A global community

[stevelouw]

In the session introducing global Englishes, Richard pointed out that we have a very global team in our faculty. In fact, many of our faculty are multicultural, multilingual and might be labelled as 'non-native' English speakers. Following what Heath's argument was for the day, this represents a strength with respect to the Global Englishes goal. Since this is in place, how exactly does it play out for the learners in our classrooms? Do our students actually experience the global faculty or a global Englishes pedagogy?

[daronloo]

While I'm not working at KMUTT, I believe there are some filters which we can find across higher education settings in the region.

Over the past semester, I've been in the midst of a 'struggle' for the (more) prominent placement of one's professional identity. There is a class, of which I am one of the many tutors, where there needs to be strict adherence to the rubric. There are different measures put in place for us to understand and implement the rubric the same way - such as norming sessions, moderating our grades together, and to analyze our scores through RASCH analysis. To avoid any brush-ins with management, I made a conscious choice to work with the rubrics, even if I do not quite agree with some of the rubric descriptors. I have, however, some colleagues, who believe that their subjectivities should still be maintained, despite the presence of a rubric.

The presence of systems to ensure accountability and fairness, especially when modules are taken by large numbers of students, may decrease the opportunities for global Englishes pedagogy to be enacted (in this class I am describing, there are about 750 students, taught by more than 10 tutors).

[Richard]

I think Daron makes a really good point that, at the risk of making sweeping claims based on anecdotal evidence, I'd like to generalise. The desire for stadardisation in educational contexts (such as when several teachers are teaching the same course) is going to be easier to fulfill if there is a standard to follow, and for the model of English this probably means a native speaker variety. My sweeping claim is that neoliberalist influences on education (e.g. evaluating through quantitative measures, administrative prioritisation of reliability over validity, meeting 'customer' wants) make it less likely for "global Englishes pedagogy to be enacted". No idea if anyone has looked into this issue, but it could be an interesting new angle (and another instance of the tensions between liberal and neoliberalist ideologies in education).

[sgtowns]

Since [we have a multilingual staff at SOLA], how exactly does it play out for the learners in our classrooms? Do our students actually experience the global faculty or a global Englishes pedagogy?

I would say that it takes a lot more than just having a multi-lingual / multi-cultural teaching staff. We have teachers from Thailand, Vietnam, China, Japan, and the Philippines, but I would venture that, at least conversationally, each one of these teachers speak with a more or less "standard" English. (Perhaps this is due to stringent SOLA hiring practices?) So, to me, it doesn't seem like having lots of "non-native" English teachers will mean much to our students from a Global Englishes perspective.

However, one interesting learning activity that Heath talked about was exposing students to other Englishes in the classroom through audio and video. I just read an interesting "pop science" article that talks about how being exposed to different accents over time helps people to understand accents in general. For example, practicing understanding Thai English will actually help you understand Japanese English. So perhaps there is evidence that this would be a worthwhile activity in a speaking and listening course. The article I read was written by a researcher in the field, and she has a lot of good citations in the article even though it is aimed at a general audience (most of the links in the article are DOI links). I definitely recommend everyone check it out if you are interested in this area at all.

https://qz.com/1586592/a-linguists-trick-to-perfectly-understanding-accented-speakers/

[Woravut]

No idea if anyone has looked into this issue, but it could be an interesting new angle (and another instance of the tensions between liberal and neoliberalist ideologies in education).

Sounds interesting. I just listened to a political debate in YouTube and accidentally came across "classical liberal".