Chapter published: Understanding and Challenging ‘the Known’

I am happy to announce the publication of an edited volume which takes a critical perspective on English Language Teaching and contains a chapter by me. In this short post, I’d like to make a brief presentation of the book and my own work.

The book

The new book, Resistance to the Known: Counter-Conduct in Foreign Language Education (Damien Rivers, ed.), sets out to critically challenge aspects of the established methodological ‘orthodoxy’ in Foreign Language Education (‘the Known’). It consists of nine contributions, as follows:

PART I: Countering micro-processes in local contexts

1. Language-Learner Tourists in Australia: Problematizing ‘the Known’ and its Impact on Interculturality (Phiona Stanley)
2. A Greek Tragedy: Understanding and Challenging ‘the Known’ From a Complexity Perspective (Achilleas Kostoulas)
3. Symbolic Violence and Pedagogical Abuse in the Language Classroom (Jacquie Widin)
4. The Authorities of Autonomy and English-Only: Serving Whose Interests? (Damian J. Rivers)

PART II: Countering macro-processes in national contexts

5. On the Challenge of Teaching English in Latin America with Special Emphasis on Brazil (Kanavillil Rajagopalan)
6. Dialogizing ‘the Known’: Experience of English Teaching in Japan Through an Assay of Derivatives as a Dominant Motif (Glenn Toh)
7. The Impossibility of Defining and Measuring Intercultural Competencies (Karin Zotzmann)
8. Transcending Language Subject Boundaries Through Language Teacher Education (Suzanne Burley & Cathy Pomphrey)
9. English-as-Panacea: Untangling Ideology from Experience in Compulsory English Education in Japan (Julian Pigott)

My chapter

In my contribution, I develop a critical perspective of how English Language Teaching (ELT) practices in Greece. I do so by synthesising empirical data from my PhD, as well as post-modern thinking. I also make suggestions for moving beyond this way of teaching and learning.

A complexity perspective on ELT

In the first part of the chapter, I suggest that we might conceptualise language education as a complex adaptive system. I briefly outline the background of Complex Systems Theory, and then I go on to explain how this can serve as a useful lens for understanding phenomena in Foreign Language Education. To support this claim, I argue that Foreign Language Education displays three properties of complex adaptive systems, namely open-ness, non-linearity and emergence.

The ‘Known’ in Greek ELT:
local and global forces interacting

The second section of the chapter draws on data from my doctoral research, which is a case study of a language school in Greece. I argue that therea re two forces driving language education there: credentialism and protectionism.  Of these, credentialism is primarily associated with communicative language teaching, whereas protectionism valorises practices derived from local pedagogical traditions. The interplay of these forces leads to the emergence of a distinctive transmissive mode of Foreign Language Education, which I exemplify with reference to grammar teaching.

Challenging the ‘Known’ in language education: A different way forward

Finally, in the third section, I problematise the linguistic, pedagogical and political implications of the Known. I argue that a complexity-informed perspective allows us to move past the Known in two ways.

Firstly, it provides us with a conceptual toolkit for understanding the situated processes from which the Known comes into being. Building on this, I make the case for more complexity-informed small-scale research into local settings.

Secondly, a complexity-informed perspective suggests that the ‘Known’ might be destabilised. In this section, I call for moving beyond existing practice and towards ways of language teaching and learning that foreground the particular, praxis-oriented forms of language education with an emancipatory outlook.

Additional information

You can find the volume on the publishers’ website, where you can browse the table of contents and find some information about the contributing authors. The hardcover edition is available from Amazon, where it is sold for $82.32.

You can download a printer-friendly version of this announcement here, and I would be most grateful if you might consider distributing it as appropriate.