Beyond ELT: more than just teaching language

• Steve Brown ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Glasgow

     University of Glasgow

     Reino Unido

     
• Localización: ELT journal: An international journal for teachers of English to speakers of other languages, ISSN 0951-0893, Vol. 78, Nº 4, 2024 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Special Issue: Generative Artificial Intelligence and ELT), págs. 498-519
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Most people would agree that the world is currently facing significant problems: we have not yet recovered from a global pandemic, wars are killing thousands every day, climate change is starting to damage people’s livelihoods and well-being, wealth inequality is increasing, minority groups are being oppressed for a variety of reasons, the spread of disinformation and fake news makes it increasingly difficult to know what is true and what is not—the list goes on. While these issues are causing real concern for people’s current welfare and for the future of the planet, and are the focus of everyday discussion all around the world, whether they have a place in the ELT classroom seems to be a different matter. There have long been calls—including from academics within the native English-speaking ‘inner circle’—for issues such as these to be incorporated into ELT curriculum content (see, for example, Pennycook 1989), but these calls have tended to be stifled by an ostensible desire for the ELT profession to remain ‘politically neutral’. In recent years, however, the extent of the problems facing the world, and the sense of urgency that something needs to be done to reverse the current trajectory, have allowed discourses advocating more transformative pedagogies to move closer to the mainstream. To this end, a number of books have been published recently that explore some of the bigger issues of concern in the world today, and how they can (and, more to the point, should) be addressed in ELT. This survey review examines five such books, offering individual reviews of each one and considering the contribution they make towards a significant shift in ELT—one that moves away from the preservation of the status quo, and becomes focused on the promotion of a critically aware, transformative, social-justice-oriented agenda.