Students' Real-life More Concerns

By Author: Jordon
Total Articles: 91
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CP takes the local' as its point of departure, and local here includes the overall actual life experiences and needs of learners. Learners' needs in CP are defined not just linguistically or in terms of tasks, but in terms of the purposes they serve in the social mobility and activism of students.

CP, in fact, would object to a blanket approach to syllabus design where all students are assumed to have a common set of communicative goals. In CP there is no separation between the communicative needs of learners and who they are socially and politically, which means that what students are taught will differ widely depending on their locale and linguistic, economic, ethnic, as well as political affiliations. In other words, in a critically inspired pedagogy, rural students' needs are different from those of urban centres, minorities have needs which diverge from those Juicy Couture Watch of the majority, and haves and have-nots need different types of instructional material and approaches. Commercially produced coursebooks, which form the backbone ...
... of instruction in many mainstream language teaching contexts, lack the required sensitivity to be able to address such concerns.

A problem of commercially produced coursebooks, in other words, is their disregard for the localness of learning and learning needs. Most such books make use of a language which is considered to be aspirational (Gray 2001), where most of the language introduced deals with the needs and concerns of middle and upper classes; in most of the dialogues of such books the interlocutors talk about issues which are far removed from the lives of many learners. While learners might have needs related to finding a part-time job, extending their visa for another year or term, or negotiating their status as a refugee (Baynham 2006), participants in coursebook dialogues worry about where to spend their vacation, how people celebrate Mardi Gras, or what to wear for a friend's party. An example of how local concerns can be incorporated in a typical English syllabus may clarify the issue further.

In Iran there are still regions that are contaminated by landmines; these landmines are the leftovers of eight years of war with Iraq. Each year hundreds of people get killed or are wounded by these landmines, and most of the victims are children and adolescents. Iran's Ministry of Education, in collaboration with the Red Crescent Society, has decided to offer a specie crash course on landmines and safety Juicy Couture measures needed in dealing with them for students living in affected areas. This course is offered as an ext to the curriculum and is not integrated in any subject area students study their regular programmes. From a CP perspective, it would have been advisable and possible to include the landmine topic in the English lesso: or instruction students receive in their curriculum and in this way come with a content that is both relevant and transformative to the immediate lives of the learners.

As an example, students in this situation can be exposed to a reading passage which makes them familiar with landmines, places they are planted, and cautionary measures that must be taken in contaminated areas. As a follow-up communicative activity, the learners can be divided into groups of two and, in an information gap exercise using maps, help their partners get home safely while negotiating their way through farm dotted with landmines and suspicious objects.