Reconstructing Kulturelingual

I know it's been a while. I have been working on a new concept for Kulturelingual...So, expect an upadated and improved blog/site really soon!

What is an English Teacher?

What is an English teacher? Students and English teachers themselves often portray an English teacher as
• a person who teaches a language
• a person who teaches grammar, linguistics, pronunciation
• a person who administers tests

What is language learning? Students and English teachers often see language learning as:
• communication
• cultural exchange and understanding
• tool in the job market

What is the goal of teaching English? Students and English teachers often see the goal language learning as:
• helping students to get a job
• enhancing opportunities for students to travel abroad
• helping students to have higher salaries
• creating more teachers to teach children and teenagers in the school system

Is that really why you teach English? Do you wake up every morning and get ready to teach solely because you want your students to speak well? Is that your only hope for those students going out into the world: help them land a good job? A good salary? Is that all there is to teaching English?

Maybe you will say you want your students to be successful. What is “successful” to you? Is “successful” working hours on no end at a sports book? Is “successful” working in a private institution and earning over a million colones a month? Is “successful” overworking yourself at a public school with no materials and no interest from students, parents or administrator? Is “successful” going around the world and meeting people from all cultures? Is “successful” passing the Internet TOEFL with a 120? Is “successful” pronouncing English vowels and consonants correctly? Is “successful” writing a five paragraph essay with no grammar mistakes and outstanding organization? Is “successful” getting a scholarship to do a PhD abroad? Is that the end goal of your teaching? If so, you might want to double check your definition of “successful” and ask yourself, what are you accomplishing by doing that? Your students will join the work force and do what? What good does it do to the world that you teach your students to speak English with the rhythm and intonation proper of an American speaker?

Do you realize that all you are doing is training workers for the masses? The market needs English speakers, so society must produce English speakers. From that perspective, there is no much difference between you or I, English teachers, and a breeder.

However, we can refuse to be only that. English teaching and learning CAN be much more. An English teacher can be

• a change agent
• a role model
• an awakener

Speaking English can be the road to reach higher ideals. Especially in a world that faces chaos and tragedy so often, speaking English is a tool not an end. Speaking English can represent the power to communicate a message of peace and justice. Speaking English can be the power to teach children to grow up as kind, responsible, aware human beings. Speaking English can provide the opportunity to make the world a better place. Even more so in the XXI century, English learning and teaching should be

• interdisciplinary
• action oriented
• critical

The world is not longer a world of specialists. English teachers should not only be proficient at speaking English. They should be proficient in history, sociology, and science –among others- and in their relationships with language learning. Important knowledge comes from interdisciplinarity. Those English teaching programs that isolate themselves as only English will fail to provide students with the skills they require in a fast-paced and always-available-information era.

Learning English should prompt social action. Students demonstrate better learning and more attachment to those aspects that prove to be close to their hearts. Communicating their journeys and feelings in a social justice project -through English- can accomplish more English learning and discovery of English than a boring lecture or a grammar class. The students will look for the way to say something they want to say, something they have experienced, not to do something imposed by the English teacher… something that lacks meaning and passion and projection in their lives. Social justice encourages research and leadership. The program of many English majors includes NGOs as a source of employment. Who would an NGO hire: a student with field experience and human tough or a student who spent all his time in the classroom and whose assignments were mainly linguistic and not humanistic? Do English teachers in Costa Rica even know what and NGO is?

Learning English should be critical. English teaching should prompt reflection not memorization or repetition. English teachers should focus on how to teach English to prompt reflection about the world around us and what it means to be in it. English writing and speaking should focus on communicating a message that is important to students, not in imposing assignments. “Easy” tasks such as reading the newspaper in English and sending emails in English, watching movies about social issues, checking out youtube videos about global warming, reading articles about their topics of interest and reflecting about them, that is critical thinking.

Many of you might be saying to yourselves: I do that all the time. Do you, really? Do you focus on the message, or on the way to say it? Do you focus on what to do about those issues, or mainly on understanding the vocabulary used in them? If you stop at understanding and talking but do nothing about the topics you study in class, you do not teach critically… you just teach.

You may be wondering: so, why bothering? All that work, all those dreams of a happy world… who cares? Well, if you are as selfish and self-centered not to care and still think teaching vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, reading, writing, speaking and listening is all there is to English teaching… if you are so ignorant and absurdly unaware of the world you live in that you think encouraging interdisciplinarity, social action and critical thinking should be delegated to the people in other fields… if you are so arrogant and full of yourself to admit that the definition of English teaching needs to change, then you might want to know:

What do students develop from an English class that embraces thought, collaboration and action? Why should I go through all this hassle? Well, through social action students develop:

• Writing skills
• Speaking skills
• Reading skills
• Listening skills
• Research skills (interviews, field work)
• Translation skills
• Information Technology skills
• Social skills (leadership, solidarity, collaborative work)

Many countries in the world, and scholars in the field of English teaching, linguistics, applied linguistics and the like have been wise enough to recognize that the world does not only need “English teachers,” the world needs “leaders.” It is your choice if you want to awake English students or to hinder them. In the end, ignoring the fact that English teaching as you know it should change will not prevent passionate and committed English teachers from providing English learners with a holistic, humanistic, critical education. There is much more than content to teaching English, how you approach that content will make all the difference.

Looking at the World from Another Point of View

We usually look at the world like this:

Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.




But have you ever thought others might look at it like this:

Flourish.org

No wonder there are so many problems in the world. We all insist our way is the right way when in fact many of our ways are just arbitrary traditions. These shows us that, indeed, "it is all in the eyes of the beholder". If you are curious and want to know more about "upside-down" maps (upside-down for whom anyway?), check the Upsidedown Map Page. I highly recommend it!

The Joy of Online Learning

Joy. That is probably the word that best describes the feeling I get when I realize that no matter where in the world I am, technology can bring most things I would want to my feet. When I write "I," I mean the student, not the teacher. Actually, for the longest time I used the internet as a source to get ideas and materials for my lessons. Even though I still do, I have now been seduced by the appeal of online learning. Many of you might think online learning is nothing new; however, there are many parts in the world where it is -Costa Rica being one of them. Still, even more surprising than that is the fact that miles away, with just a computer and an internet connection, I can continue my professional development for free.

In fact, the TESOL's Village Online workshops preceeding the annual conference at the beginning of the year were the perfect opportunity for me to become an official online learner. I "attended" two workshops, one about Non Native English Speaking Teachers (Non- NESTs) and another about Conflict Resolution for English Language Learners, without having to move from my chair at my computer desk in Costa Rica. The participants and the instructors were all from different countries, and although it was challenging to meet sometimes - I must confess I probably missed all the live sessions because I could never get the time right- the amount of knowledge and experiences that they had to share was sometimes overwhelming, but mostly challenging.

The challenge was also to master the art of reading the threads and understanding who had said what when. To be honest, it took me a couple of weeks to get familiar with the tools and the "logistics" of it all, but after a while I really felt like I belonged in such an eclectic virtual classroom. Downloading readings, uploading assignments, and reviewing and making comments became part of my daily schedule. I had tamed technology for the sake of learning.

So, as I write this, I think to myself: Yes! No matter where I go or what I do, I can now be a student forever. So, that is my joy... to be eternally learning, and etternally discovering the world.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Eats, Shoots & Leaves was one of my unexpected Christmas presents last year. As it goes, the most unexpected things are always the most enjoyable. A non-stickler, I am definitely quilty of probably killing punctuation in unimagined ways. Punctuation rules always seemed to long and too mechanic for me. However, being that I am now teaching a composition course to students in the English teaching major, I had to do something about my lack of attention to detail when it comes to punctuation rules.

This book, definitely changed my idea that punctuation was boring and mechanic -something that for a long time had prevented me to really pay attention to punctuation. Instead, I was moslty delighted by the sarcasm with which Truss narrates and describes the history and use of punctuation symbols. A really funny way to learn punctuation rules, indeed, I thought my students would love reading Truss as well. They did. Perhaps because the rules are accompanied by humor and real-life examples of the sometimes cruel, sometimes silly, but always ambiguos destiny of un-punctuated or wrongly-punctuated ideas.

Reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves is definitely a joy that does not even compare to the overwhelming task that many professores have assigned to their students: memorize punctuation rules, like you memorize multiplication tables. I, for one, know that memorizing for the sake of memorizing does not work pretty well with people who find it hard to pay attention to certain details. However, the context that Truss provides in this book, makes it hard for me to forget the uses of the comma or the origin of the semicolon. So, my previous "lack of attention" was pretty much a lack of interest and a lack of motivation to learn something that up to now had seemed decontextualized and meaningless.

The same happens to many of our students. So, why not, having the students read Truss and reflect on the ideas presented in the book, rather than having them memorize and do thousands of repetitive exercises? There is even an educational companion to the book online at http://us.penguingroup.com/static/pdf/teachersguides/eatsshootsleaves.pdf. This guide summarizes the punctuation rules and aspects highlighted in each chapter and provides useful tips and exercises for the students. There is also a website, Save the Comma, by Penguin Group that has a "Test Your Comma IQ" game based on Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

As usual, Truss has arised a fair amount of criticism mainly based on the fact that her book too has several punctuation mistakes. An article in the New Yorker, Bad Comma by Louis Menand, certainly makes it a point to highlight the various comma and parenthesis mistakes in Truss' book. Still, for those of us who still do not aim at editorial perfection of our work -not that such a thing would be undesirable- Truss is a great start. So, if you would like to know more go ahead and check these websites out:

http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a1424.asp

http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Eats,%20Shoots%20and%20Leaves.htm

They both have excerpts from the book. Buen provecho!