Communication and Participatory Involvement in Linguistically Diverse Classrooms

Abstract

The main purpose of this chapter is to present a refl exive examination of the notion of communication in English Language Teaching (ELT). The widespread demand for English as an additional or complementary language in different world locations has spawned a thriving English Language Teaching profession, sustained an internationalized academic community, and created a textbook market for transnational publishing houses. Promoting learners’ capacity to communicate meaning through language with others is routinely presented as a key pedagogic goal. In particular, the concept of communicative competence, understood here as the capacity to communicate with others through language effectively, has informed a good deal of the curriculum, pedagogic, and assessment developments in ELT in the past 40 years (cf. Canagarajah, this volume; Li Wei, this volume). Historically, the advent of the concept of communicative competence in language teaching in the 1970s was widely seen as a moment when the traditional grammar-focused approaches gave way to a more socially and culturally sensitive approach to language modeling, curriculum design, and classroom pedagogy. This sociocultural turn was promoted energetically by leading theorists, researchers, and senior professionals in ELT, and it has since been consolidated into a teaching approach known as communicative language teaching (CLT) (for further discussion see Howatt & Widdowson, 2004, Chapter 20; Leung, 2010). It would be no exaggeration to say that communicative competence has come to be seen as a professional “kite mark” signaling intellectual respectability and desirable qualities in real-life curriculum applications. For instance, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of Europe, 2001, Chapter 2), a high-status transnational curriculum framework for language education and simultaneously an assessment framework for language profi ciency, claims to be conceptually grounded in communicative competence.