Global TESOL for the 21st Century. Heath Rose

built on evidence from corpus linguistic methods. This research can help to inform the TESOL profession of the diverse ways in which language is used in a variety of global settings.

      If resources permit, some educational institutions are able to conduct their own needs analysis by tracking their students after they graduation from a course. Needs analysis can aim to gather information on how well the course provided them with the necessities (knowledge and skills) required to successfully use the language. Needs analysis should also seek to understand where linguistic knowledge is lacking, as this can then be fed back into the curriculum via modifications to address these lacks. Further to this, Nation and Macalister (2010) state that good needs analysis should not only include necessities and lacks, but also consider learners’ wants. This is because not all language learning is instrumentally driven, and students may want to develop linguistic knowledge and skills in areas that might not be immediately applicable. For example, in an English exam preparation course, the learning of low-frequency vocabulary might be a necessity, knowledge of reading comprehension strategies might be a lack for many students, and student might want to engage in regular group work – and all of this informs the needs of the course.

      When students are in a course which has situational or specific needs, such as an EAP course to prepare them for university postgraduate study or an ESP course to prepare nurses to use English in professional contexts, needs analysis is often easier to conduct, as it is targeted to these specific domains.

      Teaching approaches

      A further key concept for this chapter is realisation of the fact that throughout history, approaches and ideologies underpinning language teaching have always changed according to the sociolinguistic needs of learners (see Figure 2.2). As Rose (2018) observes, ‘Since the early years of mass language education, approaches have adapted according to the needs of the learner’ (2018: 6). Taking Europe as an example, Grammar Translation prevailed in the school system well into the 1900s, where language acquisition was seen as part of students’ academic development, and any communicative purpose would mostly be in the form of reading literature and writing papers or letters. As European mobility increased in the 1900s, some learners who needed language for use in politics, commerce, or travel turned to language schools that offered a more Direct Method such as the Berlitz Method, where language was learned via intense spoken communication with orally fluent (often native) speaking teachers. Then, wartime needs in Europe saw the rise in use of the Audiolingual Method by US military stationed in Europe, which aimed to teach phrases for communication to large groups of learners, so they could linguistically operate during their deployment. After the war, such methods were developed into teachable classroom methods such as structural-situational language teaching in the UK, which was seen as the first feasible replacement to grammar-­translation in schools (as the Direct Method was too resource intensive, requiring small classes, native speakers, and motivated learners).

Figure 2.2 The relationship between changing contexts and approaches (adapted from Rose, 2018; Rose & Galloway, 2019)

      In the 1970s, the growth of the European Economic Community and an increase in European mobility brought communicative needs of learners to the forefront, giving rise to communicative language teaching, which is still the current prevailing method in most European contexts. As communicative language teaching is an approach, and not a method, it exists in multiple forms. These include ‘weaker’ forms that follow a similar approach to structural-situational language teaching (such as utilisations of the present-practice-produce technique), and ‘stronger’ forms (such as task-based language teaching). Now, however, the explosion of English in the late 20th century has seen the establishment of English as a global language, which students need for global communication. This new reality, and the new needs that have accompanied it, are ushering in new ways to explore what teaching English as a global language should look like.

      Proposals for Change

      Suggestions for a change in TESOL in order to keep pace with the dramatic sociolinguistic changes in global English language use stretch back decades, and can be found sprinkled throughout linguistic and educational literature. In order to organise these calls into key areas that required the attention from TESOL practitioners, Galloway and Rose (2015) grouped them into six broad proposals for curriculum change. These proposals claim for a need to:

      (1)increase World Englishes and ELF exposure in TESOL curricula;

      (2)emphasise respect for multilingualism in TESOL;

      (3)raise awareness of Global Englishes in TESOL;

      (4)raise awareness of ELF strategies in TESOL curricula;

      (5)emphasise respect for diverse culture and identity in TESOL;

      (6)change English language teacher hiring practices in the TESOL industry.

      Together, these proposals seek to achieve innovation with a TESOL curriculum, and within language learning institutions.

      The first proposal seeks to rectify an imbalance in current language norms in TESOL (especially the spoken language norms), which are presented to learners of English. It increases awareness that the dominant educational norms of ‘British’ (i.e. received pronunciation) and ‘American’ (i.e. General American) are only spoken by a fraction of the global English-using population. In the 21st century, students need to understand a diverse range of speakers (McKay, 2012). The second proposal ties in with movements in the multilingual turn, and embraces an increased awareness that other languages can add efficacy and authenticity in the language classroom. The third proposal promotes the notion that students need to be educated in the language itself, and also with regards to how it is used, so that they can better prepare themselves as global English users. The fourth proposal sees the need to focus on the communication strategies that might help learners to successfully converse with interlocutors of varying Englishes and proficiencies. These include, but are not limited to, negotiation and accommodation strategies. The fifth proposal emphasises a global ownership of English, and seeks to situate English use in diverse contexts and cultures, rather than Inner Circle-situated ones. The sixth proposal lobbies for change in hiring practices, drawing on the work in NNEST movement (discussed in Chapter 1).

      However, despite the push for pedagogical change in EIL, there have been relatively few models proposed that detail what such change should look like. This has led some scholars to observe that ‘the volume of such academic attention does not seem to have had a tangible impact on actual classroom reality’ (Saraceni, 2009: 177). Galloway and Rose (2015), alongside others, have described this mismatch as a theory–practice divide, which they define as both an ‘incongruence between what experts claim is the case (or prescribe should be the case) and actual practices’ and an ‘ incongruence between [substantial] theoretical-level discussions and a lack of practical, empirical research at the classroom level in relation to ELT’ (2015: 259).

      Models to Innovate the Curriculum

      In order to close the theory–practice divide, some researchers have specifically explored ways to operationalise theory into tangible practices, which can be implemented into classrooms. In this section, we explore three movements that have grown out of the three areas of EIL scholarship outlined in the previous chapter (World Englishes, English as a lingua franca and Global Englishes). Each of these fields has produced models, frameworks or blueprints for change, which can broadly be described as: World Englishes-informed ELT, ELF-oriented pedagogy and Global Englishes Language Teaching.

      The EIL curriculum blueprint and World Englishes-informed ELT

      Over the past two decades, Aya Matsuda has actively explored the implications for World Englishes research for TESOL in quite concrete ways. Together, this work could be seen to inform a pedagogical model for EIL. In 2011, Matsuda and Friedrich observed that much of the discussion surrounding the pedagogical implications of World Englishes had ‘remained at an abstract level and [had] not provided pedagogical ideas that [were] theoretically sound, informed by research, and at the same time specific enough to be useful in the classroom’ (2011: