Where does this leave us in language education? My earlier assertion of links between the wider social context and educational practice should lead us to ask whether the forces of McDonaldisation are at all evident in our work today, and to look hard at some of the recent developments in language teaching. In fact, we probably don’t have to look very far to identify some initial tendencies. The first of these is, I believe, the emergence of what we can call “McCoursebook”. McCoursebook contains ‘units’ of classroom work, increasingly standard length ‘bite-sized’ nuggets of two or four pages, each containing routinised interactions that have the potential to produce exactly the same classroom outcomes wherever they are used in the world, with whatever students. McCoursebook is, of its nature, a global text, but it is not this fact that is its essential characteristic. Rather it is the way in which explicit scripts are provided to teachers and students with the aim of producing standardised outcomes– rather than unique classroom events. The devices for doing this are now commonplace: closed ‘ask and answer’ routines, the gap-fill exercise with its easily countable right/wrong solutions, questions the answers to which are all supplied in accompanying texts, and invitations for personal contributions by students which are reduced to the status of a ‘warm-up’ before the ‘real’ learning of the scripted interactions is to be done. For teachers, too, McCoursebook gives explicit indications of what precisely they are to do in the classroom and even say. These characteristics of coursebooks are now so common that we hardly give them a second thought – in fact, it seems that that is what a course book is – and we assume and hope that it is for the teacher and students to adapt, amend, omit as they see fit. But, in many schools and school systems around the world this is precisely not what is expected to happen – the directions of the coursebook are a means by which predictability, accountability and control are maintained by the hierarchy above the classroom teacher. It is also a means by which inexperienced and often untrained teachers can be employed – cheaply.
Just as the McDonald’s hamburger may be low in nutritional content, so too is McCoursebook. McCoursebook contains eclectic, random topics which jump hither and thither, strung together by a focus on form. Texts about testing an atomic bomb lead on to exercises in which students complete sentences such as “They were making butter when….” “She was playing her flute when….” – atomic bombs, butter and flute-playing all united in the exemplification of a grammatical form. Central to McCoursebook is the separation between learning content and carrier content. Learning content is strictly identified as the forms and uses of English. Carrier content is the language which is used to present the language, and which it is not intended will be retained by the student. The result is that McCoursebook contains bland, trivial content and often, in secondary school aged materials, an emphasis on the pop and consumer industries.
It is tempting to believe that behind McCoursebook is a conspiracy of materials writers. Alas, this is not the case. McCoursebook is the way it is because it increasingly meets the expectations of teachers and students, who are now used to fragmented and routinised products in other areas of their lives. McCoursebook is clear evidence that forces of social change are now entering the classroom and structuring educational practice.
And while McCoursebook is selling well and structuring our expectations of what should happen in classrooms, similar moves are evident in teacher education. With the need for greater quality control – whatever that may be – in an expanding market for language instruction, the teacher certification business has expanded accordingly. Most recently, we have seen how it is now rapidly moving towards global standardised conceptions of what a ‘good teacher’ is, a conception that is largely rooted in a Britain-centred view of ELT and a British inspired ‘weak’ variant of Communicative Language Teaching. The ‘model lesson’, now generally structured around the ‘PPP’ (presentation-practice-production) framework is expected of trainees, a script to be unfolded regardless of context, to be acted out with adults and children alike, rendering schools detached from any wider educational goals in the pursuit of an efficient, predictable means towards language proficiency. And again, it is not the global nature of this teacher certification that is of concern. It is rather the standardisation of routines and interactions that it proposes – that may effectively stand between the students and the teacher recognising each other as individuals.
Where does this leave us in language education? My earlier assertion of links between the wider social context and educational practice should lead us to ask whether the forces of McDonaldisation are at all evident in our work today, and to look hard at some of the recent developments in language teaching. In fact, we probably don’t have to look very far to identify some initial tendencies. The first of these is, I believe, the emergence of what we can call “McCoursebook”. McCoursebook contains ‘units’ of classroom work, increasingly standard length ‘bite-sized’ nuggets of two or four pages, each containing routinised interactions that have the potential to produce exactly the same classroom outcomes wherever they are used in the world, with whatever students. McCoursebook is, of its nature, a global text, but it is not this fact that is its essential characteristic. Rather it is the way in which explicit scripts are provided to teachers and students with the aim of producing standardised outcomes– rather than unique classroom events. The devices for doing this are now commonplace: closed ‘ask and answer’ routines, the gap-fill exercise with its easily countable right/wrong solutions, questions the answers to which are all supplied in accompanying texts, and invitations for personal contributions by students which are reduced to the status of a ‘warm-up’ before the ‘real’ learning of the scripted interactions is to be done. For teachers, too, McCoursebook gives explicit indications of what precisely they are to do in the classroom and even say. These characteristics of coursebooks are now so common that we hardly give them a second thought – in fact, it seems that that is what a course book is – and we assume and hope that it is for the teacher and students to adapt, amend, omit as they see fit. But, in many schools and school systems around the world this is precisely not what is expected to happen – the directions of the coursebook are a means by which predictability, accountability and control are maintained by the hierarchy above the classroom teacher. It is also a means by which inexperienced and often untrained teachers can be employed – cheaply.
Just as the McDonald’s hamburger may be low in nutritional content, so too is McCoursebook. McCoursebook contains eclectic, random topics which jump hither and thither, strung together by a focus on form. Texts about testing an atomic bomb lead on to exercises in which students complete sentences such as “They were making butter when….” “She was playing her flute when….” – atomic bombs, butter and flute-playing all united in the exemplification of a grammatical form. Central to McCoursebook is the separation between learning content and carrier content. Learning content is strictly identified as the forms and uses of English. Carrier content is the language which is used to present the language, and which it is not intended will be retained by the student. The result is that McCoursebook contains bland, trivial content and often, in secondary school aged materials, an emphasis on the pop and consumer industries.
It is tempting to believe that behind McCoursebook is a conspiracy of materials writers. Alas, this is not the case. McCoursebook is the way it is because it increasingly meets the expectations of teachers and students, who are now used to fragmented and routinised products in other areas of their lives. McCoursebook is clear evidence that forces of social change are now entering the classroom and structuring educational practice.
And while McCoursebook is selling well and structuring our expectations of what should happen in classrooms, similar moves are evident in teacher education. With the need for greater quality control – whatever that may be – in an expanding market for language instruction, the teacher certification business has expanded accordingly. Most recently, we have seen how it is now rapidly moving towards global standardised conceptions of what a ‘good teacher’ is, a conception that is largely rooted in a Britain-centred view of ELT and a British inspired ‘weak’ variant of Communicative Language Teaching. The ‘model lesson’, now generally structured around the ‘PPP’ (presentation-practice-production) framework is expected of trainees, a script to be unfolded regardless of context, to be acted out with adults and children alike, rendering schools detached from any wider educational goals in the pursuit of an efficient, predictable means towards language proficiency. And again, it is not the global nature of this teacher certification that is of concern. It is rather the standardisation of routines and interactions that it proposes – that may effectively stand between the students and the teacher recognising each other as individuals.
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..