Tesol

Páginas: 46 (11262 palabras) Publicado: 30 de julio de 2012
TESOL at Forty: What Are the Issues?
A. SURESH CANAGARAJAH
Baruch College and Graduate Center, City University of New York New York, New York, United States

This overview delineates the direction of pedagogical developments since the 25th anniversary issue of TESOL Quarterly. Three tendencies characterize our professional practice: (a) a continuation along the earlier lines of progression(i.e., in opening up the classroom to learning opportunities, integrating skills, and teaching for specific purposes); (b) a radical reorientation along new paradigms (i.e., in understanding motivation and acquisition in terms of social participation and identity construction; in developing methods from the ground up, based on generative heuristics; in widening testing to include formativeassessment; in accommodating subjective knowledge and experience in teacher expertise); (c) unresolved debates and questions about the direction in certain domains (i.e., when and how to teach grammar; whether to adopt cognitivist or social orientations in SLA, testing, and teacher education). Our professional knowledge gets further muddled by the new movements of globalization, digital communication, andWorld Englishes, which pose fresh questions that are yet to be addressed. However, grappling with these concerns has engendered realizations on the need for local situatedness, global inclusiveness, and disciplinary collaboration that are of more lasting value.

e live in an age when metanarratives or grand theories that attempt to provide unifying and totalizing explanations for social andintellectual developments are viewed with suspicion. In this context, publishing a state of the art issue on TESOL requires caution. Such an issue is not only about where we are now but how we got here. In other words, this issue is an attempt to understand the current state of the profession in the light of its history. However, histories are always partial and partisan because they involve theadoption of a particular narrative viewpoint. It is not just that any description of the state of the art is informed by the describer’s perspective; many would go further to question the effects and intentions behind such descriptions. For the state of the art serves to define what is legitimate knowledge in the field. That is to say, the description will become the new orthodoxy. Therefore,
TESOLQUARTERLY Vol. 40, No. 1, March 2006

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the histories we narrate not only reflect but shape history. Such awareness makes writing the state of the art a controversial and contested activity. If histories are actually stories (from specific locations and locutors), let us acknowledge up front that there are multiple stories of TESOL. I will tell the TESOL story differently if I am narrating itfrom my postcolonial setting in rural Jaffna, Sri Lanka, where I learned ESL and taught for a while, or if I narrate it from my current setting in the postmodern metropolis of New York City, where I teach transnational multilingual students. The plural stories of TESOL are already colliding in the publications in our field. For example, compare Howatt’s (2004) self-assured History of EnglishLanguage Teaching, which traces the progress in constructing efficient methods and materials as ELT marched on from medieval England to become an autonomous discipline, with Spack’s (2002) painful America’s Second Tongue, which narrates the imposition of English on Native American children—both insightfully reviewed from another location (Oaxaca, Mexico) by Angeles Clemente (2005) in the pages of thisjournal. We must also be careful not to give the impression that TESOL is only 40 years old. While Howatt’s book starts in 1400, Spack starts in 1860 (for the convenience of studying recorded history, although the history of the particular language teaching enterprise she investigates goes further back). Even rural Jaffna has a history of TESOL from at least 1780. Therefore, we mustn’t encourage...
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