English - A Changing Medium for Education (New Perspectives on Language and Education, Band 26) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847697704 ISBN 13: 9781847697707

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In this volume a range of authors from different international contexts argue that the notion of communicative competence in English, hitherto largely referenced to metropolitan native-speaker norms, has to be expanded to take account of diverse contexts of use for a variety of purposes. It also discusses the popular belief that language and literacy should simply be regarded as a technical 'skill' which confers universal benefits and that it should be replaced with a social practice view that recognises situated variations and diversity. This volume, we believe, provides a reference point for extended research and practice in these areas that will be of interest to wide range of people engaged in language and literacy education.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Constant Leung is Professor of Educational Linguistics in the Centre for Language Discourse and Communication, Department of Education and Professional Studies at King's College London. He also serves as Deputy Head of Department. His research interests include additional/second language curriculum, language assessment, language education in ethnically and linguistically diverse societies, language policy, and teacher professional development. He is Associate Editor for Language Assessment Quarterly and Editor of Research Issues for TESOL Quarterly.

Brian V Street is Emeritus Professor of Language in Education at King's College, London University and Visiting Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. He has a commitment to linking ethnographic-style research on the cultural dimension of language and literacy with contemporary practice in education and in development. Over the past 25 years he has undertaken anthropological field research and been consultant to projects in these fields in countries of both the North and South (e.g. Nepal, S. Africa, India, USA, UK). He has published 18 books and 120 scholarly papers.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

English A Changing Medium for Education

By Constant Leung, Brian V. Street

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2012 Constant Leung, Brian V. Street and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-770-7

Contents

Contributors, 
Preface, 
1 Introduction: English in the Curriculum – Norms and Practices Constant Leung and Brian Street, 
2 What Counts as English? Mastin Prinsloo, 
3 The Rise and Rise of English: The Politics of Bilingual Education in Australia's Remote Indigenous Schools Ilana Snyder and Denise Beale, 
4 (Re)Writing English: Putting English in Translation Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu, 
5 Multilingual and Multimodal Resources in Genre-based Pedagogical Approaches to L2 English Content Classrooms Angel Lin, 
6 Multimodal Literacies and Assessment: Uncharted Challenges in the English Classroom Heather Lotherington and Natalia Sinitskaya Ronda, 
7 Beyond Labels and Categories in English Language Teaching: Critical Reflections on Popular Conceptualizations Martin Dewey, 
Concluding Remarks Constant Leung and Brian Street, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: English in the Curriculum – Norms and Practices

Constant Leung and Brian Street

Introduction

This book is concerned with English as a medium of curriculum communication, particularly in English as an Additional/Second Language (EAL) contexts. The spread of English in the world in the past 200 years, initially through British colonial expansion and through globalisation of business and industry in more recent times, has been accompanied by a huge demand for English Language Teaching (ELT) in a variety of contexts. EAL is taught and learned in many ways – as a subject in school, university and adult education settings in countries such as China and Brazil; as a language of instruction in English-medium education catering to speakers of other languages in places where English is an official language such as Singapore and Hong Kong and also in some international schools; as a language of schooling for linguistic minorities in countries such as Australia and the UK; and as a vehicular language in content-language integrated language teaching (generally referred to as CLIL) in some schools in Europe and elsewhere. All of this does not even include the vast number of students who travel to English-speaking countries for general and vocational education at all levels. According to Graddol (2006: 101) worldwide there are two billion (approximately) learners of EAL at the present time.

Given the scale and the international reach of this language teaching enterprise, it is important to ask how English has been characterised in the professional language teaching literature, and how far the established characterisation corresponds with the ways in which it is understood and used in contemporary contexts. These two questions are fundamentally related to a number of pedagogic issues such as the content, methodology and norms of teaching and assessment (see Nunan, 1991; Richards & Rodgers, 2001, for a discussion on the connections between teaching methodology and conceptualisation of language). In this introductory chapter we will look at the ways in which English language has been discussed in the professional literature with a view to exploring the possibilities for conceptual broadening. We will first focus on the emergence of the concept of communicative competence and how it has been a major influence on curriculum development and professional practice in ELT for the best part of the past 30 years. Next we will suggest that, in the light of our changing understanding of how language works and the diverse and dynamic ways in which English is being used as an additional language in the world, the notion of communicative competence, as understood in language teaching, should take greater account of a practice view of language use (instead of a norm-based view). By a practice view we are referring to an understanding that has emerged especially in ethnographic and sociological studies that addresses not only the form and content of languages but also the social meanings and uses associated with them.

Some of the developments in the related field of literacy studies are instructive here. Distinguishing between events and practices in the literacy field, Street (2000: 21) suggests that

the concept of literacy practices ... attempt[s] to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy but to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind.

And part of that broadening involves attending to the fact that in a literacy event we have brought to it concepts, social models regarding what the nature of this practice is and that make it work and give it meaning.

In the sociological literature, the work of Bourdieu (1991, and also Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) has been particularly significant in challenging narrow models of language and events and replacing them with a broader conception of social capital and practice. As Grenfell (2012: 67) notes, earlier theorists

defined the study of language in terms of its formal, structural properties. Even the Chomskyan revolution of the 1950s is predicated on the notion of an 'ideal' speaker and, thus perfect competence. For Bourdieu, this model is simply something that does not exist. Moreover, the consequent methodology that seeks to see sense and significance in terms of an 'internalist' reading of language itself basically overlooks all the contextual (social, cultural) components that give linguistic events their meaning.

At first glance it may seem that in making this appeal to a more socially and culturally oriented approach to language and literacy, we are adopting an unnecessarily large canvass. However, as the classroom vignette in this chapter will show in a moment, what goes on when teachers and students engage in talk and in reading and writing is not a simple matter of manual driven didactic transmission. Indeed, the ways in which they use English to 'do' teaching and learning are unavoidably situated in a wider context of social norms and practices, curriculum affordances and constraints, and institutionally induced relationships, and at the same time, all the participants in the classroom activities are themselves social actors investing in particular social and cultural choices.

In the final section we will explore the conceptual implications of a practice-oriented notion of communicative competence for understanding the multifaceted manifestations of English in classroom and curriculum contexts. This discussion will draw on research in a number of related fields such as English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), language education and literacy studies (including NLS – 'New Literacy Studies'). We will use EAL as a super-coordinating term to refer to English whenever the speaker/learner already has another language, but will defer to the relevant 'native' nomenclature such as EFL and ELF where appropriate, particularly in citations (see Dewey, Chapter 7 this volume, for a detailed discussion on diverse contexts of and labels for ELT).

Communication as Language

The focus on communication in ELT has been a relatively recent phenomenon. In the 1950s language teaching, particularly foreign language teaching, was predominantly concerned with grammar and lexis delivered through a variety of teaching methods, for example, grammar translation and the audio-lingual method. For reasons of focus and scope we will not...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1847697704
• ISBN 13: 9781847697707
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 178
• Herausgeber: Leung Constant, Street Brian V
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland