Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 2; March 02

Exploring context: Localness and the role of ethnography

Ian Tudor,
January 2002

ILVP CP110
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Avenue F.D. Roosevelt 50
B-1050 Bruxelles
Belgium

itudor@ulb.ac.be

The goal of this article is to examine the role of context in language teaching and, on this basis, to argue for a more explicit consideration of context in pedagogical decision making. Context is sometimes portrayed as something relatively secondary, rather like the decor and props in the staging of a theatre play: In this perspective, the text of the play remains the same whether the actors find themselves performing this text in a plush West End theatre or in a battered church hall with creaky floorboards and wobbly chairs. I would like to suggest that context plays a more fundamental role in language teaching and that, in fact, the reality of language teaching emerges dynamically from the interaction between the initial “text” as found in programme goals and methodology and the context within which this text is enacted (Tudor, 2001a).

“Context” is clearly a complex phenomenon. It can, however, be usefully analysed in terms of two main components – pragmatic and mental.

Pragmatic context relates to the objectively observable features of the language teaching situation, and therefore includes a wide range of factors. Class size is clearly one: Teaching a group of 100 students is a very different affair from teaching a group of 10, even if the objective learning goals that the two groups are pursuing are the same. Then there is the question of the teaching-learning resources which are available, and which can vary from a blackboard with a more or less reliable supply of chalk to classrooms equipped with audio and video equipment backed up by a self-access centre with CALL and multimedia facilities. Salary levels are another factor in that they can influence the time and effort teachers can devote to preparation and innovation as opposed to their second or third job. Other factors include the type and level of training teachers have received, as well as their decision-making role in their institution. The presence of an examination may also be an important contextual factor in terms of the vision of language on which it rests, and the approach to learning and the study habits it generates. Factors of this nature clearly play a powerful role in influencing the actions of both teachers and students.

Mental context is less easy to identify than pragmatic context and its influence on language teaching can be more difficult to pin down. The mental context of teaching arises out of the attitudes, beliefs, behavioural expectations, goals and aspirations which participants bring with them to the classroom and, in this way, the meaning which language teaching and learning assume for them. The factors which constitute the mental context of teaching include the belief and value system(s) of the students' home society, the educational traditions and practices current in this society, the modes of study, the learning strategies, and the approach to language teaching to which students are accustomed. They also include the students' attitudes to the target language (TL) and the TL community, their attitudes to the institutional setting in which they are studying, as well as their perceptions of the relevance to them of the TL in personal, academic or pragmatic terms. All these factors influence what language learning means to students, and therefore how our own actions as teachers will be perceived by them. They thus exert a potentially significant influence on classroom dynamics.

Then, of course, we have the interaction between pragmatic and mental context Good material conditions, for example, are not in themselves a guarantee of effective and harmonious teaching and learning. Nevertheless, they can facilitate methodological experimentation or allow an extension of the learning opportunities made available to students. If such measures are perceived to be successful, all participants can feel encouraged to make a further investment of time and energy, and thus initiate a virtuous cycle of experimentation and engagement. The opposite can also occur. Poor material conditions can place a variety of obstacles in the path of innovation, and this in turn can give rise to discouragement and a feeling of being trapped by circumstance, which can lead to a downward cycle of demotivation among both teachers and students (cf. Fortez, 1997). In both cases, we witness a dynamic interaction between the material conditions of teaching and participants' attitudes to and their affective involvement in the teaching-learning process.

Localness and the role of case studies

Incorporating an explicit consideration of context into pedagogical planning means that this will be a local undertaking which calls for “local understandings” (Freeman 2000; Tudor, 2001b). It is perhaps for this reason that increasing importance is being accorded to case studies as a means of exploring language teaching (Richards, 1998; Wallace, 1999). To the extent that they relate to the specifics of one teaching situation, all case studies are idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, by focusing on the details of language teaching as it is lived out in a particular setting, case studies can bring to light the dynamic interaction between participants and context and, in this way, provide more relevant insights into teaching and learning as they are lived out by real teachers and students working in real classrooms than methodological precept and generalisation. The details of the situation in question may be what Freeman (1996: 91) describes as "messy", but it is precisely in the "messiness" of local detail that teaching and learning are lived out and where the relevance of methodological principle is put to the acid test of pedagogical validity.

A coursebook and its context of use

In line with what has just been said, I would like to examine the role of context on the basis of a case study (Canagarajah 1993, 1999; cf. also Tudor 2001a: 145-154) which shows a mismatch between a fairly mainstream methodology as manifested in a given coursebook – American Kernel Lessons: Intermediate (AKL) (O'Neill, Kingbury, Yeadon, and Cornelius, 1978) – and the attitudes and expectations of one specific group of students. Canagarajah's study is set in one university English classroom in Sri Lanka, and describes the interaction of a class of 22 students over one academic year with the coursebook AKL. The reason why AKL came to be used in the classroom in question was directly related to the pragmatic context of English teaching in Sri Lanka. ELT materials were expensive and difficult to come by, and even reproduction facilities were limited, which made it difficult for teachers to prepare their own materials. For these reasons, coursebooks constituted a practically useful approach to organising language teaching. It should, however, be pointed out that in Canagarajah's study the coursebook in question was donated by aid agencies, and not selected by the local teachers.

Early in the course, Canagarajah, who was the class teacher of the students in question, became aware of discontent among students with respect to the coursebook, and his study revolves around his effort to understand the causes of this discontent. Canagarajah approached this task by means of a number of ethnographically oriented research techniques including observations and field notes made by Canagarajah during the course, analysis of the glosses and drawings made by students in their coursebook, a pre-course questionnaire, and one-to-one interviews with students at the end of the course. The discontent among students observed by Canagarajah clustered around three main areas.

The place of grammar

It this respect, students expressed discontent with the relative importance accorded to grammar in the coursebook. Specifically, they wanted more explicit grammatical instruction, which in their eyes meant the provision of abstract grammatical rules, paradigms and charts they could study and learn as products or content. Student discontent in this area manifested itself in a number of ways. Canagarajah notes that the students often skipped activity-oriented classes but attended classes which dealt with the more overtly grammatical elements of the coursebook. Furthermore, student attendance fell off dramatically from the second month of the course. Canagarajah discovered, however, that from this period a number of students had been following extra classes (for which they had to pay) given by private teachers who used Indian and Sri Lankan coursebooks and who adopted a very "traditional", grammatically based approach to teaching. The students thus actively sought out the kind of grammar teaching they felt they were not getting in class. Indeed, even within AKL-based classes Canagarajah observes that students tended to "filter out" grammar and vocabulary from "supposedly interesting conversations" (1993: 617). In other words, they recycled AKL input into their own preferred view of language and of learning. The post-course interviews conducted by Canagarajah with the students revealed that they were reasonably happy with the more explicitly grammatical parts of AKL, although most felt that AKL should be replaced by a more grammar-based coursebook, that grammar should be given primacy in the course, that grammar should be taught first, and that time should not be "wasted" on skills and activities. These student reactions reveal a perspective on language as the code and content, as opposed to language a skill and a means of communication.

Learning activities

The students also manifested discontent with some of the learning activities employed in the course. The students were reluctant to participate in the role-play or conversation activities found in AKL; they also showed resistance to engaging in collaborative learning activities, trying to shift classroom interactive patterns towards a teacher-centred format. In this respect, Canagarajah reports that students rearranged into neat rows the desks that Canagarajah had put in a circle before the class began: The physical layout of the classroom thus assumed a symbolic value in terms of what the students considered to be appropriate modes of classroom interaction. Canagarajah suggests that the students were looking for a product-oriented and teacher-centred mode of learning, an approach which was held in high esteem in the students' own culture and to which they were accustomed from their previous educational experience.

Cultural content

Canagarajah reports on two apparently contradictory reactions of students to the cultural content of AKL. During the course itself, the students showed resistance to the cultural content of the coursebook, which manifested itself in at least two ways. One was the nature of students' comments and drawings in their coursebooks, which Canagarajah interprets as an attempt to "localise" the scenes shown (eg. by drawing in Sri Lankan clothing on the characters), or as indicative of a negative affective reaction to the characters, scenes and cultural norms portrayed. In this respect, Canagarajah observes that in the situations contained in AKL upward social mobility and consumerism, the work ethic and the routine of factory life are positively connotated, whereas strikes and demonstrations, and the lifestyle of African Americans are not. In other words, Canagarajah suggests that there was an implicit social agenda in the coursebook, and that this agenda did not coincide with the value system, social experience and aspirations of the students. The other manifestation of student discontent with the cultural content of AKL was the reluctance to participate in role-play and conversation activities which has already been mentioned. Canagarajah attributes this in part at least to the social values underpinning the portrayal of the TL culture in the coursebook. Canagarajah observes that in these activities the students "uttered their parts in a flat reading intonation when they were supposed to dramatize the dialogue in front of the class" and that they found it "funny" or "unbecoming of them" (1993: 617) to attempt to bring the dialogues to life. He goes on to remark that " … the discourse behind these dialogues was itself so alien to these students that they had difficulty entering into the roles specified" (ibid.). In other words, in addition to unease with the value system implicit in the coursebook, the students experienced a personal credibility gap when it came to stepping into the roles of characters in AKL. The students were thus unable (or unwilling) to suspend their disbelief sufficiently to use the relevant activities even for intonation or pronunciation practice.

After the course, however, the students showed a somewhat different reaction to the cultural content of AKL. Their attitude at this stage was fairly relaxed, and even interested, albeit in a detached manner. Canagarajah explains this change in two ways. The first is that the students converted culture, or cultural knowledge at least, into a "product", ie. something to be studied and learned for its information value and stored in memory for possible future use, a strategy similar to that which they adopted with respect to the language itself. This strategy, however, became difficult to maintain when the students had to verbally assimilate aspects of this culture in role-play or conversation activities. In other words, as long as the TL culture could be viewed in a detached manner, it had a certain interest value for the students, but became problematic when they were asked to step into this culture - albeit verbally - and were no longer able to view it from a safe distance as interested observers.

Furthermore, Canagarajah suggests that the students' interaction with the cultural content of AKL, and thus with the coursebook's role-play or conversation activities, was not related exclusively to the foreign TL culture, but also had links with aspects of Sri Lankan society. Canagarajah reports that "correct" English is seen as the hallmark of the priviledged Sri Lankan elite, and he suggests that students' reluctance to engage in spoken activities arose in part out of inhibitions within the class group as a micro-society in its own right - the students not wanting to break ranks with their fellow students by approximating towards a form of English associated with Sri Lankans from a more priviledged social background. (Canagarajah notes, for example, that students said they would not object to using English with a foreigner, but would hesitate to do so with another Sri Lankan.) The question of identity with respect to use of the TL thus related not only to the source TL culture as such, but also to the social connotations of English usage within Sri Lankan society itself. The students were therefore reacting to English not only as learners of a foreign language but also as members of a society in which this language is socially marked.

Discussion

Canagarajah's case study reveals a fundamental mismatch between the approach to language teaching found in a professionally produced mainstream ELT coursebook and the attitudes and expectations of one specific group of students. On the one hand, this might be viewed as fairly unremarkable: Coursebooks are aimed at a very wide audience, and it is unlikely that any one coursebook will fit in seamlessly with the specifics of each setting in which it is used. On the other hand, the study highlights the influence of context on students' receptivity to language teaching materials and, thereby, the potential of such materials to promote meaningful learning. For this reason, it has relevance well beyond the specifics of Canagarajah's study as such. In particular, the study highlights the role of mental context and alerts us as teachers to the need to explore the psychological reality which our pedagogical choices assume for our students.

Some of the tensions observed by Canagarajah are attributable to a dissonance between the students' prior educational experience and the methodological approach embodied in AKL. AKL operates with an largely code based view of language, which corresponded reasonably well to that held by the students, even if they expressed preference for a more explicit presentation of grammatical structures than they found in AKL. Another source of tensions related to the vision of learning found in AKL. In this respect, AKL offers students a fairly eclectic approach to learning, but one which has a strong experiential component, as manifested in its role play and communicatively oriented activities. The students, on the other hand, were used to an analytical, content-based mode of learning. AKL offers some scope for this mode of learning and the students responded to these aspects of the coursebook quite well, but resisted the other, more experientially oriented modes. In other words, there was a dissonance between one aspect of mental context, namely the expectations about language learning which students had derived from their prior educational experience, and the methodological assumptions upon which AKL rested.

The main source of tensions, however, was the coincidence of a certain type of learning activity and the cultural colouring with which the TL was presented to students in AKL. As has already been pointed out, AKL presented the TL in a manner which was marked in social terms, and the social values in question differed from those of the students. This dissonance was compounded by the fact that many of the learning activities found in AKL required students to enact this culture or, as they may have perceived it, to step into a set of social values and aspirations which were alien to them and with which they neither could nor wished to identify. Furthermore, this reluctance related not only to the TL culture as such, but also to the social associations of the TL within their own culture. In other words, tensions arose between AKL and another aspect of mental context, namely the social attitudes and values of the students concerned. A survey of AKL alone would not be sufficient to predict this problem. Indeed, some students could perfectly well find the fairly conventional, mainstream portrayal of US culture enjoyable and motivating. It is only by an analysis of the attitudes and expectations of the specific group of students in question that such factors can be assessed reliably. Indeed, such an analysis needs to look beyond language learning in a narrow sense of the term to explore the wider attitudes and value system of the students in broader social and ideational terms. Language learning involves more than a sanitised accumulation of structures and vocabulary: It also entails contact with a foreign culture and this, in turn, engages learners as full human beings and not simply as language learners in a narrowly technical sense of the term. Factors of this nature exert a significant influence on students' ability to engage in language learning activities in a holistic and personally meaningful manner and, for this reason, clearly merit consideration in pedagogical planning.

Implications

Canagarajah's study has been briefly reviewed here as an illustration of the way in which context, and mental context in particular, can influence the meaning which pedagogical choices asume for students and thus how these choices influence classroom dynamics. The study has two main sets of implications.

The first is that the exploration of context should be an integral component of pedagogical planning. Recourse to methodological principle and notions of best practice can of course provide teachers with insights and open up strategies for action. There is, however, no guarantee that methodological principle will feed through to meaningful classroom learning in a direct, linear manner. The pedagogical reality which methodology assumes in the classroom emerges dynamically from the interaction between methodology and the attitudes, expectations and value systems of the students (and teachers) who are directly involved in using it. In other words, it is strongly influenced by the mental context within which it is used. For this reason, a sustainable and locally meaningful approach to pedagogical planning cannot rest upon recourse to methodological principle alone - even if this is presented as “best practice”. It needs equally to involve an open and constructive exploration of local realities – not what language teaching is in the eyes of the “experts”, but what is means to local actors in the here-and-now of their lives within but also beyond the classroom.

The second main implication is that teacher education can only benefit from including an explicitly ethnographic component. In the first instance, this involves aiding teachers to conduct the sort of ethnographic research which will allow them to explore the attitudes, expectations and value systems of their students insofar as these factors may influence students' interaction with various aspects of the teaching-learning process. Another and equally important goal relates to the analysis of the ethnographic underpinnings of methodological options, including of course those which we derive from our own cultural background and professional education. Methodological choices are never neutral, and they all rest upon a certain set of assumptions. These assumptions, however, are rarely explicitly articulated and may be “invisible” to members of the cultural group which has developed them – they are simply “the way things are done”. In this respect, it is important to remember that ethnography is not simply a matter of studying “the other”. We, too, are frequently “the other” to our students. Exploring our own assumptions and the mental context within which we approach language teaching is thus as integral a part of an ethnographic approach to pedagogical decision making as exploring the mental context which our students bring with them to the learning experience.

To return to the theatrical metaphor which opened this article, I have suggested that context is far more than simply the decor within which a pre-set text is acted out. Once we have read the text of King Lear, we know how the play will end. In the classroom, on the other hand, outcomes cannot be predicted confidently on the basis of the “official text” – programme goals, prescribed methodology and materials etc. – alone. This is because the reality which the official text assumes in the classroom results from the meaning which this text has for classroom actors, and this is always highly context dependent.

References

Canagarajah, A. S. 1993. Critical ethnography of a Sri Lankan classroom: ambiguities in student opposition to reproduction through ESOL. TESOL Quarterly 27: 601-626.

Canagarajah, A.S. 1999. Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fortez, G. E. 1997. Language teaching in difficult circumstances. In B. Kenny and W. Savage (Eds). Language and Development: Teachers in a Changing World. Harlow: Longman: 15-32.

Freeman, D. 1996. Redefining the relationship between research and what teachers know. In K.M. Bailey and D. Nunan. Voices from the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 88-115.

Freeman, D. 2000. Imported theories / Local understandings. TESOL Matters 10: 1,6.

O'Neill, R., R. Kingbury, T. Yeadon, and E. T. Cornelius. 1978. American Kernel Lessons: Intermediate. New York: Longman.

Richards, J. C. (Ed.) 1998. Teaching in Action: Case Studies from Second Language Classrooms. Alexandria, Virginia: TESOL Inc.

Tudor, I. 2001a. The Dynamics of the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tudor, I. 2001b. SLA and context: The case for 'local' understandings. Plenary talk given at the TESOL France 2001 colloquium 'Bridging the gap: Theory and practice in second language acquisition', 16-17 November 2001.

Wallace, M. J. 1999. Using case studies in language teacher education. Paper presented at the conference IATEFL Teachers Develop Teachers Research 4: Reflective Learning, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2-4 September 1999.