Critical Language Teaching

Pennycook (1999) desribes a critical appraoch to TESOL as always 'in flux', 'questioning', 'problematizing'. This means we as ESOL teachers need to constantly problematize and deal with social, cultural and educational issues surrounding students. The global position of English makes the role of English teachers a crucial one. Students learn English not just for the mere reason that they want to learn the language, but mainly because they want to enter universities or get a good job. As in Lin's (1999) article, she mentions the example of Hong Kong where employers preffered employees with a good command of English rather than Chinese, although Chinese is the mother tongue of the majority of the people. The role of English teachers then is to review and relflect how best to deal with the issues learners have and develop a method of teaching that benefits learners.

Lin (1999) discusses four different classrooms in her article. Learners from different social backgrounds had different attitudes to learning English which affected their learning. Reflecting on my own teaching context, I realise that my students too had similar issues/problems as those in Classrooms B and C. The pressure on them to always use English within the classroom often led them to withdraw from class discussions using English. What was interesting to see was that group activities generated more discussion because students used their mother-tongue together with English to express their ideas. Things that they were not able to express using English language was done through their native language.

I believe that we need to critically look at our own classroom situations and devise the best method(s) to use. Each classroom has their own mixture of students of different socio-cultural and educational backgrounds. One method of teaching does not fit all. A more critical approach is needed.

references:

Lin, A. M. Y. (1999). Doing-English-lessons in the reproduction or transformation of social worlds?. TESOL Quarterly, 33 (3), 393-412.

Pennycook, A. (1999). Introduction: Criticial Approaches to TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 33 (3), 329-348.