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ELT Journal is a quarterly publication for all those involved in English Language Teaching
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2/1/24, 10:22 AM About | ELT Journal | Oxford Academic
The origins of ELT Journal, by Richard Smith
"In October 1946, the first issue of English Language Teaching, now known as ELT
Journal, was sent out around the world from the British Council’s offices in Hanover
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Decolonizing ELT methods through critical thematic units

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Decolonizing ELT methods through critical thematic units Get access

Mario E López-Gopar and William M Sughrua

ELT Journal, Volume 77, Issue 3, July 2023, Pages 305–315, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccad012

Published: 12 April 2023

...://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights ) Abstract The purpose of this paper is to resist the

‘colonial’ status of ELT by discussing our attempts to decolonize ELT methods through critical thematic units (CTUs),
co-developed and applied by Mexican student-teachers working with children in Oaxaca...

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Research methods in applied linguistics and language education: current

considerations, recent innovations, and future directions Get access
Farahnaz Faez and others

ELT Journal, Volume 76, Issue 2, April 2022, Pages 276–296, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccab091

Published: 22 January 2022

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2/1/24, 10:26 AM Search Results | ELT Journal | Oxford Academic

... an issue through different methods of data collection and analysis. At the centre of the discussion is the core concept
of triangulation, which requires analysing data from multiple sources, in various groups, or with numerous research
techniques. This survey review outlines current considerations, recent...

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The Qualitative and Quantitative Rise of Literature on Teaching English to Young

Learners Get access
Nayr Ibrahim

ELT Journal, Volume 74, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 202–225, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccaa019

Published: 01 April 2020

... ELLs to demonstrate proficiency in content knowledge and language abilities. The following chapter, by Verplaetse,
Ferraro, and Mazzaro, is about eliciting high levels of engagement from students by asking questions that focus on
personal and thematic relevance, provoking critical enquiry that requires...

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 Decolonizing ELT methods through
critical thematic units
Mario E. López-Gopar and William M. Sughrua

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The purpose of this paper is to resist the ‘colonial’ status of ELT by discussing
our attempts to decolonize ELT methods through critical thematic units
(CTUs), co-developed and applied by Mexican student-teachers working with
children in Oaxaca, Mexico. Understanding that epistemologies (knowledge)
and in consequence language methods are provincial, historically situated,
and embodied in children’s ontologies and material lives, our CTUs start by
questioning ‘why’ English should be brought into children’s lives and then
continue by analysing ‘what’ social purposes ELT could accomplish with
children, with a focus on important themes in their lives (e.g. water shortage,
nutrition, and health). With these CTUs, which adopt a heteroglossic and
multimodal view of language, teachers and children coauthor multimodal and
multilingual identity texts serving as pedagogic and assessment spaces where
language is both learned and used to negotiate affirming identities for both
teachers and children. To exemplify these decolonizing attempts, the present
article walks the readers through the components and implementation of one
CTU focused on ‘eating habits in connection to health issues’, carried out by
two student-teachers. The article will thus articulate how our CTUs are different
from what are considered ‘methods’ in ELT, as they are epistemologically and
socially situated.
Key words: ELT, decolonizing pedagogies, critical thematic units, language
teaching methods

Introduction ELT is immersed within modernity/coloniality, the grand narrative that

emerged from European colonialism and capitalism in the Americas and
other parts of the world (Mignolo 2000). Pursuant to this global narrative,
European languages and English are positioned hierarchically as superior
to, or more advanced than, alleged ‘inferior’ languages such as Latin
American Indigenous languages. Consequently, English is portrayed as
the ‘modern’ and ‘desirable’ language to learn (Motha 2020), as it would
magically ‘improve’ the lives of the current colonial other (e.g. minoritized,
Indigenous, migrant and refugee groups) (López-Gopar 2016). Going
beyond language hierarchies, the modernity/coloniality narrative presents
European knowledge as universal, applicable to any part of the world. This
is the case with Eurocentric-based language teaching methods that have

ELT Journal; https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccad012  Page 1 of 11

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
 been exported to colonial settings or so-called outer and expanding circles
(Holliday 1994; Kumaravadivelu 2016).
Counteracting this reality and focusing on decolonial and/or critical efforts,
different researchers have shown that the modernity/coloniality narrative
in ELT has been resisted in various colonial settings (e.g. Canagarajah
2022). It has also been argued that ELT appears to be a door that lets
very few people in, resulting in ‘the marginality of the majority’ who do
not make it through this door due to social inequality (Kumaravadivelu

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2016: 73). Indeed, ELT is not neutral, apolitical, or ahistorical, but rather
inherently connected to discriminatory practices, social inequality, and
hegemonic power in colonial contexts. None the less, based on neoliberal,
progressive, and instrumental ideologies, ELT is reaching young children in
public schools all over the world through educational policies and parental
demands (Enever 2016). This is the case in Oaxaca, the most culturally
and linguistically diverse state of Mexico, where we (the coauthors of this
article), in our capacity as teacher-educators and in collaboration with
our student-teachers enrolled in a language teaching BA programme at a
public university, have problematized our roles as ELT teachers of young
learners of low socioeconomic status (SES). Taking this global scenario
and Oaxaca as our local reality and locus of enunciation, the purpose of this
paper is to resist this apparent ‘colonial’ state of ELT by discussing our
attempts to decolonize ELT methods through critical thematic units (CTUs)
co-developed and applied by Mexican student-teachers. For the last fifteen
years, through CTUs, our student-teachers have been teaching ‘English’ to
young children in public elementary schools and community libraries in
Oaxaca as part of the critical-ethnographic-action-research-project (CEAR)
(see López-Gopar 2016). We—co-author López-Gopar, who is a Oaxacan
local, and co-author Sughrua, who is originally from the United States but
has resided in Oaxaca for the last thirty years—work both as researchers
with a decolonial agenda and as teacher-developers in the BA language
programme at the state public university of Oaxaca. As part of these
academic duties, we supervise our student-teachers’ practica.
Following from our decolonial stance, we understand that epistemologies
(knowledge) and in consequence language teaching methods are provincial
(i.e. localized to specific communities), historically situated, and embodied
in children’s ontologies and material lives (Mignolo 2000; López-Gopar
2016). Contrary to making recommendations for universal or context-
free practices, our decolonial approach acknowledges the particularity of
every setting as well as the agendas, hopes, and dreams of all the actors
involved: teacher-educators, student-teachers, children, parents, and even
the neighbours and workers in the local school community. Because of
this inclusive perspective of ‘involved actors’, we perceive the student-
teachers, who, as described later in this article, undertake a type of informal
field research with their community in setting the goals and objectives of
their CTUs, as asserting not only their own voices but also those of the
wider community through their CTUs. This article thus articulates how
our student-teachers’ CTUs are different from what seem Eurocentric
‘methods’ in ELT. While ELT treats methods as narrowly ‘pedagogic’—e.g.
a ‘how to’ for grammar or vocabulary instruction—our CTUs are broader
and socially situated, bringing knowledge and epistemologies as tied to the

Page 2 of 11 Mario E. López-Gopar

 teaching strategies that our student-teachers use. These strategies involve
getting children to engage in language-learning activities that are relevant
to their communities. Our CTUs are contextually grounded, ‘formulated
and implemented by local players who are knowledgeable about, and
sensitive to, local conditions’ (Kumaravadivelu 2016: 81). Our student-
teachers, aged twenty-one to twenty-four, are all Oaxacan locals from a
low SES background. Most of them speak Spanish as their first language;
a few speak an Indigenous language as their first language. To exemplify
our decolonizing attempts, the present article walks the readers through

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the components and implementation of one CTU carried out by two
student-teachers working with elementary-school children, ranging from
nine to twelve years old, in a community library located in a low SES urban
neighbourhood in the capital city of Oaxaca, Mexico. All of these children
come from low SES families whose first language is Spanish. This CTU
focused on ‘eating habits in connection to health issues’. Before discussing
this unit, we first address the area of teaching English to children and
the role of thematic units, and we then discuss the decolonization of the
teaching of English through CTUs. This leads to a presentation of the
components of a CTU, with our ‘healthy eating habits’-related CTU as an
example. Finally, we offer conclusions.
Teaching English This article focuses on younger learners due to the increased presence
to children of English in public kindergarten and elementary schools worldwide
and the role of resulting from ‘the unprecedented scale of [educational] reform[s] in the
thematic units rush towards English … in the first two decades of the twenty-first century’
(Enever 2016: 354). That English language learning is now a permanent
fixture in many elementary and secondary-level curricula of both public and
private schools worldwide means that there is indeed a globalized value
placed on learning English as an additional language from a young age. We
do not see ourselves in a position to contest this. Rather, we acknowledge
that English courses are here to stay, and we view these courses as fertile
ground or a natural vehicle for a decolonizing pedagogy that could not only
enrich the teaching and learning of English but also aspire to social justice
and equity in the form of decolonization. This global phenomenon of
English courses has spurred research on ELT as pertaining to children. For
instance, in 2014, Copland and Garton edited a special issue of ELT Journal
on teaching English to young learners, featuring articles focused on Europe,
Greece, China, Hong Kong, and Mexico, and covering English teaching and
learning strategies such as online games, songs, and play (Copland and
Garton 2014). Also, many articles and books provide suggestions on how
to teach this language to children through children’s literature, music and
games, to mention a few (Cameron 2001).
Within this work in the field of teaching English to children, thematic units
are widely accepted and promoted. In particular, thematic units, as adopted
from general primary education and theoretically supported by whole
language approaches, are recommended in syllabus design (Bourke 2006;
Cameron 2001). Based on ‘the belief that children learn best by doing,
in the sense of exploring topics and engaging in meaningful tasks—in
a stress-free and supportive learning environment’ (Bourke 2006: 286),
thematic units view English as both a goal and ‘medium’ of instruction
to engage children in activities around topics of interest to them. ‘The

Decolonizing ELT Methods through Critical Thematic Units Page 3 of 11

 essential notion of theme-based teaching is that many activities are linked
together by their content; the theme or topic runs through everything that
happens in the classroom and acts as a connecting thread for pupils and
teacher’ (Cameron 2001: 180). It appears that while designing a thematic
unit, any ‘topic’ would do, as Cameron argues that ‘finding a theme or topic
is the easiest part!’ (Cameron 2001: 185, exclamation mark in original).
Bourke argues that, in thematic units, ‘the aim is … to use the topic as
a form of instructional scaffolding in order to let learners themselves
explore certain aspects of a particular topic and the language associated

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with it’ (Bourke 2006: 282). Moreover, and focusing on the learning goals
of English-only ideologies, Cameron cautions about the intrusion of the
children’s first language: ‘When activities become exciting and interesting,
children will want to talk about what’s happening and switch to [their]
first language. This is a serious potential drawback to the theme-based
teaching foreign language teaching’ (Cameron 2001: 195). Thematic
units include tasks as promoted by task-based teaching (Bourke 2006).
Thematic units are also closely connected to CLIL as they bring content and
language together. Although CLIL attempts to include the 4Cs (content,
communication, cognition, and culture) (Ellison, 2019), it does not
problematize the content included, nor consider the impact that a language
such as English may have on other minoritized languages and speakers.
The aforementioned research on strategies to teach English to children
as well as the literature including suggestions and discussions about
thematic-unit syllabus design, task-based learning, and CLIL have
not problematized the role of English in children’s lives. Much of the
emphasis has been placed on how to teach English to children, while
ignoring or giving secondary importance to why English is taught.
Nor has this research and literature problematized ‘what’ is taught to
children through English and the resulting impact on the identities of
both teachers and children, especially those from minoritized groups
in so-called developing countries such as Mexico. Children have also
been viewed in a generic way as if they were the same all over the
world. Furthermore, a monolingual and monoglossic approach has
dominated, as little is mentioned regarding teachers’ and students’
possible bilingual/multilingual or multiliteracies practices. Consequently,
in order to problematize ELT, we have adopted a decolonial approach in
our design and/or implementation of critical thematic units, as we now
discuss.
Decolonizing In our collaborative efforts between teacher-educators and student-teachers
teaching English within our colonial context of Oaxaca, we have attempted to decolonize
to children ELT; that is, to challenge the modernity/coloniality discourses around
through CTUs ELT by valuing children’s othered languages as well as their ways of
knowing and being. In accordance with Mignolo (2000) who argues that
decoloniality does not mean the end of coloniality, we as teacher-educators
and student-teachers have tried to resist and re-exist by repositioning
ourselves and our ways of being, thinking, and sensing as valid. We
strongly believe that we can ‘become producers, not just consumers, of
pedagogic knowledge and pedagogic materials’ (Kumaravadivelu 2016: 81).
Hence, the goal of our decolonial pedagogy, as carried out through CTUs,
is ‘to question, displace, and subvert … concepts and practices left by

Page 4 of 11 Mario E. López-Gopar

colonial inheritance with the purpose of intervening, constructing, creating,
and liberating by means of a decolonizing practice’ (Granados Beltrán
2016: 181).
As part of this practice, we have developed our own five principles that
guide our CTUs (López-Gopar 2016). First, our CTUs are historically
grounded. With our student-teachers, we analyse the history faced by
Oaxacan children in order to understand the origins of the prevalent
discourses of coloniality and their effects: such as viewing Indigenous

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ways of being (ontologies) and knowing (epistemologies) as inferior and
backward. Attempting to reverse these effects, we reposition ourselves
and our own Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies in the colonial
world by valuing each other. Second, as we design our CTUs, we are aware
that Oaxacan children’s language practices and their language ideologies
are rooted in coloniality. Hence, we question why English and Spanish,
colonial languages in Mexico, are considered superior vis-à-vis Indigenous
languages, and we try to reverse these language hierarchies. Third, and
based on our second principle, our CTUs do not regard children’s use
of their first language as a drawback. On the contrary, our CTUs have a
multilingual and multimodal approach and agenda, by carving out spaces
where English, Spanish, and Indigenous languages are all used and
appreciated. We also regard children’s semiotic resources (e.g. drawing
and acting) as legitimate texts and recognize that for Indigenous peoples,
language as a semiotic resource is deeply connected with the land and life.
Fourth, our CTUs are driven by children’s material lives and sociocultural
contexts. As such, the CTUs are, like language, material and embodied.
Throughout the implementation of our units, we tap into the children’s
previous knowledge to connect the topic(s) to their daily lives and complex
realities. For instance, if our CTUs include a topic about families, our
student-teachers include vocabulary that goes beyond the nuclear family,
acknowledging one-parent households and adding extended family
members and even pets if they are important to children. Fifth, our CTUs
are about creating authors of identity texts that could be written, spoken,
signed, visual, musical, dramatic, or combinations thereof in multimodal
and multilingual form. Identity texts ‘represent expressions of identity,
projection of identity into new social spheres, and re-creation of identity as a
result of feedback from and dialogue with multiple audiences’ (Cummins
et al. 2015: 578, italics in original). Through identity texts, we profit from
children’s creativity while resisting discourses of ‘othering’ present in
the ELT materials and textbooks created elsewhere. Based on these five
principles, our CTUs’ underlying goal is for all of us (teacher-educators,
student-teachers, and children) to challenge the coloniality present in
(English) language learning by feeling proud of our cultures, ways of
knowing, ways of being, and rich multilingual and multimodal practices.
Endowed with such social significance (so to speak), our decolonial stance
underlying the CTUs in the ELT class, as mentioned previously, also acts
on behalf of members of the community at large, especially those with
whom the children in the class maintain and will maintain relations in their
current and future lives, such as family members and neighbours. In the
next section, we describe the components of our CTUs, while showcasing
an exemplary unit.

Decolonizing ELT Methods through Critical Thematic Units Page 5 of 11

CTUs In our CTUs, we first question ‘why’ English should be taught to children
and then analyse ‘what’ social purposes could be targeted through this
language. ‘How’ we should teach this language is motivated by the ‘why’
and the ‘what’. Hence, the main goals of our CTUs are not linguistic per
se, but have a social justice and decolonizing agenda. Our CTUs have six
main stages:
1 Selecting the topic
2 Establishing goals/messages

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3 Authoring identity texts
4 Setting linguistic and language-skill objectives
5 Choosing teaching strategies and making connections to other subjects
6 Assessing critically
In the next subsections, we succinctly describe the six stages while
illustrating them with a CTU on eating habits in connection with
health issues.
Selecting the topic Choosing the topic of our CTUs is based on a critical ethnographic
analysis of the community done by our student-teachers. They identify
social problems pointed out by community members including
children (e.g. water shortage, environmental problems, child obesity,
eating habits, health concerns, gender issues, and social and linguistic
discrimination). For the critical component in our thematic units, we
and the student-teachers select one of the social issues identified by
the community members, contemplate ‘who’ within the community is
at the receiving end of this social issue, consider the discriminatory/
colonial practices confronted by these people within this situation,
and reflect on how our language praxis can do something about it.
We strongly believe that all ELT teachers, including student-teachers,
can identify social issues present in the community, especially if they
are part of the community and/or engage in dialogue with children
and their families. By basing the topics of the CTUs on social matters
voiced by members of the community, the student-teachers speak on
behalf of the community by way of the CTUs.
In the case of our representative CTU, the student-teachers selected
the topic ‘eating habits in connection to health issues’. Many parents
pointed out to the student-teachers that children prefer new ‘types’ of
food over more traditional meals. Our student-teachers also selected
this topic based on national trends: the presence of transnational food
companies in Mexico and the high consumption of soda drinks, highly
processed meals, and fast food. In fact, Mexico is the number one
consumer of soda drinks, such as Coca Cola, in the world, and Mexico
is also the country with the highest level of child obesity according to
the Pan-American Health Organization (Delgado 2019). Our student-
teachers believed that they could address this national and local issue,
which is connected with global trends and relations (e.g. soda and fast-
food companies), by highlighting the benefits of a traditional food diet,
such as corn and beans, in their (multi)language classes. Our premise
is that English, children’s L1, and other minoritized languages can be
used together in order to discuss critical issues in children’s lives.

Page 6 of 11 Mario E. López-Gopar

Establishing In our CTUs, the goals represent the ‘messages’ we want to construct
goals/messages and convey with the children. These goals/messages go beyond linguistic,
functional, and/or communicative goals and focus on the material lives
of the children. Thus, when someone asks our student-teachers, ‘what are
you teaching now?’ or ‘what is the topic of your lessons?’, their answers
are not ‘I am teaching the “verb to be”,’ ‘I am teaching colours’, or ‘I am
teaching how to order a hamburger’. Instead, their answers are: ‘I am
teaching children how to take care of our environment’; ‘I am discussing
food choices with children’; ‘I am celebrating with children that we speak

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many languages in Oaxaca’; ‘I am working with children so that they
can understand and convince others that that all jobs and occupations
are relevant and important’; or ‘I am teaching colours because I want
children to notice that a healthy local diet is colourful’. All these socially
oriented answers emerge from class activities conducted through (English)
language(s) as part of CTUs. Most importantly, all of these answers are
about valuing each other, believing that we can do something about our
immediate contexts, and working intersubjectively as we (re)position
ourselves in the colonial world.
In the case of our CTU on healthy eating habits, the student-teachers’
goals/messages were the following:
• We have to take care of our body by eating local and healthy food.
• Eating healthy food helps me to grow strong.
• Doing exercise is good for my body and health.
• We can learn about nutrition and health in any language as all languages
are important.
In order to accomplish these goals/messages, student-teachers plan out
different identity texts that children can author throughout the unit, as we
discuss next.
Authoring In our CTUs, identity texts are co-created by children and student-teachers.
identity texts These texts not only display what children have learned about a critical
issue but also demonstrate the children’s multimodal intelligence and
creativity (Cummins et al. 2015). Adopting a heteroglossic and multimodal
view of language, the multilingual identity text serves as a pedagogic
and assessment space where language is both learned and used in order
to negotiate affirming identities for both teachers and children and to
transform their realities. We also consider all the materials that student-
teachers co-design and co-create with children as identity texts. In other
words, a multilingual video prepared by the children around the topic, a big
book prepared by the whole class, and a flashcard that the children create
to learn new vocabulary are all considered identity texts in so far as being
original creations of the students. The creation of materials with children
is a way to compensate for the ‘lack’ of materials in multiple languages,
to resist the ELT industry that financially benefits by selling ‘cutting-edge’
materials to speakers of other languages, and to prove that student-
teachers and children can be authors in the classroom.
For this particular CTU, the identity text that the student-teachers
co-created with the children was a daily timeline to record the healthy
habits that the children already engage in and the new ones they have

Decolonizing ELT Methods through Critical Thematic Units Page 7 of 11

 learned from one another or their student-teachers. This timeline included
drawings done by the children with accompanying sentences in Spanish,
English, and Ayuk, an Indigenous language from Oaxaca, also known as
Mixe. With the assistance of the student-teachers, the children also created
a poster featuring drawings of healthy food typically eaten by people from
Oaxaca. Later, using this poster and mixing different combinations of the
above three languages, the children gave individual oral presentations
about their family’s healthy eating habits: e.g. ‘In my house, we eat tamales
with chicken.’ In addition, throughout this CTU, the children became

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authors of multilingual flashcards, board games, and other materials.
Setting linguistic Based on the topic and the identity texts planned for their CTUs, the
and language-skill student-teachers define their linguistic goals, grammatical and lexical,
objectives along with the language skills they decide to focus on (speaking,
listening, reading, and writing). In CTUs, vocabulary and grammatical
structures in multiple languages work towards meeting the particular
social goals, while creating the children’s metalinguistic awareness. The
vocabulary comes from the children’s lives and the community. This
leads to the ‘English’ class being ‘invaded’ by new words related to local
foods, fruits, occupations, and so forth, and these words are kept in
the original language such as Ayuk (e.g. ‘tsa’am = banana; xëjk = beans;
koon = tomato’). Grammatical structures are presented as language
patterns. Using these patterns, children are encouraged to activate their
full linguistic repertoire and transgress monoglossic views of language: e.g.
‘We eat mole with chicken and tortillas to grow strong’ (English and Spanish
together); ‘N’jëkxëtsy zanahorias para ver mejor’ [‘I like to eat carrots to see
better]’ (Ajuk and Spanish together). Our CTUs have a flexible language
policy which allows children to fully participate in the classes from day one,
rather than postponing their participation until they would have a control
over the particular linguistic aspects.
Depending on the identity texts planned, in CTUs the student-teachers
focus on some or all the linguistic skills at different levels of (social)
engagement. Language skills are viewed as a way to listen and learn from
each other, to read each other’s identity texts, to speak about one’s realities
and lifestyles, and to write, or author, identity texts and a place in the world.
In the ‘healthy eating habits’ CTU, it was through listening to and reading
each other’s identity texts that the children learned about the healthy
diets of each other’s family; by writing multimodally, the children wrote
short sentences on their posters in order to describe their daily eating
timeline; and in terms of speaking, the children learned and practised oral
presentation skills in order to share their posters and daily timelines. In
sum, from a linguistic perspective, the children acquired key beginner-level
vocabulary in English and put that vocabulary into practice through the
four skills of reading, listening, writing, and speaking; and from a thematic
or topic perspective, the children manifested an awareness of the value
Choosing of healthy eating. On the part of the student-teachers, multiple teaching
teaching strategies came into play.
strategies
In CTUs, student-teachers use and adapt different teaching strategies (e.g.
and making
board games, songs, stories, and puppets) so as to address real social
connections to
issues as covered in the CTUs, while also connecting those issues to other
other subjects

Page 8 of 11 Mario E. López-Gopar

 school subjects (e.g. science, maths, geography, and social studies). In
this way, the children’s knowledge in these subjects is tapped and further
developed as they engage in the topic. In the CTU on health issues, the
student-teachers used songs, games, flash cards, and different group
dynamics to maintain the children’s engagement while addressing the
importance of taking care of themselves, their bodies, and their eating
habits. The student-teachers also brought into the classroom other
academic subjects. For instance, through geography, the student-teachers
prompted the children to identify the different fruits particular to specific

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Oaxacan regions or communities. Addressing science, the student-teachers
and children also discussed how local fruits, smaller in size and not as
perfectly shaped as imported fruits, are pesticide-free and hence safer and
more nutritious than their imported counterparts. Working on geography
and science within this CTU led to a social-science-related discussion about
how local farmers, who come to the city markets to sell their produce,
need to be appreciated as important people in the children’s lives. Utilizing
maths, the student-teachers had the children compare the prices of
imported fruits and processed foods with those of locally produced fruits
and local meals. In this manner, using different strategies and connecting
the topic to other school subjects helps accomplish the goals/messages
of the CTU, as confirmed by the student-teachers’ assessment on a daily
basis.
Assessing In our CTUs, formative and summative assessment is done through the
critically ongoing creation and sharing of the identity texts. The goals/messages
are constantly revisited for evidence of the children’s awareness about the
importance of eating traditional foods and local produce and exercising
to be healthy, in the case of the CTU presented in this article. In terms of
linguistic and language-skill goals, the student-teachers prepare different
activities and strategies to assess the goals in a natural way. For instance,
the class plays bingo both to have fun and also to identify the lexical
items that the children have mastered. While children are working on
their identity texts and creating materials for the class, student teachers
pay close attention to the children’s development of linguistic goals and
the different language skills targeted in their CTU. These assessment
practices in CTUs are neither ‘neutral’ nor ‘objective’; they are constructed
by student-teachers to transgress dominant assumptions about rigour
and objectivity in assessment and to challenge the colonial legacy of using
assessment as tools of oppression (Schissel 2019).
As part of our decolonial approach, in CTUs we constantly assess how
our view of language teaching and learning and our teaching praxis
reposition ourselves, and the children especially, as intelligent and creative
individuals who can author their place in the world. The following are some
of questions student-teachers have in mind as they plan and carry out
their CTUs:
• Are we promoting multiple languages? How?
• Are we introducing vocabulary and grammatical structures relevant to
the students’ lives? How?
• Are we using relevant and appropriate materials? How?
• Are we co-creating materials with the children? How?

Decolonizing ELT Methods through Critical Thematic Units Page 9 of 11

 • Are we making grandparents, parents, and children feel good about what
they know? How?
• Are we presenting ‘other’ perspectives? How?
With these questions in mind, we remember that decoloniality is an
ongoing process that requires constant problematization of who we are
and what we know (Canagarajah 2022).
Conclusions CTUs represent our way to decolonize ELT and to challenge discourses
that position certain languages, peoples, and ways of being and knowing

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over others. In CTUs, English language learning is not the main goal, but
the conduit to address significant local/global social issues. These local
issues, which are impacted by global connections through transnational
companies and international relations, can and should be addressed
with children, especially if these issues negatively impact the children’s
lives, as is the case with the issue of health in Mexico. For instance,
in the previously mentioned CTU, the children learned and discussed
the vocabulary related not only to healthy food items such as fruit and
vegetables but also to negative consequences of unhealthy eating habits
such as anorexia and diabetes. While it seems difficult and perhaps
impossible to assert that all social problems are a direct consequence of
coloniality, we feel that most of the significant issues of personal concern
to the community, such as poor health, indeed have vestiges or traces
of coloniality, such as the transnational soda companies aggressively
advertising their products to low-SES communities in Oaxaca. Hence,
in this article, we have argued that choosing topics relevant to children’s
lives is better than filling our language classes with ‘neutral’ content. This
requires taking a stance on social issues, which does not mean imposing
our views as to how things should be, but rather engaging responsibly and
critically with social problems and the legacies left behind by colonialism.
In the CTU showcased in this article, student-teachers negotiated affirming
identities for themselves as agents who can act on social issues and
challenge practices that may affect children’s physical and mental well-
being. They also renegotiated children’s identities as authors of identity
texts and as individuals in charge of their present and future lives. In one
CTU, for instance, a pair of students drew what they termed a ‘timeline’
consisting of four sequential drawings based on brushing one’s teeth after
eating. These students, presenting their drawings to the class, introduced
themselves (in Spanish) as innovative promoters of healthy eating habits
who are knowledgeable about not only food but also dental hygiene.
Such CTUs are not at odds with young-learner-based ELT methods and
strategies. Rather, CTUs take the best in them in order to make a difference
in children’s material lives.
Final version received January 2023

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Refrescos en el Mundo.’ Gaceta UNAM, Accessed 15 The authors
July 2022, https://www.gaceta.unam.mx/mexico-primer- Mario López-Gopar (PhD, OISE/University of Toronto)
consumidor/#:~:text=De%20acuerdo%20con%20 is professor at Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez
datos,segundo%20lugar%20con%20118%20litros). de Oaxaca, Mexico. Mario’s main research interest is

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Email: [email protected]
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in English Teaching: Can the Subaltern Act?’ TESOL William M. Sughrua (PhD, Canterbury Christ Church
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Applied Linguistics Possible?’ Annual Review of Applied Paradigms (Peter Lang, 2016).
Linguistics 40: 128–33.

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