Canterbury Christ Church University |

Reconstruction is a facility for distilling diverse qualitative data within consolidated texts. This is especially helpful for the management of data which represents hidden and counter cultures and has a panoramic complexity and emergent realities that are difficult to capture in more established forms of presentation. Reconstruction helps to represent the original coherence of the data while showing the interconnectedness necessary for thick description, and addressing the difficult interplay between the principles of submission, emergence and the personal knowledge of the researcher. This paper explores how this might be done in the case of visual and descriptive data. In this endeavour, lessons can be learnt from alternative attitudes to research and data in mainstream education and fine art.

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2005. 'How is it possible to write?' Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 4/4: 304-9

In this short paper I am going to explain how understanding reflexivity and using personal narrative helped me to solve the problem of how to write a critical qualitative study of TESOL from the standpoint of a writer located in the English speaking West.

The study is about how a dominant native-speakerist ideology is the root of cultural chauvinism, or culturism, in that it essentialistically characterizes the 'non-native speaker' Other as culturally problematic within the domain of a 'Western' pedagogy (Holliday in press). A major data source for this study is email statements from 36 TESOL educators from a range of countries and educational sectors, including the so-called Periphery.

The problem of how to write arises from the dilemmas concerning who I am speaking for; and who I am to be able to do this. I write from a position of power and privilege, from the best resourced part of the TESOL world. Canagarajah and others suggest that people from the English Speaking West are not able to speak about or for people and communities that they do not belong to. His attack on 'white-skinned teacher/researchers from rich communities [who] visit dilapidated classrooms of brown-skinned vernacular-speaking students in periphery communities' (1999: 51) needs to be taken seriously. Although I feel uncomfortable about the way Canagarajah puts this into such markedly oppositional, indeed racial, terms, there is undeniably some truth in what he says. Research of this nature also often aids the 'Centre' rather than empowering 'Periphery' communities (Canagarajah 1999: 45). Hyde (2002) suggests quite rightly that members of the 'native speaker' TESOL 'Centre' only get into discussions which support the 'non-Centre' to develop their own 'Centre' discourse, and that we are all in effect playing with our own discourses in order to locate ourselves within the larger political matrix to get the best advantage.

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2005. 'What happens between people: who we are and what we do.' In Gieve, S. and Miller, I. (eds), Understanding the Language Classroom. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 47-63

I am writing in a climate of change in TESOL which is perhaps unprecedented in the way in which ESOL educators are seeing themselves and others. The change is of course gradual; but it is given texture by events which mark our professional and personal lives. An example of this change is that each year my masters students are more worldly and intelligently sensitive to this need. They indulge less in reducing Other cultures and in partisan views about particular classroom methodologies. All of this is underpinned by a general movement in the social sciences and educational research towards a postmodern view of knowledge.

I do not see this realization as a slippery slope to intellectual anarchy, but rather as an imperative to reassess in ideological terms what we have always seen as right and efficient. Whether or not he himself subscribes to postmodernism, I find Fairclough's work in looking at how ideology is embedded in everyday discourses very helpful here, as well as the more critical elements of qualitative research. Examples of this type of investigation can be seen in my own work and that of my students and colleagues, where we look at the way in which the everyday discourses of our professionalism reveal our beliefs and prejudices about the people we teach and work with.

The first move in this discussion is inspired by Allwright (1988: 51), when he urged applied linguists to consider 'what really happens between teacher and class' in order to understand the wider contexts of language learning and teaching as a social as well as a psycholinguistic activity, bringing part of applied linguistics research within the domain normally inhabited by mainstream educational studies. My concerns, however, are slightly different to those of Allwright's and those other researchers who have investigated language learning as it is contextualized in the culture of the classroom. I am interested in what happens between people, both students and their teachers, and other involved professionals, within the broader context of the whole profession of TESOL, as conceptualized by ESOL educators.

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2004. 'Issues of validity in progressive paradigms of qualitative research.' TESOL Quarterly 38/4, pp. 731-4.

In this short piece I am talking about qualitative research as described in the TESOL Quarterly guidelines under the heading of case study, while realizing that this may be a slightly artificial category in that many of the characteristics of another TESOL Quarterly category, ethnography and critical ethnography, also apply in case study research – and of course that case study research could also comprise quantitative study. I am making this point because we are into an era of qualitative research where boundaries are crumbling and the quest is becoming much more to do whatever we can to find out what we want to know. What is important about the guidelines for critical ethnography is that there is a strong statement about undoing constraining ways of seeing the world which lead to social injustice. Case study research may be smaller scale and less passionate; but I feel that the reasons for bringing down some of the boundaries is that case study researchers may, and perhaps should, also have burning critical issues to address which may, or perhaps should, drive them on whatever quest is necessary, with whatever investigatory tools they can muster, into areas of knowing that they had not imagined. In what I think is a postmodern quest, researchers must be able to stand outside traditional discourses of research and reinvent when they need to.

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2003. Social autonomy: addressing the dangers of culturism in TESOL. In Palfreyman, D. and Smith, R. (eds), Autonomy Across Cultures. London: Palgrave.

This chapter explores how we need to rethink current associations between 'autonomy' and language students, in order to address a reductive culturism which I believe pervades TESOL. I begin with a critique of two dominant conceptualizations of student autonomy. The first is characterized by a long-standing 'us'-'them' native-speakerism. Although the second is based on a more critical cultural relativism in which native-speakerism is seen as untenable, I see both as being equally culturally reductive. I then argue for a third position in which autonomy is defined in the terms brought by students from their own worlds outside the classroom. I suggest that we standardly fail to see this social autonomy because of preoccupations with our own professionalism.

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2003. Japanese fragments: an exploration in cultural perception and duality. Asia Pacific Journal of Language in Education 5/1, pp.1-28

By looking at a fragment of data representing Japanese secondary school classrooms and their institutional environment, it is possible to hypothesize about the behaviour of Japanese students in British language classes. It is observed that there are differently conceived notions of formality and informality between the Japanese school classroom and the British classroom, in which the perceptions of talk and silence play a significant role. In the Japanese school classroom, silence is perceived as a sign of tension and unease whereas student talk is common within a personal, informal domain. In the British classroom silence is perceived as a necessity while others are talking, and yet as a hindrance to formal student participation. The often reported silence of Japanese students in British classes may not therefore be a simple feature of Japanese national culture. It may be as much a product of the encounter with a highly technologized classroom culture. To understand their students, teachers therefore need to understand how the culture of the classroom is imposed by the professional régime to which they belong.

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2002. Balancing the voices of researchers and the people they research in writing qualitative research. In Spellman Miller, K. and Thompson, P. (eds), Unity and Diversity in Language Use. London: BAAL and Continuum. Pp.125-137

Qualitative researchers can show appreciation of the worlds of the people they research in several ways: by being more explicit about their own agendas and positions, by explicitly stating what they think is significant in the data which they have collected, by accounting for and capitalizing on their own cultural impact on the culture of the research setting, by bracketing cultural preconceptions. This insight is based on a small, interdisciplinary corpus of good writing in a progressive qualitative research paradigm. The chapter focuses particularly on the writer's strategies in (a) the conceptual framework, where the researcher's ideology and its impact on the research setting are stated, (b) the way in which extracts from data are embedded in argument and commentary, and (c) the way in which the first person is used to discipline the separation of voices. In all these areas, methodological rigour is enhanced. This rigour involves a subtle balance between a systematic unity of approach and a very wide diversity of possible strategies designed to respond to and protect multiple voices in very diverse social settings.

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2001. Appropriate methodology in using materials: the struggle to work with existing autonomies. Folio, Journal of The Materials Development Association. 6/2. pp.4-8

If we accept the communicative principle of relating language and learning to the real world of the student, and break from lock-step traditions such as 'four skills' and controlled activity, the classroom begins to look differently. Written classroom materials are in themselves powerful artefacts of how language works in a specific cultural setting. The most authentic engagement of students communicative competence might be to read them ethnographically - what am I supposed to do with them, what is their cultural and political agenda, how do they treat me.

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2001. Finding social autonomy. In Bodycott, P. and Crew, V. (eds) Language and cultural immersion: perspectives on short term study and residence abroad. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Education.

A qualitative study of the social aspects of an immersion programme for Hong Kong BEd students suggests that out-of-class, self-directed work reveals the existing social autonomy students employ in engaging with the English speaking community. This was evident in chance encounters outside the classroom, and in tutorials and drama classes which were physically removed from the classroom. On the other hand, it was observed that in the classroom the students conformed to stereotype and appeared largely reticent. It is thus hypothesized and that standard ESOL classroom teaching, which focuses on a classroom-created learner-autonomy may indeed hide from view the social autonomy that the students bring with them.

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2001. Achieving cultural continuity in curriculum development and implementation. In Hall, D. and Hewings,  A. (eds.) (2001), Innovations in English Language Teaching Pp.169-176.

Also in Kennedy, C. (ed.) (1999), Innovation and Best Practice. London: Longman, pp.23-31

In this chapter I look at the issue of cultural continuity in curriculum innovation. My major point is that a major obstacle to true cultural continuity is our own professional discourses which prevent us from seeing the real worlds of the people we work with. We therefore need to be critically aware of ourselves as cultural actors and learn how to see the people we work with in their own terms instead of in our terms.

The chapter begins with the principle of cultural continuity and why it is important both in classroom and the wider domain of the curriculum and curriculum projects. I then demonstrate how professional discourses create obstacles to cultural continuity, and how this might be avoided.

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2000. Exploring other worlds: escaping linguistic parochialism. In Davison, J. and Moss, J. (Eds.) Issues in English Teaching. London: Routledge

This chapter argues the importance of developing a more worldly view of English in secondary education. It is motivated by three factors in a changing world:

(1) With an increasingly global role, English is used more as an international language than as a language of any particular English speaking· nation. Indeed, English is probably used more by second language speakers communicating with each other across the world in different ways in a wide range of media, institutional, professional and technical discourses which transcend national boundaries, than by first language speakers within Britain, North America or Australasia (Graddol 1997).

(2) Ideology and prejudice is deeply embedded in the everyday use of language, supported and legitimized by group, institutional and professional discourses which form the fibre of society.

The forces in (2), operate naturally within a parochial, Anglo-centric English to reduce and degrade the foreign Other both abroad, and at home within an increasingly multicultural Britain.

Growing up in such a world, it would seem that young people in Britain need an awareness if not a use of English which goes beyond the parochial Anglo-centric. I begin with a brief exploration of the importance of a more worldly, non-parochial vision of English. Then I demonstrate how this vision might be facilitated through a process of making the familiar strange, by looking at a series of instances in which the ·expected· construction on 'us' and 'them' in English texts is changed and thus promotes a critical, non-parochial view.

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1999. Small cultures. Applied Linguistics 20/2.

There is a need to distinguish two paradigms of ·culture· in applied linguistics. What has become the default notion of 'culture' refers to prescribed ethnic, national and international entities. This large culture paradigm is by its nature vulnerable to a culturist reduction of foreign students, teachers and their educational contexts. In contrast, a small culture paradigm attaches 'culture' to small social groupings or activities wherever there is cohesive behaviour, and thus avoids culturist ethnic, national or international stereotyping. Ethnography uses small cultures as the location for research, as an interpretive device for understanding emergent behaviour, rather than seeking to explain prescribed ethnic, national or international difference. A small culture view of English language curriculum settings reveals mismatches between professional-academic and organizational cultures at the mezzo level of the institution; and (small) cultural imperialism is revealed as the invasion of the technologizing discourses connected with instrumental ·ELT·. Within the small culture mélange, culture learning will not necessarily relate to ethnic, national or international difference.

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1999. Authenticity and autonomy: the struggle to relate education to people. In Crew, V., Berry, V. and Hung, J. (Eds), Exploring Diversity in The Language Curriculum. Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Institute of Education.

Authenticity is not in the specific nature of classroom materials or tasks. It is not, for example, dependent on whether materials are 'unsimplified'. Authenticity is in the degree to which the educational event engages the real social agenda and communicative competence of students. Similarly, autonomy is not in the specifics of classroom events. It is not, for example, dependent on whether tasks take place within 'group work'. Autonomy is to do with how far students make their own sense of, and then operate in their own terms in the social world, whether in or out of the classroom. In addressing authenticity and autonomy, the teacher is in constant struggle - to understand, to find appropriate classroom input, to act appropriately. This is not simply to be 'learner-centred', but to be searching for feasible, meaningful interaction between student and teacher. Focus on the social world in terms of content and aims leads to a socially located approach.

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1998. Evaluating the discourse: the role of applied linguistics in the management of evaluation and innovation. In Germaine, K. And Rea-Dickins, P., (eds.) Managing Evaluation and Innovation in English Language Teaching: building bridges,  London: Addison Wesley Longman.

The management of evaluation and innovation in English language programmes needs to address a tension between two professional-academic cultures. The academic culture of collectionism is often invaded by a skills-oriented culture of integrationist ELT. This state of affairs has important links with a similar tension between academic applied linguistics and integrationist ELT - in turn related to wider tensions within late industrial society. The relevance of applied linguistics to the management of English language education can sometimes be questioned. Also, the presentation within applied linguistics of national or global culture difference and conflict can be counterproductive when analysing institutional factors in language programmes. However, applied linguistics can make a valuable contribution to the management of evaluation and innovation through a critical discourse analysis of the collection-integration conflict, both within English language programmes and in its own relationship with those programmes.

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1997. Six lessons: cultural continuity in communicative language teaching. Language Teaching Research 1/3.

Ideas about good teaching emerged from one-off ethnographic observations of six 'communicative' university English language classes in China and India. The lessons were all taught by non-native speakers in classes of between 25 and 45. Through analysis of the behaviour and physical environment of the culture of each classroom, it emerged that aspects of a popular view of ·communicative· connected with group-work, oral practice and teacher withdrawal may be questioned. Instead, cultural continuity between traditional and innovative forms emerges as an essential feature of successful communicative language teaching.

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1997. The politics of participation in international English language education. System 25/3.

Within certain influential spheres of international English language education 'active' student participation is often seen as central not only to the ·good· lesson, but also to the successful conference or training event. However, this notion of participation seems to be generated by a discourse of power belonging to a particular culture of professionalism. It is thus ethnocentric and potentially inadequate beyond certain contexts. If there are to be principles of good practice which are appropriate in different contexts within an international scenario, they need to exist at a significantly higher level of generality. Such principles require a sociological imagination and local knowledge on the part of teachers, curriculum designers and researchers.

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1996. Developing a sociological imagination: expanding ethnography in international English language education. Applied Linguistics 17/2.

Whereas the importance of ethnography in analysing broad social realities in education is now established, in international English language education, ethnography has often been restricted to oral aspects of classroom behaviour. This paper argues that the cultural complexity and variety in English language classrooms across the world also require ethnographies of non-verbal behaviour and of curriculum and curriculum project design and management beyond the classroom. A profession-al sociological imagination needs to be cosmopolitan, broad-based and wide-ranging in the multiplicity of relations between students, educators, the community, and also the people, material and concepts which the profession transports across cultures. In the search for ethical research we can and must look wider than the emicism of verbal data. The polyphony of views which is essential to international English language education can be achieved in as many ways as there are cultures.

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1995. Assessing language needs within an institutional context: an ethnographic approach. English for Specific Purposes 14/2.

Carrying out an analysis of English language needs for an oil company very quickly involved consideration of a complex of other factors. Language needs had to be set against, and seen partially in terms of, wider institutional needs, curriculum implementation factors, including resource and syllabus possibilities, and even wider social factors. The analysis of needs was thus integrated with a broader analysis of means for the whole process of realizing a programme of language training. One major factor which had to considered was the expertise required by the trainers who would implement the programme. This paper explores the role of ethnography in carrying out the holistic research necessary to obtain as clear a picture as possible within a short period of time.

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1995. Handing over the project: an exercise in restraint. System 23/1.

A key stage in aid projects in English language education, whether run by resident, on-site advisors or from a distance by higher education institutions, is the handing over of project processes or products to local personnel. Invariably this is inadequately managed due to lack of restraint on the part of expatriate experts in allowing their expertise to be adapted to local rhythms. Project sustainability can only be achieved if these local rhythms are appreciated and allowed to take the lead in project work. Because these rhythms may be opaque to expatriate eyes, a sign of sustainability may be an inability on the part of expatriates to see what is going on. This has serious implications for project evaluation.

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