Week 14: English Teaching across Cultures

The spread of English as an international language has changed our conception of both the language and how it should be taught. With more nonnative than native speakers of English, the ownership of English has shifted and new world Englishes (WE) have emerged. Researchers studying this phenomenon have recommended changes to English language teaching (ELT) that require re-examining firmly entrenched assumptions still evidenced in teaching practice. Despite compelling evidence, English language teaching professionals have yet to embrace and enact researchers’ recommendations.

A Cultural Linguistics approach to teaching ESL should be adopted. The focus should be on developing meta-cultural competence among students in the ESL classroom. ‘Meta-cultural competence’ is ‘a competence that enables interlocutors to communicate and negotiate their cultural conceptualisations during the process of intercultural communication’, and it comprises three major components including ‘variation awareness’, ‘explication strategy’ and ‘negotiation strategy’.

Download Files

we-n-elf.docx (0.04 MB )

we-n-elt.pdf (0.14 MB )

we-and-elt.pdf (0.10 MB )