From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship: Essays and Reflections

Introduction

The social sciences are essentially ‘applied sciences’ designed, to use Marx’s phrase, to change the world not merely to interpret it […] That sciences in the past, and especially the social sciences, have been inseparable from partisanship does not prove that partisanship is advantageous to them, but only that it is inevitable. The case for the benefits of partisanship must be that it advances science. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (1998)

At a conference of the Italian association of language teachers in Rome in November 2005, I gave a lecture on ‘Foreign language education for intercultural citizenship’ and afterwards a teacher came to say thank you because ‘teachers need a vision’ in the midst of their daily life. A few months later I spoke to a conference of teachers of language courses for the International Baccalaureate about the relationship of their work to the mission statement of the International Baccalaureate Organisation and again I was thanked by someone for ‘making us think’. This gave me renewed energy to complete this book.

There are different kinds of language teachers: those who teach what is usually called ‘mother tongue’, the dominant language of a society (such as French in France, Japanese in Japan); those who teach a dominant language in a society to newcomers to the society for whom it is a ‘second language’; those who teach a language spoken in another country and learnt only in schools, colleges and universities – a ‘foreign’ language. All these teachers are handling one of the most important elements of humankind, for it is language that is one of the distinctive features of being human, one of the most important facilitating factors in the formation of human social groups, and at the same time one of the factors that separates groups from one another. Language teachers have important responsibilities in ensuring that learners of any age – from kindergarten into schools and on into adult, lifelong education – acquire the practical skills of the languages they need. This includes reading and writing the language(s) they otherwise acquire naturally in their environment – their ‘mother tongue(s)’ or ‘first language(s)’ – because, although they will inevitably learn to speak, reading and writing do not come naturally and often do not come at all without great effort and application. Language teaching also includes teaching the practical skills in a language that are needed for a short term business or pleasure trip to another country. Teaching ‘mother tongues’ and ‘languages for business’ are two extremes of a continuum of skills and knowledge, and there is every kind of language teaching in between.

At the same time, language teachers are concerned with values, for values are inherent in any kind of teaching whether teachers and learners are aware of them or not. The teachers of ‘mother tongue’ have to reflect on what the language means for those who speak another language at home. They have to think about how their teaching is not only focused on practical skills but also creates a sense of living in a specific time and place, in a specific country, in a specific nation-state; language and identity are inseparable. Those who teach second and foreign languages have to think about how the language is offering a new perspective, a challenge to the primary language of identity, and a different vision of the culture(s) in which they live and have hitherto taken for granted.

Language teaching has both practical purposes and challenging values, and it is this complex relationship that the teachers mentioned earlier wanted to think about in the midst of their career.

Language teachers can expect a career of 30–40 years and half way through this they may begin to feel that the vision they had as young teachers needs renewal. At the beginning of their careers, teachers are full of enthusiasm and visions – which may be indeterminate and not yet well formed – and to give shape to their enthusiasm they undertake initial teacher training.¹ This however tends to focus on the everyday issues of methods, classroom discipline and the problems that all new teachers face. It is important to temper this with engagement with the significance of language teaching for individuals, for societies, for teachers themselves. They need to maintain the knowledge that they are doing something worthwhile, even in the midst of their daily, often stressful work.

By mid-career, teachers have established a routine for dealing with discipline and similar issues even though it is in the nature of such things that they are never totally resolved. Mid-career teachers have different priorities and they are usually offered short in-service courses or sometimes they can attend Masters courses. Short courses may keep them up to date with new methods and recent policy changes but hardly give them the opportunity to renew their enthusiasm and vision. Longer courses should allow them to see their work in a wider educational context, but unfortunately longer courses are not offered to everyone.

This book is written for all who wish to think about their teaching in the wider context, to see the bigger picture, clarify or renew their vision and their work in the classroom.

The book is also written from a personal perspective. I have partisan views of language learning and teaching after 50 years of being involved in languages as learner and teacher, and I accept Hobsbawm’s admonition that partisanship should bring change and progress. What constitutes ‘progress’ is not always obvious and depends on circumstances, on the historical moment. Progress in language teaching was defined differently in 1945 than it was in 1989, to take but two dates that are significant not only in world-historical terms but also for language teaching. For it is one of the themes of this book that language teaching is a social and political activity. I hope that these essays will inspire readers to think about what progress might mean and to be involved in change. This has been one of my own preoccupations as a teacher and researcher, through my own work and that of my students. My professional life has been largely, though not exclusively, in Europe and this affects my perspective. All teachers will have their own personal picture within which their language teaching vision exists. They should be aware of this and of the way it impacts on their own thinking and practice.

The European situation is, however, a particularly interesting one and offers food for thought for other parts of the world. The ‘European project’ in which some kind of co-operation among nation states is taking place is an experiment in economics, identities, social policies and politics that may be followed elsewhere in the world.² Languages and language teaching have been an integral part of the evolution of nation states and this new situation has implications for language teaching in a post-nation-state world. One small indication of this is the plan to develop a parallel to the Common European Framework of Reference for languages in Asia, or the use of the Framework and related work in North America and elsewhere. I hope therefore that my European perspective will not be dismissed as parochial.

This is a book of essays. They can be read independently and in any order. This means that there is some repetition to ensure each can stand alone, and I have provided some notes between chapters that will help readers to locate them in the book as a whole. The essays can also be read in order, because there is a gradual move from the vision of language teaching that I think most teachers would share to a proposal for language teaching as political action that many will not immediately identify with. The title of the book traces a development in the vision that I hope will persuade. The book is, like all writing, an illocutionary act and, if it stimulates a response, whatever that may be, I shall be more than satisfied, having met Hobsbawm’s requirement.

Michael Byram

Durham, October 2007

Chapter 1

Foreign Language Education in Context

Three fundamental functions of all national education systems, and of compulsory education in particular, are to create the human capital required in a country’s economy, to develop a sense of national identity and to promote equality or at least a sense of social inclusion. In various degrees and forms these have been educational aims since the foundation of national education systems in Western Europe and North America, and were exported, together with the forms of schooling, to other parts of the world by the colonial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. The learning of a foreign language was in the early stages of this development, rather anomalous. It was not essential to the economy since it was colonial languages that were used in trade, supplemented by a few intermediaries with knowledge of local languages. It did not function in policies of equality or social inclusion but on the contrary was antithetical to these since only an elite learnt foreign languages. And it was, if anything, a potential threat to national identity because it introduced learners to different beliefs and values. In practice the threat was minimised by teaching methods based on translation, which by definition involves seeing another language and the values and beliefs it embodies through the framework of one’s own language, and one’s own beliefs and values.³

Some of the purposes and forms of education remain unaltered and are from time to time re-asserted,⁴ but social changes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries which are encapsulated in the words ‘globalisation’ and ‘internationalisation’ have given new meaning and significance to foreign language learning. One example of this is to be found in Western Europe, and increasingly in Central and Eastern Europe. The creation of a single market by the European Union is a microcosm of globalisation and has led to increased mobility and frequent interactions among people of different languages. This in turn has led to a political will to develop a new concept of identity, a European identity, which is fostered by increased foreign language learning. A second example is China, where entry into the World Trade Organisation is creating a demand for language learning on a massive scale but where access to international communication, particularly through the Internet, is perceived as sufficiently threatening to national values and beliefs to lead to censorship.

Foreign language education is thus no exception to the need to locate all education in its social, economic and political context. There are factors to be considered in the educational purposes as sketched above (and developed in detail in Chapter 2), but there are also factors to be taken into account in the definition of ‘foreign’ language education.

Defining Foreign Language Education

From a psychological perspective on the processes of language learning, there may be no useful distinction between ‘second’ and ‘foreign’ languages, since it can be argued that the acquisition processes are identical. In an educational and political context, however, the status of a language in a given society is important, and the distinction significant. Consider the case of French. In the anglophone provinces of Canada, French is taught as a Second Language, being one of the two official languages of the country. Across the border in the USA it is a foreign language with no official status but considerable prestige. In Australia, too, it is a foreign language but its prestige is being threatened by other foreign languages from countries such as Japan, which are geo-politically more important to Australia than to France. In India, French is present in the curriculum of the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, the major university for languages, but with the exception of Pondicherry is not otherwise a significant language in India. On the other hand, in some African countries it is an official language. Yet in both India and Africa, French is clearly a non-indigenous language, in one ‘foreign’ in the other ‘official’. Finally, in France, Belgium and Switzerland, French is taught as the or a national language and assumed to be school pupils’ ‘mother tongue’, even though there are many French, Belgian or Swiss citizens for whom it is chronologically their ‘second’ language since they have learnt, for example, Arabic in the home. Furthermore, it may not be perceived by some French citizens as their ‘national’ language because they accord this status to Breton or another language of an indigenous minority.

Secondly, it is important to distinguish ‘learning’ from ‘education’. In most countries, people learn more than one language in the course of their lives. They do so in many settings, of which educational institutions are only one; they learn in many ways, of which being taught in a classroom is only one. What distinguishes foreign language education from learning is that it has social and political purposes reflected in the formalities of an educational institution and embodied more or less explicitly in the learning aims and objectives attributed to the institution by governments at local or national level.

As a consequence of globalisation and internationalisation, these educational policies and aims have changed, or more accurately the emphasis has changed. Although there was a famous call for change in aims in the late 19th century, when in the ‘Reform Movement’, Viëtor said ‘Der Sprachunterricht muß umkehren’ (‘Language teaching must start afresh’), the fresh start took almost a hundred years to be accepted. The change required was from aims of acquiring a foreign language for purposes of understanding the high culture of great civilisations to aims of being able to use a language for daily communication and interaction with people from another country. As this change became accepted, ultimately under the banner of ‘Communicative Language Teaching’, the aims of language teaching in educational institutions began to coincide with the aims of people who learn languages in many other ways and locations. Foreign language education is now largely focused on the purposes of language learning and these seem self-evident to learners – and to politicians – and thus foreign language education has to meet the expectations of success in foreign language learning. Those expectations are high because parents and politicians see people around them, especially young children, apparently learning languages quickly and successfully in non-educational settings, through interaction with other children, through exposure to mass media. To what extent their expectations are justified and how often they are fulfilled varies from country to country and is an issue to which I shall return below.

To what extent the shift of focus in foreign language aims is satisfactory is still under debate. The shift within compulsory education seems to be almost complete, even if the practice lags behind the policy at times. For example, in Japan in 1993, a Government Commission on Foreign Language Policy Revision for the Twenty-First Century (see Koike & Tanaka, 1995), proposed fundamental structural change in syllabus, teacher training, public examinations, exchange programmes and so on, to improve learners’ communication skills. In the USA, the publication in 1996 of Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century (NSFLEP, 1996) moved away from a framework of four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) where the focus is on language as a system to be acquired, and substituted goal areas (communication, cultures, connections, comparisons and communities) where the focus is on what can be accomplished through a foreign language. The underlying principles are provided by three modes of communication – interpersonal, interactive and presentational – which describe the ways of functioning in a language. Similarly, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (Council of Europe, 2001) developed by the Council of Europe in the 1980s and 1990s proposes an approach based on an analysis of how languages are used in communication, on the ‘functions’ people use them for, the ‘notions’ they use them to express and the ‘tasks’ they wish to accomplish with them, instead of an analysis of the grammatical system.

All of these are influential documents on which new curricula and teaching methods are being constructed in the new century throughout the first world. The second world of the former Soviet bloc is also quickly moving from traditions of language learning based on linguistic analysis and is in fact overtaking many first-world countries by moving more quickly to this new position without passing through intermediary phases of language teaching methods such as the audio-lingual method. Changes in the third world are however much slower. Communication-skills methods require hardware and teaching materials, which are costly. Methods that rely on minimal equipment and which can be used in large classes, with emphasis on grammatical analysis, are still widespread. On the other hand, ‘new’ methods of developing communication skills by using a language as a medium of instruction in other subjects, which are currently being (re)discovered in Western Europe and imported from immersion programmes in North America, have been current in Eastern European countries for decades. In many African countries too, bilingual education is common. Here it is a necessity rather than a choice because foreign, i.e. non-indigenous, languages (English and French above all) are the official languages of many African countries and therefore automatically the languages of instruction. Children acquire them as a consequence of attending school.

The shift of emphasis to communication aims goes unchallenged in compulsory schooling and vocational education but is disputed in university education. Language teaching in universities for non-majors is following the shift in emphasis on aims and methods with little hesitation and the formation of an association to support this kind of teaching in Europe (the Confédération Européenne des Centres de Langues dans l’Enseignement Supérieur) is a symptom of the recognition of this function of university education. On the other hand, ‘study’ of languages, as opposed to language learning, for language majors and their lecturers, seems to be caught between the poles of language as ‘a means to an end’ and language as ‘an end in itself’. When language is a means to an end, the purpose has traditionally followed that of the study of classical languages – Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic – i.e. to gain access to great texts, often literary but not exclusively so. In some countries, the literary canon has been expanded to include, or given way absolutely to, the study of cultures and societies, drawing on a range of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, economics and history, and not just literary history and criticism. Astriking example of this is the growth in interest in British/American/Canadian Studies – the study of life in Britain/USA/Canada from many disciplinary perspectives – in departments of English where previously the study of English literature was the norm, the literature of the ‘native’ anglophone countries or in more recent times all literature written in English whatever the country of origin of the author. Similar developments are taking place in other language ‘disciplines’ and have for example fostered a debate in German Studies in the USA about what should be taught and which are the reference disciplines (Schulz et al., 2005). One of the issues is precisely whether language study is a ‘discipline’ with a clear definition of an object of study, a methodology and an epistemology, or whether it is an ‘area’ whose boundaries are in fact ‘fuzzy’ and, in the contemporary post-modern world, appropriately so (Di Napoli et al., 2001). In this environment, people also ask whether language study develops ‘criticality’ in students in higher education, because criticality is a crucial characteristic of university education. That it is possible to develop criticality even in beginners courses at university has been shown in the teaching of Japanese at a British University (Yamada, 2008). If language study were to be found wanting in this respect, questions might be raised as to its appropriateness as a university ‘discipline’ (Brumfit et al., 2004).

Foreign Language Education Policies

As foreign language learning has become more important for societies responding to globalisation and internationalisation, governments have paid more attention to policy-making. In many cases, the focus is on the teaching and learning of English, and in many countries, particularly in East Asia, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is almost synonymous with Foreign Language Learning. This is a consequence of British colonialism continued by American dominance of world affairs.

The role of English thus often dominates the development of language education policies and the teaching of English has been a major influence on the methods of teaching all foreign languages. The most significant factor in policy-making for EFL is the relationship English has with native-speaker communities. As an ‘international language’, there should in principle be no priority accorded to British or US English, or in fact any other country where English is the national or official language. Yet there is still a strong tendency in many countries to pay allegiance by accepting British or US norms of language use, of pronunciation, of grammatical correctness and of dictionary definitions of meanings. Despite the special circumstances of English being spoken by many more non-native than native speakers, native speaker norms are still taken as international norms, in spite of the questioning of the whole concept of ‘nativeness’ in this sense, and in spite of the potential for an international English with its own norms of pronunciation and grammar (Jenkins, 2000; Seidlhofer, 2003; Davies, 2003). For example, in Singapore, the government has formulated an explicit policy of maintaining external norms against the development of Singaporean English, not least for fear of Singaporeans losing competence in the major medium of international trade.

Native speakers, and the governments and cultural institutes of native speaker countries, have a vested interest in promoting attitudes of deference to native-speaker norms in that they thereby continue to dominate communication and gain advantage in negotiation. There has been much debate about the argument that there is both conscious and unconscious ‘linguistic imperialism’ (Phillipson, 1992; Phillipson & Davies, 1997) beneath these processes. On the other hand there is growing evidence that the dominance of native speakers, for example as teachers setting and embodying linguistic and cultural norms, is being challenged (Medgyes, 1994), and international users of English are taking ownership of it for their own purposes (Canagarajah, 1999).

Other languages and their native-speaker communities have not been criticised as vehemently as English. Nonetheless the institutionalisation and promotion of French, German, Italian and Spanish (in the Alliance Française, the Goethe-Institut, the Istituto Italiana di Cultura and the Cervantes Institute) is an indicator of the significance of the teaching of their languages in the foreign policies of the countries in question. The Cervantes Institute, for example, was founded in 1991, embracing the aims of language teaching for communication, and the significance of Spanish continues to grow in the commercial development of South America and as the second language of the USA. The Goethe-Institut plays a crucial role in the teaching of German because in many countries German does not have a substantial place in school-level education, but is learnt by adults, and adult education is seldom a priority for governments. The Goethe-Institut thus offers a systematic base for the learning of German and it too has embraced communicative aims for language learning.

Policy responses to the evolving significance of language learning, and in particular the dominance of English, are mainly based on acceptance of the trend towards English. Avery striking example of this was presented in Japan in a ‘Report of the Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century’ (Kawai, 2007):

It is necessary to set the concrete objective of all citizens acquiring a working knowledge of English by the time they take their place in society as adults, organise English classes according to level of achievement, improve training and objective assessment of English teachers, expand the number of foreign teachers of English, contract language schools to handle English classes, and other general materials. In addition, the central government, local governments, and other public institutions must be required to produce their publications, home pages, and so on in both Japanese and English. … In the long term, a national debate on whether to make English an official second language will be needed. (Commission of Japan’s Goals in the 21st Century, 2000: 10)

The final statement caused uproar. The threat to national identity that has in principle always been present in the teaching of foreign languages but never in practice, suddenly loomed very large.

Politicians in democratic societies, at whatever level they operate, follow the perceived demands and needs of their publics, who seek every opportunity to learn English, to have English introduced to their children at an early age, to use English for work and leisure. These perceptions may not be as well-founded as they seem and the future of English may be less dominant, evolving simply as one of a number of languages an individual speaks (Graddol, 1997, 2006). Furthermore, as the case of education in France demonstrates, the choice of foreign language by parents for their children can sometimes support languages other than English since the choice of a ‘difficult’ or ‘less widely used’ language ensures a pupil is placed in a good learning environment and among an elite. Nonetheless, here too, the tendency is for a reduction of diversity as most parents ‘play safe’ and choose English (Puren, 2000).

Policies to encourage diversity of language learning in non-anglophone countries thus run against the trend and are difficult to sustain in a democracy. In Eastern and Central Europe, memories of the obligatory learning of Russian, which people counteracted by deliberately forgetting all they had been taught, are a strong barrier to enforced language policies in the new democratic era. On the other hand, there is some recognition in policy-making that language teaching is a necessary but not sufficient response to change, and needs to be accompanied by ‘internationalisation’ of the whole curriculum in compulsory education. Examples include Japan, South Korea, Sweden and Denmark where such a policy has been formulated by national ministries of education. This typically means that teachers of all subjects are expected to make explicit the international dimension; science teachers might draw attention to the nationality of well-known scientists and the places and circumstances in which their discoveries were made, or mathematics teachers might draw out the historical origins of mathematics in the Arabic-speaking world. Visits and exchanges with other countries are seen not simply as an opportunity to practise foreign languages but as occasions for cross-curricular projects and comparative studies.

Policies are made by national governments and sometimes by sub-national entities. The European Union is the only example of a supranational polity that believes that it needs to develop a language education policy. As a political entity with, at the time of writing, 23 ‘official and working languages’ functioning in its institutions, it formulated ten years earlier a policy that all citizens of its member states should learn three of these languages, their own national language and two foreign languages of the European Community (European Commission, 1995). This was seen as crucial to the development of the economy and a sense of identity, not unlike the policies of nation states:

Proficiency in several Community languages has become a precondition if citizens of the European Union are to benefit from the occupational and personal opportunities open to them in the border-free single market. This language proficiency must be backed up by the ability to adapt to working and living environments characterised by different cultures.

Languages are also the key to knowing other people. Proficiency in languages helps to build up the feeling of being European with all its cultural wealth and diversity and of understanding between the citizens of Europe. (European Commission, 1995: 67; emphasis added)

However, in more recent documents the simple and attractive ‘one plus two languages’ policy has been emphasised less than the importance of diversification in language learning in a European Union that has almost doubled in the number of member states since the 1995 document.

The Council of Europe is similarly a supra-national body, but focused on cultural co-operation. It embraces 46 member states at the time of writing, almost twice as many as the 25 of the European Union, and has also formulated a policy to promote linguistic diversity. It has not committed itself to a specific number of languages but recognised that diversity is a function of each particular situation and should be pursued as an over-arching principle:

Council of Europe language education policies aim to promote:

• Plurilingualism: all are entitled to develop a degree of communicative ability in a number of languages over their lifetime in accordance with their needs.

• Linguistic diversity: Europe is multilingual and all its languages are equally valuable modes of communication and expressions of identity; the right to use and to learn one’s language(s) is protected in Council of Europe Conventions.

• Mutual understanding: the opportunity to learn other languages is an essential condition for intercultural communication and acceptance of cultural differences.

• Democratic citizenship: participation in democratic and social processes in multilingual societies is facilitated by the plurilingual competence of individuals.

• Social cohesion: equality of opportunity for personal development, education, employment, mobility, access to information and cultural enrichment depends on access to language learning throughout life. (Council of Europe, 2005: 4)

In both cases, the wish to promote diversity stems partly from a recognition of the economic value of plurilingual individuals able to move freely in a multilingual market-place, and partly from a concern to sustain the culturally diverse heritage of European countries.

A comparable policy in nation states would promote continuing cultural, and not only commercial, relations with a wide range of countries, not just those where English is the native or official language. Understanding of other cultures, for example of China or of Arabic-speaking countries, presupposes acquisition of Chinese or Arabic in order to have access to significant texts. A policy that encourages diversity in language learning for these reasons would be a revival of earlier aims of language learning for cultural purposes. Although it would be perceived as incompatible with communication aims and emphasis on major languages, above all English, it has in fact a complementary function since political and economic affairs often founder not on a lack of linguistic competence but on a lack of cultural understanding.

The policy dilemmas in anglophone countries are different. Despite what might appear to be the advantages of ‘linguistic imperialism’, the US President’s Commission on language learning was established