Globalization and language teaching

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• Globalization and language teaching
• David Block
• Institute of Education
• University of London
• d.block_at_ioe.ac.uk

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Plan of action

• The rise of CLT/TBLT
• CLT/TBLT as globalized phenomenon
• The global TEIL textbook and commodified
  identities
• Conclusion

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(1) CLT was about new ways of viewing language
education in modern societies

• In the aftermath of anti-establishment movements
  with explicit anti-institutional implications...,
  educational approaches which called for the
  de-schooling of society ... or, in its less
  radical forms, for a basic humanizing of
  technocratic and de-humanizing schools, had
  gained ground. To humanize schools would require
  an orientation towards holistic education,
  which aimed to promote growth in intrapersonal
  awareness and interpersonal sharing as well as
  intellectual development. (Legutke and Thomas,
  1991 36)

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(2) There was a change in how language was
conceived

• The shift from an exclusive focus on grammar
  (syntax, morphology and phonology) and lexis to
  communicative competence (Hymes, 1971)
• Michael Hallidays (1973) early form of
  functional linguistics was influential at this
  time.
• There was an interest in the work of John Austin
  (1962) and John Searle (1965) and the development
  of speech act theory

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(3) There was a change in language teaching
practices

• Information gap
• It is necessarily inherently good to speak and to
  do so as frequently as possible
• One learns to speak by speaking

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CLT/TBLT as globalized phenomenon

• CLT/TBLT as ideoscape, i.e. a global flow of
  ideas about language teaching and learning.
• Ideologically loaded- related to sets of beliefs
  and feelings about the best way to conceptualise
  language, communication and language Ideologies
  are always and necessarily constructed in the
  interests of a particular group or groups (in
  this case, the academic and educational
  communities propagating CLT/TBLT)

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Clash of ideologies

• just as the technologically and economically
  developed nations of the West (or centre) hold an
  unfair monopoly over less developed (or
  periphery) communities in industrial products,
  similar relations characterize the marketing of
  language teaching methods (Canagarajah, 2002
  135).
• New approaches to language teaching are
  disembedded, i.e. lifted out of their source
  contexts (e.g. US, UK) and then taken up
  elsewhere in the world.
• This assumes that their form and content
  transcend spatio-temporal contexts (Giddens,
  1990)
• There is seldom any dialogue between exporters of
  new approaches and their importers.
• There is no discussion, not only of the form and
  content of approaches, but also of their
  ideological underpinnings.

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Reconciling the global and the local

• glocalization, taken from the world of business
  in Japan, means marketing goods and services on a
  global basis by catering to local
  particularities. Here, it conveys the idea that
  the global does not merely overwhelm or swallow
  the local rather, syntheses emerge from contacts
  between the global and the local via a processes
  involving the interpenetrating of the
  particular and the universal (Robertson,
  1995 30).
•  

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Glocalization processes in ELT

• involve a call for local teachers to work out
  their own solutions, appropriating what they deem
  suitable from globally circulating ideas about
  language education in the development of
  locally-generated pedagogical practices.
• But there seems to be a near-exclusive focus on
  Anglophone countries or English-dominant
  educational environments.
• But see e.g. Cheiron McMahills grass-roots
  feminist English classes in Japan.

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The global TEIL textbook and commodified
identities

• Some publishers provide lists of proscribed
  topics, while others rely informally on the
  acronym PARSNIP (politics, alcohol, religion,
  sex, narcotics, isms, and pork) as a rule of
  thumb. One publishers list I saw contained some
  thirty items to be avoided or handled only with
  extreme care. This included alcohol, anarchy,
  Aids, Israel and six pointed stars, politics,
  religion, racism, sex, science when it involves
  altering nature, e.g. genetic engineering,
  terrorism, and violence. (Gray, 2002 159)
• By contrast, what does seem to be allowed are
  sanitized presentations of various aspects of
  national cultures (their geography, social norms,
  history, iconography and so on), in effect the
  traditional content of foreign language textbooks

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• However, today new textbooks and new editions of
  older textbooks include more and more references
  to an emergent global culture
• And foundational to this shift in emphasis has
  been the commodification of the English language,
  and as I will argue the concomitant branding of
  English speaking identities which learners can
  aspire to as cosmopolitan consumers on the global
  stage.

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• For Heller, the commodification of language means
  a shift from a valuing of language for its basic
  communicative function and more emotive
  associations- national identity, cultural
  identity, the authentic spirit of a people and so
  on- to valuing it for what is means in the
  globalized, deregulated, hyper-competitive,
  post-industrial new work order in which we now
  live (Gee, Hull and Lankshear, 1996 Cameron,
  2002).
• In other words, it means a shift from language as
  use-value to language as exchange-value.

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• However, as Lash and Lury (2007 6) note,
  commodities have no relationships' and they
  only have value in the way that they resemble
  every other commodity.
• English as the consumer good called global
  English is understood to be vaguely the same
  thing in different educational contexts around
  the world. It is the language for communication
  in business and leisure settings that everyone
  needs to know in the age of globalization.
• There arises, therefore, a need to bring English
  alive, to make it more attractive and ultimately
  more saleable.
• In order to inject commodities with life,
  advertisers brand them, i.e. they link them to
  particular world views, behaviours and artefacts,
  developing in the process narratives which over
  time become recognizable to the public as ways of
  life and lifestyle options that can be opted into
  or abandoned, depending on circumstances.

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Cosmopolitanism

• home plus (Hannerz ,1996)- the individual
  wants the place he/she is visiting to have one or
  two exotic attractions but for the most part
  wants everything else (e.g. the standard of
  accommodation, the transportation facilities, the
  nature and quality of services and in some cases,
  even the food) to be the same as it would be at
  home.
• Cultural cosmopolitanism should be understood as
  the capacity to mediate between national
  cultures, communities of fate (sic) and
  alternative styles of life. It encompasses the
  possibility of dialogue with traditions and
  discourses of others with the aim of expanding
  horizons of ones own framework of meaning and
  prejudice. (Held, 2002 57-58)

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aesthetic cosmopolitanism

• an engagement with the Other which goes
  deeper than the superficiality of Hannerzs
  home-plus but does not attain moral high ground
  implied in Helds cultural cosmopolitanism.
• This cosmopolitanism is driven by a desire to
  consume the Other- cuisine, sight-seeing,
  music, and cinema and so on- and is the domain
  with those members of society with sufficient
  economic capital to afford to do so

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Success as central

• Success associated with celebrity
• non-celebrities who are successful
• A steady, durable and continuous, logically
  coherent and tightly structured working career is
  ... no longer a widely available option (Bauman,
  2005 27)
• Clare Davis, 26, resigned from her job as a
  geography teacher in secondary school and started
  retraining as plumber Lorna Whitwort, 29, and
  husband Ian gave up their jobs in the city of
  London ... and moved to the country to run a
  small hotel ... (Cunningham and Moor, 2005 52).

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The conflation of the private and the public in
ELT materials

• Under the heading Life stories
• Work in pairs. Have you got any brothers or
  sisters? In what ways are you similar/different?
  Which of your parents/grandparents do you take
  after? ...
• Under the heading Social behaviour
• You go out to a restaurant for dinner. Do you
  a. dress up? b. wear smart casual clothes? C.
  wear traditional dress of your country? D. wear
  whatever you feel like?
• Under the heading How socially responsible are
  you?
• Would you ... hand in a wallet that you found in
  the street? ... park in a disabled parking space?
  ... drop litter? ...
• (Cunningham and Moor, 2005 36, 74, 96)

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Conclusion

• There is the idea that the ever-increasing
  inter-connectedness of the world, one of the most
  cited characteristics of globalization, means
  that the uptake of CLT/TBLT, the commodification
  of English as a necessary skill and the
  positioning of learners as cosmopolitan global
  citizens/ consumers is likely to continue and
  even increase in coming years
• But this idea rests on two assumptions
• 1) that English will remain the global language.
• 2) that the Anglophone countries, in particular
  the US, will continue to exercise a considerable
  (though by no means complete) dominance over
  global forces and flows (technology, the media
  finance and so on)

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• However, US cultural, economic and political
  hegemony in the world could be on the wane along
  with many of the assumptions which people around
  the world have made over the past 60 years. There
  could be changes in store as regards the
  following
• 1) what languages are most studied globally
• 2) how languages are taught
• 3) the kinds of teaching materials employed
• But, it may well be that no such changes occur.
• Far more likely, however, is a future falling
  somewhere in between these two alternatives a
  more recognizably multipolar world (including
  grass-roots language teaching methodologies) than
  exists at present, but one in which the English
  language and the influence of the Anglophone
  nation states will continue to be important.