Seminário 8. UFRJ - 2012/2 INGLÊS 7. Trabalho apresentado em 7 de janeiro.

1. ADRIENA CASINI
DENISE VENTURA
SHUNITHI YAMAUE
Faculdade de Letras – UFRJ – 2012/2

2. Globalization and Language Teaching - David Block
 Focus of the text: Focus on how publishers in recent
years have come to position learners as cosmopolitan
consumers and have set up branded identities for
them to aspire to.
Main topics:
 1) The Rise of CLT/TBLT
 2) CLT/TBLT as a Globalized Phenomenon
 3) The Global TEIL Textbook and Commodified
Identities

3. 1) The Rise of CLT/TBLT
 A shift in many parts of the world over the past three
or four decades: from well established approaches to
language teaching (Grammar
translation, Audiolingualism) to communicative ones
(Communicative Language Teaching and Task-Based
Language Teaching).
 Council of Europe (1960-70 – settled in a post-World
War II Europe, era of cooperation across nation-state
borders): recommendations for changes in language
teaching which involved radical breaks with the past.

4.  Firstly, CLT was about new ways of viewing language
education in modern societies. It emerged in 1960, the
respective roles of institutions and of the individual in
society had begun to be questioned and reformulated
in many parts of the world.
 Legukte and Thomas (1991) discuss the changes in
approaches to education and what they believe to have
been a move towards “humanistic language teaching”:

5. “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)
 The humanist side of language teaching was not
articulated in the early discussions of CLT, although it
was fundamental to understand the new attitudes
toward language and communication.

6.  Change in the way language was conceived: the object of
language teaching shifted from an exclusive focus on
grammar and lexis to communicative competence
(Hymes, 1971).
 Language user competence: grammar and lexis + the way
language is used by members of a speech community to
accomplish their purposes + interactional skills to
communicate effectively and properly in that language.
 Halliday’s (1973) outline of the basic functions of language
for children during their early period of development (FLA’s
period): how children use language to obtain things, to
express feelings, to initiate and maintain interaction, to
create imaginary worlds…

7.  Austin (1962) and Searle (1965) - ‘Speech act theory’:
focus on the meaning of the words uttered by speakers to
a consideration of the constituents of communicative
events.
social contexts
+
intentions of speakers
 Intentions >>> Illocutionary acts:
offering, refusing, asserting, describing, promising, sugge
sting, complaining…

8.  Speech act theory’ + Illocutionary acts = functions: it
became by the early 1980s the staple of language teaching
syllabuses and the backbone of commercially produced
materials in Europe and North America.
 But it was hard to conceive of the contents page of a
syllabus or coursebook that was not a list of functions.
Functions formed the basis of all the activities designed
by teachers (behavioral goals to work toward).

9.  CLT: interaction-based activities in the target
language, conducted by information gap.
 Pair or group work >>> student-focused work: sharing
personal experiences, opinions about real or imagined
events; talking about one’s job or holiday.
 Two interrelated notions became axiomatic to CLT:
 a) that it is necessary and good to speak and to do so as
frequently as possible.
 b) that one learns to speak by speaking.

10.  Recently, CLT has been transformed in different ways
and it is used synonymously with TBLT (task-based
language teaching), an approach that puts tasks at its
center.
 Tasks are goal-directed pedagogical activities involving
a primary focus on meaning: participants choose and
implement the necessary linguistic resources to work
towards a clearly defined outcome. (Ellis, 2003).
 The task has served as a key construct in language
teaching and in SL acquisition research (SLA).
(Block, 2003).

11.  Tasks (…) activate the type of language-processing
cognition that leads to learning (Gass and Selinker, 2008
and Ellis, 2008).
 This cognitive activity is thought to begin with the process
of negotiation for meaning:
“in an effort to communicate, learners and
competent speakers provide and interpret signals of
their own and their interlocutor’s perceived
comprehension, thus provoking adjustments to
linguistic form, conversational language
structure, message content, or all three, until an
acceptable level of understanding is achieved”
(Long, 1996:418).

12.  Negotiation for meaning “facilitates acquisition
because it connects input (internal learner capacities)
and output in productive ways”. (Long, 1996:451-2)
 Cognitive processes are not idiosyncratic to each
individual, tasks and negotiation for meaning are
applicable to all language learners in all contexts
(Long, 2005).
 Universalist as learning, it has become a global notion
as regards how teaching should take place in all parts
of the world, as we see in the next slides.

13. 2) CLT/TBLT as a Globalized Phenomenon
 Arjun Appdurai (1990) – description of globalization
as a “complex, overlapping and disjunctive order”
made up of 5 types of forces and flows.
1) Ethnoscapes or flows of people
2) Technoscapes or flows of technology
3) Financescapes or flows of money
4) Mediascapes or flows of information
5) Ideoscapes or flows of ideas

14.  CLT/TBLT - ideoscapes that are not freestanding sets
of ideas that just emerge in one context and then flow
freely around the world.
 Canagarajah (1999 and 2002) has critizized the spread
of CLT lamenting that “just as the technologically and
economically developed nations of the West (or
center) hold an unfair monopoly over less developed
(or periphery) communities in industrial
products, similar relations characterize the marketing
of language teaching methods

15.  Methodological nolveties tend to be accepted with “awe”
and bewilderment”
 New approaches to language teaching are
disembedded, i.e. lifted out of their source contexts, for
example, the US or UK- and then taken up elsewhere in the
world.
 For those local teachers who follow pedagogical practices
imported from the West or Center in a relatively
unquestioning manner, lessons may be of limited use to
their students.
 Process of Glocalization

16.  The emergence of glocalizing process in the spread of CLT
 Example of Glocalized TEIL - Cheiron MacMahill – unique
example of resistance to the global hegemony
Feminist second language pedagogy;
Combination of explicit teaching of morphology, syntax,
phonology, pragmatics , and feminists concerns.
 The chief aim of such classes was to create an English
medium alternative “female discourse community of
resistance to sexism” in Japan and in the world.

17. 3) The Global TEIL Textbook and Commodified
Identities
 How can we define what is proper or not to be part of
the content of the textbook?
 What is proper to be in the content of it?
 Items to be avoided or handled with extreme care =
PARNISP:
politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, isms and
pork.
 Items that are allowed but that should be less
emphasized: aspects of national cultures.

18.  Marxism theory: commodities are objects that have
two types of value: exchange-value (market) and use-
value of the objects.
 Heller (2003): Language as a commodity:
commodification of language means a shift from a
valuing of language for its basic communicative
function and more emotive associations to valuing it
for what it means in the
globalized, deregulated, hyper-competitive new work
order.
 It means a shift from language as use-value to
language as exchange-value.

19.  This implies that the English which is offered as a skill by a
language school or global textbook in one context is the
same as the one taught in another context.
 To be more saluable, there was a need to bring English
alive. The solution was to inject commodities with
life, advertisers started branding them: they linked them to
particular world views, behaviors, artefacts, developing
narratives, (….) “environments of meaning”. (Banet-Weiser
and Lapansky, 2008).
 One lifestyle option that has become prevalent in recent
years revolves around the idea of cosmopolitan citizens
who embody an ideology of consumerism and global
capitalism.

20.  Cosmopolitanism: sliding scale at work X superficial
contact and engagement with cultures.
 Held (2002): Cultural cosmopolitanism should be
understood as the capacity to mediate between national
cultures, communities of faith and alternative lifestyles.
 Are we worried as teachers to develop with our students
this dialogue about diversity, ideologies, culture?
 Are we, at last, worried to discuss the textbook with other
teachers and colleagues?
 Do we reflect about the need to make the material
(textbook) closer to our students’ reality? How could we
adapt it?

21. Local Literacies and Global literacy – Catherine Wallace
 Literacy is seen not as something possessed as a skill, but something
done or performed as a contextualized practice. (Barton, 1994; The
emergence of glocalizing process in the spread of CLT
 Example of Glocalized TEIL - Cheiron Machill
 The chief aim of such classes was to creat an English medium
alternative “female discourse community of resistance to sexism in
Japan and in the world.
 nham, 1995).
 Local literacies operate in private domains, such as family life, as
opposed to public ones, such as the media and education.
(Wallace, 1988).
 “Literacy is always plural” (Gee, 1990): literacy as context dependent
and situationally contingent. Rather than a single monolithic literacy
we have multiple literacies.

22.  School sanctioned literacy just ‘one of a multiplicity of
literacies which take place in people’s lives, in different
languages, in different domains and for a variety of purposes’.
(Gregory and Williams, 2000).
 Two major conceptualizations of literacy: autonomous and
ideological literacy (Street, 1984):
 Autonomous: literacy is an universal skill or aptitude, is being
able to read and write; it is a skills-based view of literacy.
 Ideological: literacy is a social construct, taking on complex
cultural and ideological meanings and diverse forms in
specific settings: cross-cultural differences in literacy practices
(Gregory and Williams, 2000) >>> this is the literacy of
multiple literacies.

23.  However, conceptualizing literacy as plural and as
autonomous or ideological presents several problems:
 A) the emphasis on the multiple character of literacies
may trivialize and relativize their significance.
 B) There is a danger that in emphasizing parity we may
fail to acknowledge those powers relations that are so
strongly associated with certain literacies.
 C) The autonomous literacy seems to be exclusively
related to educational contexts, as a ‘schooled’ literacy,
constructed and practiced as a neutral technology, with
reading ‘taught as a set of skills which can be broken into
parts and taught and tested’. (Barton, 1994).

24.  British National Literacy Strategy: literacy as teaching of
skills, little contextualization of practice, little
acknowledgement of bilingual learners that they have
different literacy experiences and different language
repertoires from home language.
 It is not as Bernstein’s (1996) recontextualizes/reshaping
everyday experiences/knowledge.
 School and home are different domains: it is not like: skills-
based work x authentic activities. At the same time, school
literacy can be mechanistic. (Heath, 1983)
 It is teacher’s job to be aware of the differences, to build
bridges between these domains.

25.  Gee (1990) suggests two Discourses (ways of being in
the world):
 1 – Primary Discourse: early social setting.
 2 – Secondary Discourse: schooling
 As children move from home to school, they move
from primary socialization to take on their
identities, ways of behaving and ways of using
language.
 Halliday (1996) describes the difference between
everyday life and school as primary and secondary
knowledge, respectively.

26.  Bernstein (1996) talks of horizontal and vertical
literacies. The latter are ongoing practices and directed
to specific goals, acquired through apprenticeship.
 “It is not that school literacies are inferior attempts at
‘the real thing’ (Street and Street, 1995) – they are
qualitatively different.
 Schooled language is literate-like, delivered through
the medium of print, a code for learning and for wider
communication rather than day-to-day use. School is
a secondary socialization.

27.  Heteroglossic (Halliday, 1996): knowledge is construed out of
the dialectic between the spoken and the written language.
 This shift from primarily oral language to written or literate-
like language may involve not just a new language variety but
a new code.
 Gee does not wish to privilege print over other kind of
technologies. Halliday believes that print literacy offer
particular educational advantages.
 Print is still the medium we mainly deal with, in different
forms: e-mail, books, newspapers, hypertexts... The written
world of secondary socialization is in English.

28. Literate English and Critical Literacy
 Some texts are more linguistically and cognitively challenging
than others and that it is particularly important such texts
should be made available in English to a wide range of students.
 For FL and L2 learners that means access to not only oral
everyday English but also English language literacy.
 At present when Islanders call for English literacy we are told we
need literacy in one of our traditional languages first. Why do we
need to read and write in our first language which is after all still
a robust oral tradition? Simply because it works in French
Canada! This standpoint assumes that learning English at school
cancels out children’s previously acquired and ongoing
acquisition of their first language competencies and
communicative patterns. (Nakata 2000:112)

29.  The importance of English literacy and ‘literate
English’
 Teaching English as subject rather than medium not
just for content learning but for learning more about
language itself.
 Pedagogy for enriched English need to attend
structure, content and function for a literate English
 An English education will enable us to negotiate our
position in relation to these outside influences
 Global literate English as a international auxiliary
language

30.  Pennycook (1994) acknowledges a writing back role for
English in post colonial contexts of new generations of
users. These new users participate in the dismantling
of the colonial legacy of English.
 Critical literacy (Paulo Freire) - Power of literacy by
lived experience as part of educational process.
Freirean Ideologies
 For Lankshear (1997) Critical literacy is powerful to
the extent that it offers a vantage point from which to
survey other literacy.

31.  Critical reading involves gaining some distance on our
OWN production and reception of texts; we are not
just involved ongoingly in these as we process or
interpret text but take the opportunity to reflect on the
social circumstances of their production, on why they
come to us in the form they do, and on the variable
ways their meanings may be received in different
cultural context.

32. Global English teaching and the ELT profession.
 As we saw in the other text, there is this tendency to
language be considered in a market view, as a
commodity.
 Teachers of EFL/ESL have to be aware of the realities
of the globalization of English, to be capable to handle
with the implications projected on language teaching.
 How necessary is the consideration of the different
contexts and the way that we might draw on, adapting
or rejecting methodologies and materials?

33.  ESL/EFL: different educational needs according to the
profile and needs of the students, it is defined two
defined groups of learners: Short-stay students and
Refugees or asylum seekers.
 English language teaching: Wallace argues that it is
educationally demanding, rooted in literate language
and designed to prepare students for longer term and
relatively unpredictable needs as continuing learners
and users of English.

34.  Canagarajah (1999): “What we cannot tell is whether
the authors and publishers of American Kernel
Lessons and similar courses understand how little
relation their subliminal messages bear to the life of
students and teachers in periphery contexts”.
 CLT has been under attack for some time: “empty
battle of the communicative language”.
(Pennycook, 1994).
 What are feasible ways of promoting a global critical
literacy through the medium of English?

35.  Canagarajah (1999) and Pennycook (1994) have proposed critical
pedagogy as a necessary underpinning to any English Language
Teaching project that wishes to address the global reach of
English.
 Critical pedagogy means developing literate English as a priority.
It implies participation of all the agents in the educational
process, it is the language to serve emancipatory rather than
oppressive goals.
 Canagarajah (1999) observed “largely non-reflective” ways in
which students “display their strategies of linguistic
appropriation”. This relates to Giroux (19830: opposition x
resistance.
 To turn instinct into reflectiveness, opposition into
resistance, means forging English as a critical analytical tool
which is elaborated to serve those purposes.

36.  Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA): critical literacy and
literate talk are mutually reinforcing in the sense that
talk around texts offers opportunities to check out our
own preferred readings against those of others.
 It involves not talk as social action but as the
‘acquisition and development of more complex
conceptual structures and cognitive processes’. (Wells
and Chang-Wells, 1992).

37. Conclusion
 CLA classroom are encouraged to deploy literate talk
in critiquing a range of texts. It is to offer opportunities
for students to exercise their discursive abilities at the
same time as developing literate English.
 As teachers, we have to be aware of the realities/needs
of our students and lead them to develop not only
linguistic competences but also the critic one.
 It is fundamental to show to our students that they
‘own’ this foreign or second language as a meaningful
way to express themselves as global citizens.

38. References:
 BLOCK, D. Globalization and Language Teaching.
In: COUPLAND, N. (org). The Handbook of
Language and Globalization. London:
Blackwell, 2010.
 WALLACE, C. Local Literacies and Global Literacy.
In: BLOCK, D; CANON, D. (org). Globalization
and Language Teaching. London: Routledge, 2002.