Page 269 - Beyond Methods

Ensuring social relevance 257
ESL textbooks imported from the West. Similarly, analyzing L2 class- room data in terms of the ideology and structures of the apartheid South Africa, Keith Chick (1996) demonstrates how the classroom talk represented “styles consistent with norms of interaction which teachers and students constituted as a means of avoiding the op- pressive and demeaning constraints of apartheid educational sys- tems” (p. 37). While the Sri Lankan and South African cases may be considered by some to be extreme cases of classroom life imitating the sociopolitical turmoil outside the class, there are numerous in- stances where race, gender, class, and other variables directly or in- directly influence the content and character of classroom input and interaction.
In the process of sensitizing itself to the prevailing sociopolitical reality, a pedagogy of possibility is also concerned with individual as well as social identity. More than any other educational enter- prise, L2 education that brings languages and cultures in contact provides its participants with challenges and opportunities for a continual quest for subjectivity and self-identity. In a sense, then, the classroom behavior of the Sri Lankan and South African stu- dents mentioned above is an unmistakable manifestation of their attempt to preserve and protect their individual and collective iden- tity. At a different level, the same can be said about the persistence of Singlish in Singapore as well.
Reflective task 11.5
Considering the overall thrust of this chapter, what challenges do you think L2 teachers face in raising sociopolitical and sociocultural issues in class? And, how to overcome those challenges?
In answering this question, reflect on the following episode reported by Douglas Brown (1998, p. 256): “From China I received some very guarded personal comments from a native Chinese who asked not to be identified. I was told that, in fact, treatment of political issues must be covert, lest one lose more than one’s job. He described two approaches that intrigued me. The first he called ‘point at one but accuse another,’ through which he has had students study oppression and suppression of free speech in the for- mer Soviet Union, calling for critical analysis of the roots and remedies of such denial of freedom. In another approach, which he called ‘murder someone with a borrowed knife,’ he had students criticize Western news re-