Glocal Network Shifts: Exploring Language Policies and Practices in International Schools (original) (raw)
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Cultural and economic globalization has considerably reinforced the use and spread of English as an international language across the world. In return, the learning and teaching of English in numerous local educational contexts has played a major role in making globalization (and its effects) possible. In this chapter, I view the dialectic of the global and the local as a complex, simultaneous, and constant interplay of homogenization and heterogenization, and convergence and divergence which repudiates the one-way flow from global to local. Resting upon the concept of glocalization, I suggest understanding the kaleidoscope of English Language Teaching (ELT) contexts as processual social, cultural, historical, and political constructions rather than essentialized, concretized, and static entities. This is an attempt to reconceptualize the ELT contexts as glocal spaces which are characterized by both global and local discourses and their dynamic interplay and mutual inter-penetration. This reconceptualization can afford us the lens through which we can valorize the emergent glocal conditions in ELT practices and debunk the restrictive boundaries of dichotomous approaches. More specifically, glocalization can help gain further insights into the constructs of global ELT discourses and how they shape the possibilities of being, becoming, and knowing and impact the ways ELT professional negotiate identities, agency, and legitimacy in their glocal contexts.
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This chapter reviews and synthesizes three major strands of recent research, alongside discipline-specific research design, from scholars of Language Issues in Comparative and International Education. The first strand is mixed methods research on the policy and practice of L1-based multilingual education programs, and their contribution to raising educational quality and addressing equity and inclusiveness worldwide. The second strand is qualitative, community-based research of educational programs aimed toward revitalization of minoritized, indigenous, and/or endangered languages. The third strand is empirical and theoretical research that seeks to document, contest, and reconceptualize the dynamics among dominant and non-dominant languages within and between international contexts. The authors explore points of synergy between studies, examine publication in the field from a meta-perspective, and suggest encouraging directions of future research, while highlighting the value of non-dominant languages as resources for education and life.
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This article examines the role English now plays in international communication and examines a number of implications of this development for the teachers of English to non-English speaking students. In particular, it critiques the teaching of English in the context of our increasingly globalised world. For many scholars, globalisation is the defining idea of our times, and the spread of English as a "world language" is a significant aspect of this phenomenon. Although our focus is on the implications of teaching English as a global "lingua franca", we begin with a brief review of some events that have given rise to the "globalisation" of our world. The purpose of this review is to emphasise the contingent nature of English as a global language. Next, it explores the relationship between language, identity, and power. Specifically, it discusses the way in which language is a manifestation of power within a given "collective identity" and among peoples who have differing identities. Building upon this discussion, it concludes with a focus on the teaching of English as a "code of power", and the ways this approach can help students not only learn the grammar, vocabulary, and syntax of a language, but more importantly, understand the ways teaching of English as a foreign language can become more meaningful and beneficial for our planet and the people who share it.
Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal, 2020
Bilingual educational programmes in recent years received criticism from translanguaging or superdiversity scholars. These programmes follow either the subtractive or the additive models of bilingual education (García 2009), in both of which the languages are considered as separate systems. This distinction is considered as “inadequate to describe linguistic diversity” (García 2009: 142) and masks the real diversity of difference by focusing only on languages. Thinking in terms of plurilingualism and multiculturalism “might contribute to a continuation of thinking in terms of us-versus-them, essentializing cultural or ethnic differences” (Geldof 2018: 45). The present study argues that a critical ethnographic sociolinguistic approach provides a more relevant analysis of children’s language practices. From this critical perspective, speaking is highlighted instead of languages and considered as action in which the linguistic resources carry social meaning (Blommaert–Rampton 2011). Th...