Embracing Dissonant Voices In English Classrooms

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine whether a pedagogy grounded in dialogical ideals has the potential to empower students to make changes in English classroom interaction. The study first scrutinized the traditional “banking” educational system in English classrooms in which students were passive learners to realize students’ silence and powerlessness in classrooms. Then, after realizing students’ silence and resistance in traditional English classrooms, with a vision of social change, the researcher proposed the dialogical interaction pedagogy to the English class to challenge the traditional view of authority and power, with an eye to exposing how dominant education was constructed through language and discourse. Unlike the traditional teaching-learning structures in which instructors act as authorities and subjects, and students act as objects and receivers, the dialogical English classroom, adapted from traditional classroom hierarchy structures, is a double-voiced or even multiple-voiced English learning environment in which both the teacher and students work together to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have long become the norm in the contemporary English classroom system.