Authenticity, communities and hidden potentials

1. Authenticity, communities and hidden potentials Adrian Holliday

2. Stating the obvious

3. New understandings in ELT • Appreciating a globalised world • Newly? • Always? • English can no longer be associated simplistically with any particular origins • Speakerhood? • Methodology? • Culture of learning and teaching? • Form and standard?

4. Critical cosmopolitan understandings Ethnographies of hidden learning Egypt HE Sri Lanka secondary Hong Kong secondary Kuwait HE UAE HE China HE, secondary UK, secondary Taiwan-UK FE Iran-UK FE Why are they surprising? Un-established ‘autonomy’ Marginalised cultural realities claiming the world Learning from the margins

5. Complexity of community Communities Contexts Particularities Diversity Cultural resources Can engage with anything, in their own terms Underlying universal cultural processes Individuals Cosmopolitan Claiming the world Cultural practices Authentic Stamping their own identity on the language Professional & popular discourses Modernism (e.g. one-language-one-culture-one-learning-style)

6. The notion of linguaculture • When I as a Dane move around the world, I tend to build on my Danish linguaculture, when I speak English, French or German. I therefore contribute to the flow of Danish linguaculture across languages. • (Risager 2011: 110) • Small and personal • Autonomy, diversity and complexity

7. What teachers therefore need to encourage in their students • The ability to research their existing linguacultural experience • The ability to stamp their identities on English • An avoidance of restrictive popular discourses about culture, language and learning

8. What teachers therefore need to know • The value and the contribution of their students' communities, languages and cultural experience • What therefore makes truly authentic content • How to allow space for authentic learning • The politics of ‘culture’ and ELT professionalism

9. Unavoidable challenges • This opening up of creative possibilities • Problematises traditional English teacher knowledge and professionalism • Fine balance between regulation and messiness

10. References • Adichie (2007).Half of a yellow sun. Kindle edition. Harper Collins e-books. • Canagarajah (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism. Oxford • Clemente & Higgins (2008). Performing English as a postcolonial accent: ethnographic narratives from México. Tufnell Press • Ghahremani-Ghajar et al (2012). We have been living with this pain: enquiry-based language learning in Iranian higher education. Teaching in Higher Education 17/3: 269-81. • Gong & Holliday (in press). Cultures of change. In Hyland & Wong (Eds.), Innovation and change in English language education. Routledge • Hall (1991). The local and the global: globalisation and ethnicity. Culture, globalisation and the world-system. Palgrave: 19-39. • Holliday (2005). The struggle to teach English as an international language. Oxford University Press. • –– (2011). Intercultural communication & ideology. Sage. • –– (in press). Understanding intercultural communication: negotiating a grammar of culture. Routledge. • Kumaravadivelu (2012). Individual identity, cultural globalization, and teaching English as an international language: the case for an epistemic break. In Alsagoff et al (Eds.), Principles and practices for teaching English as an international language. Routledge: 9-27. • Risager (2011). Linguaculture and transnationality. In Jackson (Ed.), Routledge handbook of language & intercultural communication. Routledge: 101-5. • Saraceni (2010).The relocation of English: shifting paradigms in a global era. Palgrave Macmillan.