Global thinking, local teaching

The ideas underlying the readings for this week appear at first pretty simple: the English language has permeated to most (but not all) areas of the world, and now those affected must decide just how to deal with this fact. But it isn’t that simple. How do people reach across borders and communicate without knowing a common language? Whose language will be the language decided upon for communication? What does that do to the power of that language and the language(s) not chosen? What happens to native languages? How do we maintain native languages and identity while at the same time attempting to participate in a global conversation? What wins out: global interests or local ones? Western or Other? And what is the sociohistorical background that helps inform all of these decisions? What are the implications? Who is given power and who is Othered? Who retains agency and who loses it?

To attempt to illustrate these issues, we were given circles. Then cylinders. Then back to circles (but remember the circles are fluid, they are permeable). And Kubota reminded us of Kaplan and his doodles, the doodles that helped him convey his ideas of the indirect (to him, illogical) way of Eastern rhetoric. McKay and Bokhorst-Heng (after deciding upon circles) did a fantastic job of clearly delineating for the reader the issues and complexities of English as a lingua franca in regards to each of the three circles:

• Inner Circle countries often view language diversity as a problem and monolingualism as the ideal. They have English, which is “the” (I would argue “an”) international language; what more does anyone need to survive in this world? some Inner Circle inhabitants would ask. Language minority students (anyone for whom English is not the L1) are seen as the outsiders. Inner Circle countries deal with providing English language support in (what “someone” feels is) the least restrictive environment (in the U.S., that would be ESL classrooms; in the U.K., that would involve mainstreaming. Oddly enough, this difference and debate sounds like one involving American students upon whom we have slapped the label “Special Ed.” Hmmm.)
• Outer Circle countries deal with the perceived or real necessity to educate all in English, but they often run into issues of how (and whether) to offer this equally to all their inhabitants. We were presented by the authors with studies of both South Africa and the Phillipines, with South Africans appropriating Zulu as a less-accepted language than English while the people of the Phillipines attempted to maintain some sort of national language, with the accompanying/interplaying cultural identification, while acknowledging that “necessity” (due to colonization) of incorporating English.
• Expanding Circle countries deal with more local issues, such as motivating learners and finding competent (and confident) teachers of English in the face of often-stringent ideas by top-down edicts. In this discussion, we were presented with Bonny Norton Peirce’s social identity and investment theories, although (unfortunately and disappointingly) McKay and Bokhorst-Heng never mention the difference between “motivation” and “investment” when discussing integrative versus instrumental motivation.

So many language policies. But so many different languages, and so many different attitudes. And then we come to Kubota (discussing English language learning in Japan), and – in examining ideas and attitudes of English language policies in Japan – we realize that there is no easy answer. Here, sociohistorical factors continue to affect language attitudes and policies, in often a dichotomous way. Always in tension, Kubota says, is nationalism versus Anglicization. She begins the article having us think of this triangle (ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity; English/Anglicization; nationalism) as an equilateral triangle, all “pulls” and “pushes” being equal. In the end, though, she explains that this is more of an isosceles triangle, with English/Anglicization (kokusaika) and nationalism pulling on diversity, each with its own “direction” of language ideology and leaning.

Triangles, circles, cylinders (ok, we can let the cylinders go). But it is all very confusing, so very confusing that it makes my head hurt to try to think of the application of all of this to TESOL, to teaching.

However, my confusion and bewilderment as to “What do I do with all of this?” was answered with McKay and Bokhorst-Heng’s invocation of Kramsch and Sullivan’s (1996) “contention that the most appropriate pedagogy for teaching a global language is one that is based on global thinking but local teaching” (McKay and Bokhorst-Heng 2008, p. 53). This should inform our practices: global thinking, local teaching. Taking our students’ individual situations, attitudes, motivations, into consideration, and informing that consideration with what we’ve learned ourselves, is what we should take from this.