Using Graphic Oral History Texts to Operationalize the TEIL Paradigm and Multimodality in the Malaysian English Language Classroom

Abstract

The adoption of commercial language-teaching materials produced in the United Kingdom, or the United States, is a common practice in English language teaching (ELT) worldwide. This is due to the wide perception of British and American English as the standard, favorable models of the English language. This practice, however, does not support the increasing and urgent shift to the teaching English as an international language (TEIL) paradigm, and it further perpetuates the hegemony of these Western countries over the market of ELT materials. In this paper, we seek to not only problematize the adoption of global commercial materials but also propose a conceptual model for composing effective local ELT materials for the Malaysian English language classroom. In doing so, we refer to the relevant literature and previous research. The proposed conceptual model embraces the TEIL paradigm as well as multimodality and executes them by utilizing oral history and the graphic novel as two powerful pedagogical tools. By combining these two pedagogies, the model accentuates the acknowledged pedagogical value of both oral history and the graphic novel and results in local-context and culture-based texts that are also consistent with the current nature of texts being visual and multimodal. Furthermore, the paper showcases some samples of graphic oral history texts composed by Malaysian English language teachers and student teachers in two projects.