Critical pedagogy in l2 learning and teaching suresh canagarajah

Critical Pedagogy in L2 Learning
and Teaching
Suresh Canagarajah
Baruch College, City University of New York
ahfameri@gmail.com
By: Amirhamid Forough Ameri
March 2016
1

Outline
 Introduction
 Areas of research interest
 Critical academic literacy
 Learning processes, strategies, and styles
 Target language?
 Issues of contestation
 Critical research methods and reporting
2

Key Terms
Critical
Pedagogy
(CP)
3

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.
4

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.
5

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.
6

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 interest
Critical 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).
12

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.
13

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.
14

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.
16

 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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 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. 18

 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.
19

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.
20

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.
21

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.
22

 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.
23

 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.
24

 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.
25

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.
26

 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.
27

 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 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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Critical pedagogy in l2 learning and teaching suresh canagarajah

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