a teacher, too!). You soon learn that co-teaching, in practice, often involves a lot of tension and negotiation.

In Iran, you teach a college-level class, and you want students to participate in open discussions about controversial issues, such as capital punishment, body piercing and charity donation. The problem is, sometimes what the students say resonates with your beliefs and fits with your lesson plan, but sometimes it doesn’t. Now, you must face a fundamental problem: how much control do you want and how much freedom do you give?

In Brazil, you’re teaching a beginner-level class, and your students can’t speak a lot of English yet. However, the school promotes an unspoken ‘English-only’ policy in the classroom. How do you stick to English when explaining new words or when students talk to each other in Portuguese? It turns out that even the constraints of the rule can sometimes open up opportunities.

In Mexico, you teach English at a boarding school to indigenous children of Mixe (ayüük) ethnicity. What this means is that your students are learning English as a third language, besides Spanish. Furthermore, what is the relevance of English in this remote, rural village? The adolescent students are a lively bunch (they don’t call you ‘Teacher Bikwahet’ for no reason!) and you are devoted to bettering their lives through education.

Reading this book, you will leave your tourist binoculars behind and join the authors to look at these scenes through the lens of Conversation Analysis. Your close-up observations will connect to concepts such as interactional competence, centrifugal and centripetal forces, embodied actions, power relationship and social relevance, which are at work in many other global contexts.

So welcome on board!

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also enjoy English as a Lingua Franca for EFL Contexts edited by Nicos C. Sifakis and Natasha Tsantila.

The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca on EFL Teaching

This month we published English as a Lingua Franca for EFL Contexts edited by Nicos C. Sifakis and Natasha Tsantila. In this post the editors discuss the rise of English as a Lingua Franca and its impact on EFL teaching.

Thinking about the function and impact of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is not new. The fascination for the global character of English has been around for at least four decades. Scholars have been discussing and analysing the (mostly idiosyncratic) uses of English by so-called “non-native speakers”, predominantly people working in the field of banking and economics, since the late 1970s. Those were simpler times. As the 20th century gave its turn to the 21st, and as the internet took the world by storm, people, and not just businessmen, needed a quick and easy way to communicate, to exchange ideas, to become understood and to express themselves on a global level. English was the ideal vehicle for this. Everything happened so fast. Suddenly, there were millions and millions of instances where people (yes, mostly “non-native”) were using English without the least concern for established norms. When you want to communicate and be understood, you have to consider what the other person is able to understand and therefore you are bound to tailor your entire linguistic behaviour (i.e., choice of words, intonation, speed of delivery, etc.) to the communicational needs of the circumstance; you find that your interlocutors feel and act very much the same way.

This is fine, except that now it is suddenly happening everywhere and by everyone. Online and offline, in virtually all geographical latitudes, people use English when no other language is shared, and even when this is the case, English seems to be the “go-to” primary linguistic vehicle. All this makes the task of describing and making sense of what is happening fascinating but extremely taxing. There are simply countless contexts and situations where English may be used by the “non-native speaker”, and these contexts are now many many more than those demanding compliance to the native-speaker norms will ever be. Even native speakers have to buy into this ELF mindset if they want to successfully communicate with non-native speakers.

On top of everything, the critical perspective in applied linguistics, developed in the 1990s, shook scholars’ confidence in many of the perceptions and terms that had shaped the field for decades. Certain things that were considered fundamental in applied linguistics and foreign language teaching were fundamental no more, the very notion of the “native speaker” being one of the first in the fray. The cornerstone of modern linguistics, the native speaker, was deemed not useful and more a politically incorrect term that fails to describe reality and, to make matters worse, carries with it a string of convictions that are old-fashioned and, well, plainly wrong. Also consider the notion of “mistake” and that of “feedback provision” in the EFL classroom: what constitutes a mistake is arguably no longer a simple matter of looking up the grammar of English, and how the teacher will focus learners’ attention to different aspects of their use of the language is no longer straightforward.

Of course, we are not arguing that EFL, as we all understand it and have experienced (or are experiencing) it, is not still valid. Far from it. It’s just that it is now becoming clearer that so-called EFL-focused practices tend to be predominantly (some would say, exclusively) native-speaker-oriented, and this is the remit of a huge and highly profitable field in applied linguistics and teaching, called high-stakes testing. But the world is not the same as it was 30 or 20, or even 10 years ago and the point that we and the other authors make in the book is that this needs to be reflected in the way that English is taught.

In a nutshell, this book aims to present the case of ELF for EFL contexts. The colleagues that wrote the various chapters are top scholars in their respective fields and the cases they are presenting in each chapter are grounded in extensive research they have undertaken. What we are concerned with is making sense of the impact that ELF can have for teaching, and specifically EFL teaching. We have done our best to incorporate all aspects of EFL teaching, including pedagogy, materials evaluation, teacher education, policy, assessment and testing. Our ultimate aim is to kickstart a dialogue on the principles and processes of what we call ELF awareness in EFL teaching. ELF awareness is a lot more than awareness of ELF: it first and foremost incorporates an awareness of context and an appreciation of pedagogical style, learner needs and usage of English inside and outside the EFL classroom and, fundamentally, an awareness of our attitudes and convictions regarding English.

Nicos Sifakis, sifakisnicos@gmail.com

Natasha Tsantila, ntsantila@acg.edu

For more information about this book please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like Preparing Teachers to Teach English as an International Language edited by Aya Matsuda.