Classroom Language Work Is Congruent With Students' Life-world Matters

By Author: Peter King
Total Articles: 73
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Critical language educators in the Freirean tradition have tackled these issues by turning the tables on established power relations, developing the concept of participatory curricula, whereby students bring their own real life concerns and texts to class, and so creating the curriculum according to their evolving needs. Thus classroom language work is congruent with students' life-world matters. For example, in migration contexts language learning is intimately bound up with the difficult business of successful functioning as a newcomer in a new country. Students may well be concerned with understanding how locals, using local accents and dialects, ask for and give directions. They will also be concerned with Chanel Jewelry other problematic and contradictory aspects of their lives, in (finding) employment, childcare, housing, and dealings with immigration officials, for instance. Building on the Freirean argument, Auerbach and Burgess promote a view that language education should 'start with problematic issues in people's lives and, through dialogue, encourage ...
... students not only to develop a critical view of their reality but to act on it to improve their lives' (1985: 492). As Auerbach and Burgess suggest, the ability to think critically is perhaps the most important survival skill of all.

With many teachers bringing a healthy criticality to their practice, I would question whether a turn towards authenticity is, in fact, driven by applied linguists' critiques of language pedagogy. Waters associates 'the primacy of authenticity' with, among other tendencies, the 'anti-text-book stance' and the advocacy of non-metropolitan language models as a basis for syllabus design. He then contends that: 'In most language teaching situations, where practice is configured primarily in terms of pedagogical priorities and ideas of this kind tend to be viewed as having only limited relevance' (2009: 140). But such ideas often are relevant, and develop not in ivory towers but in the contingency-driven talk of classrooms and staff rooms, the talk of practice, actually. Take the rejection of published textbooks. It is in publishers' interests to make coursebooks appeal to as wide a market as possible, hence the emergence of Pandora Jewelry the generic 'global coursebook' (Gray 2002). Yet the extent to which global coursebooks are appropriate in many classrooms is questionable. In particular, the sort of young, apolitical, carefree, affluent, and overwhelmingly middle class culture that such coursebooks present opens them up to criticism, as does the assumption of a general knowledge base and linguistic background that is Eurocentric. The grounds for criticism of such materials are as much pedagogical as political. A challenge for all language teachers is to present the students in their classes with materials they might relate to, culturally and linguistically. Much teaching is driven by a concern for local context, and of relevance to learners' lives, which global coursebooks cannot hope to address, regardless of how high quality and contemporary they might be.

Critical pedagogy rests on arguments that advocate working towards a better world. This is not an unreasonable aim, and is why many people come to teaching in the first place. In some ELT contexts for example, those where participants are migrants to English-dominant countries students experience inequality as a matter of course, and are often among the most marginalized in society as a whole. Those involved in their education are in a position to work to counter the power imbalances inherent in their daily lives.