Global TESOL for the 21st Century. Heath Rose

Before we venture into our collective perspective on teaching EIL in the remainder of this book, we want to briefly share each of these journeys with the reader. We feel this is important, as it reveals our personal motivations behind writing this book. Sharing our stories as a kind of reflective practice, helps to establish who we are and via what paths our researcher and teacher identities have been constructed.

      Heath‘s story

      For the first few years of my teaching career in high schools in Japan and Australia, I was acutely aware and uncomfortable with my privileged status as a white, male, native English-speaking teacher, but I did very little to challenge this in the curriculum, largely upholding the status quo of established practices. When I returned to Japan several years later to take up a job at a language specialist university in the Tokyo area, I began to make small changes to shift focus away from native and Anglophone norms in my curricula via two content-based courses that I had been given the freedom to create (one was on travel in Asia, and the other on Japanese influence on culture around the world, which aimed to counter balance an existing focus on American and British cultural studies in the program). A colleague of mine (Nicola Galloway) at the time later taught a course called Global Englishes, which was my first exposure to this as a field of academic study. Learning about Global Englishes enabled me to put a label on aspects of the TESOL profession that I’d been uncomfortable with throughout my teaching career. I became interested in the curriculum changes she was introducing, which led to us co-publishing a number of papers on these innovations in subsequent years.

      By the time I moved into my next position in a business program at another Japanese university, I was ready to instigate larger changes in the wider curriculum I was put in charge of. In this curriculum, globally-oriented content was taught explicitly to prepare students to use the language as a business lingua franca. Expert ELF-users were hired as teaching assistants instead of native speakers, expert L2 English users were regularly invited to give lectures to provide role models to the students, and business projects centred on using English to plan business ventures in places such as China, rather than in Anglophone countries. When my Global Englishes colleague moved to my university during my fourth year there, we made further changes across the entire curriculum. Seeing the success of these early efforts in raising our students’ confidence and awareness of how English is used, I embarked on a research career to communicate to other teachers what a global curriculum could look like.

      Now that I have moved into academia, I have lost access to language classrooms of my own to instigate curriculum change, but have been fortunate enough to connect with teacher-researchers around the world, who are equally driven by the notion of teaching EIL. Some of these connections have facilitated this jointly authored book, with each of my co-authors having travelled their own independent journeys to reach this point.

      Mona’s story

      My teaching career began as an undergraduate and graduate student, aiming to become a secondary school teacher in Germany. During this time, I developed as strong interest in linguistics, which led me to do an exchange at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. That was when I discovered my curiosity for research and decided to pursue a PhD. In search of a suitable topic, my teacher (and future co-author) Heath Rose, introduced me to the field of Global Englishes, which led me to explore this topic as part of one of my module assignments at Trinity College Dublin and then as part of my postgraduate dissertation back in Germany. This initial research revealed to me the opportunities of working within such a young, dynamic, developing field of study, and I began to realize its practical relevance to not only teachers but learners of English as well.

      The more I learned, the more I understood the practical implications of a global approach to English language education. However, I also saw that most of the discussions within this field were rather theoretical, leaving a significant gap between stating what should be done and what is possible to do. While my doctoral research explored lacks in English language teaching materials and tests, my subsequent work has explored avenues to address this gap in practical ways. As an educator and teacher, the value of my work and research lies in the extent to which it helps teachers to bring English as an international language into their classroom. This goal has motivated my work on this book, and continues to be the foundation of my research.

      Anya’s story

      Back in 2014 when I had crossed the finish line of my TESOL education, I thought I had the entire world of English language teaching figured out. In my master’s degree I had been introduced and inspired by the teaching of EIL, which I was eager to put into practice. This degree had granted me access to my first professional journey as a university lecturer in an English undergraduate programme in Thailand where I imagined making my stage debut with some EIL ideas that had captivated the fantasy of my teacher-in-training self. Yet, in reality, such all-consuming aspiration remained well-hidden in the backstage, while I let subconscious native norms have their premiere and ‘steal the show.’ On reflection, I was gripped by disappointment. Rather than drawing the students’ attention to English as fluid and varying across communities of practice, I diverted them to notions of English as a monolithic entity based largely on dominant Inner-circle varieties. Instead of helping them to see ‘English’ realistically, I covered their eyes and reinforced the misconceptions. Not only did I fail to live up to my pre-defined philosophy, but I also let slip any opportunity for my ‘ideal’ teacher identity as a ‘multilingual instructor’ to materialise (see Kramsch & Zhang, 2018).

      If there is one lesson I have gleaned from this ‘story of failure’, it is that I have learned and evolved as a teacher more on account of things going wrong than things going (al)right. Out of crisis has come clarity and commitment to resolution. Where could I have otherwise done better to optimise my students’ learning experience as well as my own professional development as a teacher? How do I translate curricular innovations into practice? The answer to these questions, as I realised, lied in the act of self-introspection itself. I went ‘backstage’ and re-discovered my once-inspiring pedagogical values, which I was able to re-cast in a new light given the newly-acquired freedom as a course coordinator. With heightened awareness of subtle ambivalence within my belief systems, I replaced out-of-context listening activities in my course’s commercial textbook with a context-sensitive, EIL-oriented activity. I began to understand small adaptations can lead their way to larger waves of change. I also learned that failure is not necessarily an end point. As I have later come to learn, it is (and should be) a staging post on a journey towards greater success (or something better).

      Natsuno’s story

      My personal journey begins with my experience as an English language learner. I studied English through Japanese formal education and graduated from a Japanese university with a bachelor’s degree in law. In this degree programme, Japanese was used as a medium of instruction and English was not something to which I felt connected in my life at that time. Nevertheless, there were some English language study requirements within the core curriculum, and I accepted the situation.

      Later, I became more interested in the ongoing debate on a long-standing issue in Japan and other countries, where many people do not reach a level at which they can successfully communicate in English with people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. I originally searched for a solution to the issue through a master’s programme in TESOL, however I still could not find anything concrete to address my concerns. Thus, I felt the necessity to investigate the issue beyond TESOL, as I have found the attachment to native English is deeply rooted in society from both narrow and broad perspectives. This results in many people blindly accepting the underlying norms attached to English, such as the legitimacy of the native-speaker.

      Eventually, I came across the research area of Global Englishes, which gave me some insights into the sociolinguistic, sociocultural, historical, and political underpinnings of these beliefs. This inspired me to begin my doctoral studies into the attitudes of English language learners in Japan towards the use of English as a global language. As a learner and subsequent teacher of English, my mission is to explore ways of disentangling the complexity of those norms in society, and to encourage learners and teachers in the current globalised world to think critically about what it means to learn English in their respective contexts to investigate this issue, rather than to accept things at face value.

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