Critical pedagogy in l2 learning and teaching suresh canagarajah

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Critical Pedagogy in L2 Learningand Teaching

Suresh CanagarajahBaruch College, City University of New York

[email protected]: Amirhamid Forough Ameri

March 2016

mailto:[email protected]

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Outline

Introduction Areas of research interest

Critical academic literacy Learning processes, strategies, and styles Target language? Issues of contestation Critical research methods and reporting

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Key Terms Challenging

Voice

Identity

(Dis)Empower

ment

(In)equalityIdeology

Postmodernism

Globalization

Issues of Power

Critical Pedagogy

(CP)

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Introduction Critical pedagogy (CP) entered the second language (L2) scene quite late. Marxist orientations to ideological implications of learning were already being

discussed around the 1970s. Teaching a colonial language to students from minority language groups was shaped by

the structuralist perspective behaviorist orientation to learning and the positivistic tradition to language acquisition research

L2 teaching was motivated by the pragmatic attitude of equipping students with the linguistic and communicative skills to make them socially functional.

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Introduction Critical practitioners would now argue that these apolitical disciplinary principles were

indeed motivated by geopolitical realities. ELT, (as sponsored by cultural agencies like the United States Information Agency and

the British Council) became an important activity after decolonization and around the Cold War when English language was perceived as a more effective medium of hegemony.

The dominant principles in the discipline, therefore, served to mask the controversial material and ideological ends of ELT pedagogy (Pennycook, 1989, 1994a).

The beginning of CP: Around the late 1980s and early 1990s. A reductive approach: CP is decolonization, the Cold War, and ethnic revivalism.

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Introduction CP features:

Intellectual questioning Discursive reconstruction in the academy Challenging modernist values of the enlightenment tradition, A range of critical theories coming into prominence from diverse socially

marginalized groups.This period: "post" everything: poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-Marxism, postcolonialism.

Feminism, critical race theory, subaltern studies, and queer theory.

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Introduction Thus CP in L2 is sympathetic to:

the agency of subjects; the shaping influence of culture, discourse, and consciousness the relative autonomy of specific social domains to critically negotiate the economic

and political structures; and the power of local settings like the classroom

CP is not a set of ideas, but a way of "doing" learning and teaching. Critical students and teachers are prepared to

situate learning in the relevant social contexts, unravel the implications of power in pedagogical activity and commit themselves to transforming the means and ends of learning.

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Areas of research interestCritical academic literacy

More research reports in CP relate to reading and writing than to speaking and listening.

The unstated assumption: the more spontaneous acts of speaking and listening don’t conveniently provide the space for critical reflection. Reading and writing, being slightly detached activities, have provided more possibilities for intervention.

Very few research projects have used CP in classroom learning: Using news reports during the Gulf War, Morgan (1998) enables immigrant students

to interpret the way lexical items, the grammatical status of words,… construct meanings that favor the North American position.

Min-zhan Lu (1994) shows how a peculiar grammatical modal used by a Chinese-Malaysian student indicates a move toward creativity: "can able to’’, seemingly connoting for her "ability from the perspective of the external circumstance’’.

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This power-sensitive textual critique was built on the schools of English for Academic Purposes, Genre Analysis, and English for Specific Purposes.

Moving beyond grammar and text to more rhetorically based issues has been explored only recently theorization of "voice" in feminist circles largely narrative, personal, and reflective case studies. E.g., Xiao Ming Li (1999): the conflicts she faced between her formal Chinese ethos

and the individuated American academic writing. Her attempts to adopt American or Chinese conventions led to academic

marginalization. Therefore, she adopted a "third" discourse.

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Note: studies on reading/writing are now not limited to the text, but adopt a more holistic approach in situating textual reception and production in social processes: literacy practice studies.

A recent collection of ethnographic studies by Street (2001) indicates: how the literacy in the classroom doesn’t always meet the real-world needs of

students; how the methods of teaching literacy don’t relate well to the local traditions of

literacy acquisition; and how the learners appropriate what is taught by teachers for divergent local uses.

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A research approach expanding the analysis of L2 texts to cultural context is contrastive rhetoric (see Kaplan, 1966; Connor, 1996).

Assumption: "With the knowledge that all discourses/cultures are equal, we can move on to adopt the established conventions for a specific context."

Shortcomings: Discourses are not equal. In specific social contexts, certain discourses are privileged. Contrastive rhetoricians define the cultural differences in stereotypical and

homogeneous terms ("essentializing" them). They also define cultures in biased terms, using the dominant culture is the norm.

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CP has researched the following: Situate the "culture" displayed in L2 writing in contexts of history and Power to

show that the hybridity reflects a complex process of appropriation of globally powerful cultures (Kubota, 1999).

Explore the process by which students shuttle between local and "target language" communities in their writings in L1 and L2, critically negotiating cultures in the process (Canagarajah, 2000);

Analyze the products of such negotiation and shuttling to show how texts may adopt a critical orientation on both discourses (see Canagarajah, 2002a, pp. 118-121).

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Learning processes, strategies, and styles

Critical research has also challenged the stereotypes about the preferred learning styles of ESOL students. Do students from traditional communities (in Asia, Africa, and Latin America) prefer

memorization, rote learning, and product-oriented pedagogies, while the favored approaches in the field are of course process-oriented?

Holliday defines the ideal conditions for language learning: process-oriented, task-based, inductive, collaborative, communicative English language teaching methodology.

Empowering foreign students and developing a more democratic learning environment. However, Critical practitioners have questioned this learning group ideal of ELT.

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1. Product-oriented approaches cannot be dismissed as dysfunctional in all contexts. Several scholars have pointed out that there is a real need for ESL students in some

learning situations to desire a knowledge of the rules of English: African American students who don’t know the established codes Minority students without any knowledge of the socially valued codes Older students who come to western institutions communities with limited material/educational resources

2. Several other scholars have given more social and psychological complexity to the learning styles by situating product-oriented learning in context. Pennycook (1996) points out that the memorization techniques of the Chinese students

were motivated by a respect for others who previously put those ideas more effectively.

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3. product-oriented learning may have oppositional significance. They are making the statement that they don’t envision using English for everyday

communicative purposes. They need English to vie for jobs and other utilitarian purposes.

Those who treat a product-oriented learning as passive and conforming are going too far in stereotyping ESL students. First, everyone has the agency to adopt diverse forms of thinking; Second, students refrain from participating in communicative activities as they see

no relevance to their everyday life.

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Indirect opposition may involve parody, satire, humor, foot dragging, cheating, name calling, mimicking, and stealing in which they express opposition behind the backs of those in authority.

In classroom ethnographies, I have come to identify spaces/interactions that students define as separate for themselves: classroom underlife (Canagarajah, 1997). They may constitute micro-level interactions like gossip, passing of notes, and

unauthorized conversations and topics behind the back of the teacher. Or they could be practiced in larger level interactions in small group discussions,

e-mail or chat rooms in the computer-mediated classes, and graffiti in textbooks.

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The rationale for classroom underlife: a need for solidarity, relief, and protection for students from the ideological assaults

of the school. a needed site for students to construct alternate identities to those shaped by the

school. students reframe and reinterpret authorized curricula, textbooks, and discourses to

favor their own contexts and interests.

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Learning processes, strategies, and styles Given such complexity in learning processes, there is a line of research into the effects

of ESL textbooks published in Anglo-American communities. Cameron (2002) and Block (2002) argue that there is a current tendency for publishers

to adopt uniform learning styles and discourses in ELT textbooks in the name of globalization. Block sarcastically charges them for promoting "McCommunication.“

Consequences: a reproductive effect (as the values and codes are spread locally) in classes where

students and teachers are less critical in their learning. a clash of discordant discourses as the expectations of the publishers and host

community don’t match, resistance and appropriation as ideologically better informed teachers and students

reinterpret the discourses for their own purposes.

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Learning processes, strategies, and styles In the area of methods, too, the profession has validated approaches that suit the

preferred learning styles of western communities. In more recent times, such approaches as task-based teaching, learner-strategy training,

student-centered pedagogies, and learner-autonomy practices seem to take us further along the process-oriented paradigm.

Prabhu, (1990): "there is no best method" Kumaravadivelu (1994):

We should abandon the notion that there are preconstructed methods that can be implemented wholesale.

We have to now think of responding more directly to the needs and learning styles of our students, sensitive to the cultures and social conditions relevant to the classroom context.

We may eclectically draw from previously defined methods the postmethod condition.

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Target language? It was commonly accepted that the dominant dialects spoken by the "native speakers"

was the target (i.e., Standard American English, or the dominant dialects of South East England).

The local varieties in postcolonial communities were considered transitional interlanguages and pidgins.

Such traditional assumptions have been effectively challenged since Kachru (1986) displayed the system and logic of nativized Englishes the values of descriptive linguistics, no linguistic bases for considering one dialect as superior to the other.

We are moving toward the egalitarian position that English is a plural language accommodating different norms and grammars.

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Target language? With postmodern forms of hybrid communication, we are more sensitive to the fluidity

in languages, discourses, and registers. the native speaker fallacy justifies the preferred position of native speaker teachers in

the employment market. Discussions of target language should go further to include the place of the first

languages ESL students speak. We know from recent research that

skills and language awareness developed in Ll can transfer positively to L2 a validation of the student’s L1 can reduce the inhibitions against English, and a multilingual self can be formed of diverse languages.

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Issues of contestation Structure and Agency

Critical practitioners rightly consider abstract arrangements of social organization, political establishment, economic infrastructure, and ideological complexes.

We have to be open to the possibility that structure and agency will interact with each other dialectically in an ongoing and relentless fashion.

Reproduction and Transformation The possibilities for transforming or reproducing discourses and structures. Reproductionist studies show the power of economic and ideological forces to shape

the thinking of individuals.

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Issues of contestation History and Desire.

It is possible to consider the workings of power as an external manifestation through history and society. From this perspective, we would critique power objectively.

However, it is important to see that our own consciousness, subjectivity and desire are shaped by diverse histories of domination.

Opposition and Resistance. Whereas some students may accommodate to values unfavorable to them, others

will react against them. Resistance displays ideological clarity and commitment to collective action for

social transformation, from mere Opposition, is unclear, ambivalent, and largely passive.

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Issues of contestation Macro- and Micro-levels of Intervention.

What is the effective level of pedagogical intervention? Changing educational policies by lobbying established structures such as boards,

and organizations? Changing local level structures that happen in classrooms everyday? The local changes can transcend their immediate context to unsettle larger

institutional structures. Student Autonomy and Teacher Control.

Some consider teachers as the intellects who should lead their students toward critical thinking

Others pointed out that students (esp. from marginalized backgrounds) come with personal experience.

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Issues of contestation Voice and Access.

Should critical practitioners provide marginalized students access to the dominant codes or, rather, empower their own vernaculars?

we needn’t reduce linguistic proficiency to univocal codes and discourses. It is good for students to be multilingual.

Inclusion and Interrogation. How should we set about changing curricula and textbooks? Should we fight for more inclusive representation? Or should we say that it is idealistic to expect such a level of diversity?

However, as in the other constructs, we should learn to balance both orientations in our pedagogy.

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Critical research methods and reporting Critical research differs from descriptive approaches, which adopt a detached,

objective, value-free orientation to knowledge. Critical approaches align themselves with the post-Enlightenment philosophical

tradition in situating research in the social context.

A critical approach questions the separation of constructs such as the following: Theory and method: In descriptive approaches, research methods are atheoretical,

but CP treats methods as ideological.

Interpretation and data: In descriptive research, data is considered hard and raw, but CP assumes that the data presupposes an interpretation.

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Critical research methods and reporting Subjective and objective: Descriptive research considers it possible to detach

ourselves from the matter studied, but CP would consider all research as colored by the intentions, experiences, and values.

Contextual and universal: the objective of descriptive research is to generate facts and constructs of universal validity. However, CP would acknowledge that all research is situated.

Applied and disinterested: Traditional research conducted research for purely descriptive purposes. However, for CR research is conducted for the difference it will make for social betterment and human development.

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Critical research methods and reporting Research approaches accommodating a critical orientation:

Critical ethnography treats the classroom as a cultural site and inquires into the ways in which culture may serve as an empowering force in pedagogy.

Action research enables teachers to critically reflect on their classroom experience, as they manage their teaching and research to complement each other.• A variant of this is Participant Action Research, which encourages the teacher to

collaborate with students, giving them a greater role.

Self-reflexive studies encourage the subject to become a researcher of his or her own learning/teaching experience.

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Critical research methods and reporting Critical Language Socialization situates processes of SLA in sociopolitical context. It is not impossible to tailor other established research approaches, such as discourse

analysis, language planning/policy studies, or literacy studies to take on the critical assumptions outlined here.

Other emergent genres of research reporting adopt: Reflexivity, in representing the personal shaping of the findings, Narrativity, for a more indirect, context-bound, and personal form of theorization Multivocality, for textualizing the plural perspectives and voices Authorial collaboration, in involving the participants/informants Open-endedness, in dramatizing the tensions in interpretation and data.

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Education

Critical pedagogy in l2 learning and teaching suresh canagarajah