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May 2009- Globalization and English Language Teaching

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Saved by Prem Phyak
on April 30, 2009 at 6:05:25 pm
 

 

1. Scholarly articles (David Block and David Carless)

 

Globalization has brought so many changes in economy, technology, politics, education and culture. One of the major points that all scholars point out about globalization in relation to language teaching is the commodification of language. With the global flow of people from various language groups, nationalities and ethnicity we have to choose one or more language (s) which bridge the gap between us. And this role at present is played by the English language. Thus we are learning, teaching and using English. We have different underlying aims  behind this. We want to communicate people around the world, we want to access informations and fresh findings of researches and we also want to be part of global community. However, various scholars have also critiqued that such commodification of the English language may not bring long term educational development. This further ignores the local reality. This tension between global and local implies that we need to be critical about the taken-as-granted-globalization of the English language. Especially we need to explore, how we can use English for our benifit. Do we need to accept the global methods of teaching English and textbooks eventhough they are not appropriate in our context? How can we integrate global with local and make ELT more contextual? Such are the issues that are coming into fore regarding globalization and language teaching. To get ideas about the issue of ELT in relation to globalization please read David Block's paper which was originally published in the

 Encyclopedia of Language and Education (2008).  To read full PDF version of the paper please clickhere.

 

After this general ideas about globalization and its relationship with ELT, we can also have a look at how the global methods are not appropriate in various world contexts. For example, task-based language teaching (TBLT) which is useful in native English context does not seem appropriate in other world contexts. It needs adaptations from local teachers to make it more learners' friendly and goal-oriented. In this regard, David Carless (2003) critically analyses the suitability of TBLT at primary schools of Hong Kong. In his study, Carless argues that TBLT does not seem suitable in the Confucius culture of Hong Kong where students prefer to learn grammar, making noise in the classroom is considered indiscipline and so on. He strongly contends that a new situated version of TBLT should developed for Hong Kong context. The issues raised in the study in many ways reflect the issues of Nepal. Please click here to read more about the study.

 

2 Teacher anecdote

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