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Has English been increasingly tested as an international language? Evidence from 1956–2016 / I-Chung Ke
// Language, Culture and Curriculum Volume 32, No 2/2019 2019p.191-206 A previous study (Ke, I. 2012. From EFL to English as an international and scientific language: analysing Taiwan’s high-school English textbooks in the period 1952–2009. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 25(2), 173–187) on the trend of English textbooks in Taiwanese high schools showed that the proportion of the lessons embedded in Anglo-American cultures decreases in the 1990s along with the globalisation trend while the proportions of local and intercultural lessons increase after the 2000s. The general trend corresponds to the changing role of English becoming an international language. To further confirm the trend, the current study examines whether the cultural trend observed in high school English textbooks can also be found in the college entrance exams in Taiwan. The total number of exams examined is 85, dating from 1956 to 2016. The results show that the cultural contexts did shift in the similar vein as found in the textbook study. The proportions of Anglo-American cultures gradually decreased from the 1990s while those of international cultures appeared more often after the 2000s. Questions based on the local culture started to appear from the late 1980s, but the percentages fluctuate and decrease recently. The overall findings suggest that English has been gradually tested as an international language, but not as a local language in the local college entrance exam.
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Language matters : developing educators’ expertise for English learners in linguistically diverse communities / Amy J. Heineke,...
// Language, Culture and Curriculum Volume 32, No 1/2019 2019p. 63-77 The population of English learners (ELs) continues to grow in schools across the United States and around the world. In this article, we share one urban university’s collaborative approach to building educational capacity for cultural and linguistic diversity through professional development efforts that brought together stakeholders from classrooms, schools, communities, and districts. This grant-funded project aimed to build educator expertise to effectively support and positively influence students’ language development and disciplinary learning. Grounded in sociocultural theory, we used an apprenticeship framework of teacher development, strategically planning and implementing collaborative capacity building efforts to foster learning across individual, interpersonal, and institutional planes. In this paper, we share the results of professional development efforts across three years of this project, drawing from observation, interview, and focus group data. Findings indicate that classroom-, school-, and district-level educators developed knowledge of discipline-specific language development, pedagogical skills for effective EL teaching and learning, and leadership abilities to positively shape institutional responses to their culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. Implications focus on fostering teacher professionalism through bottom-up development of EL-specific expertise and expanded opportunities for leadership.
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The construction of the tourist gaze in English textbooks in South Korea : exploring the tensions between internationalisation and nationalisation / Kimberly Vinall, Jaran Shin
// Language, Culture and Curriculum Volume 32, No 2/2019 2019p.173-190 This study investigates how larger ideological tensions related to internationalisation and nationalisation are manifested in local education systems, especially in English textbooks. We begin this exploration with a review of the School Curriculum of the Republic of Korea. Using three textbooks as cases; we examine how they reflect and manage the tensions presented in the Curriculum. We argue that these tensions are managed through the construction of a tourist gaze, which is both directed inwards, in the construction of Koreanness, and outwards, in the construction of a global citizen. Through the medium of English, learners are both tourists, viewing their own culture from the perspective of the ‘other,’ while they are being prepared to be ‘tour guides,’ learning how to explain this perspective to the ‘other’ in the other's language, English. When focused outwards, the tourist gaze constructs representations of foreign cultures because it is through learning English that Korean learners become global citizens and are able to connect to ‘others,’ to make friends, and to travel the world. We conclude with considerations of ways to go beyond the tourist gaze, as teachers and learners use the tensions in more constructive ways – namely, to develop critical cultural competence.
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