Wk5 - Critical Language Teaching

First of all, I am interested in this conceptually – a philosophy that combines education with research and theory.  Pennycook (1999) suggests that critical language education as a whole is linked with social concepts such as class and race, and political orientation.   For me it brings forward an often unspoken side of language teaching and made me look at how we traditionally teach language for example the typical “nuclear” family is often seen in teaching materials, and relative to the social expectations of that geo-political region (eg. wholesome, married with children families).

Additionally I like the idea of Pennycook’s self-reflexive stance, making sure critical theory is never nailed down into a body of knowledge, and must too be constantly criticized.  Self-criticism being crucial in critical work, this makes sure the theory never becomes stale. It does appear very challenging as a language teacher to think outside the box in this way, but as Pennycook suggests, it may be fruitful to consider language teaching work not only as reductive meanings attached to simple labels such as teaching and English.

On aspect that interested me in Lin’s (1999) research was the four classrooms and the Form 1 remedial class that used L1 strategically linking to L2.  This was of particular interest to me as I have generally for a while now been sceptical of the total immersion language learning concept.  As the study showed, it may have worked for the more privileged students who had exposure to English in their daily lives, but not for the others.  I know in a lot of countries, particularly in Asia, there is a firm belief in the total immersion system for learning English.  I have a friend who speaks English as L2 and has lived in New Zealand for over 10 years but his English level does not reflect that.  I asked him about his education background and he said his only experience of English (pre-NZ) was at high school, total language immersion – and he wasn’t that interested in it.  Therefore I suspect he missed out on the fundamental aspects of grammar and such forth being explained to him in his own language.  At AUT, beginner level Japanese classes are taught in L1, slowly phasing into L2 at around the second year of study - and for this I’m thankful otherwise I probably would have lost interest early on.

References

Lin, A.M.Y. (1999).  Doing-English-Lessons in the Reproduction or Transformation of Social Worlds? TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 33, No.3, Critical approaches to TESOL, pp. 393-412. 

Pennycook, A. (1999).  Introduction: Critical Approaches to TESOL.  TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 33, No.3, Critical approaches to TESOL, pp. 329-348.