Philippine Normal University

The National Center for Teacher Education

GRADUATE STUDIES
Taft, Manila

Submitted by: Jaypee C. de Guzman

Submitted to: Dr. Cecilia M. Mendiola

LIST OF ISSUES ON SLE (SECOND LANGUAGE EDUCATION)
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CENTRAL ISSUES ON SLE BY ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK

1. The tendency in SLE to divorce itself from broader aspects of

educational theory.

Stern (1983) suggests that of all the disciplines that inform language teaching,
educational theory has been the least dealt with: A more deliberate
interpretation of language teaching in curriculum terms and, more broadly, in
terms of educational theory is needed if we want to arrive at a more balanced and
more comprehensive view of teaching.

Language teaching has remained strangely isolated from educational theory and
the sociopolitical questions that better educational theorists have been more
inclined to raise. In trying to understand why this should be so, it is perhaps first
worth considering the particular nature of the language class itself, i.e. that
language is both the content and the medium of the class, a relationship which
has perhaps led language teaching theory to look in on itself and become overly
concerned with the inner workings of language and language learning at the
expense of other issues. The move towards technical views of the curriculum
earlier this century, the arrival of positivism in sociology, psychology, and
educational theory in the 195Os, and the growing specialization of educational
subdisciplines within a conceptual-empirical model, laid the ground for the
growth of applied linguistics as a scientist discipline divorced from broader
social, cultural, political or philosophical issues.

Also, the focus in SLE, as Allen (1984) and Richards (1985) have pointed out, has
primarily been on the syllabus-the selection and sequencing of language items to
be taught rather
 than on broader curricular concerns. It is the linguistic sciences and
psycholinguistics that have been the principal informing disciplines for SLE, a
position typified by Spolskys (1980: p. 72) model of the main contributing
disciplines to educational linguistics. Arguing that a theory of language
(linguistics) is insufficient, he adds theories of learning (psycholinguistics) and of
language use (sociolinguistics), arriving at a model of SLE that nowhere includes
educational theory. When one considers the predominance of structuralist
paradigms in these areas (especially as adopted by applied linguists), with their
claims to asocial, apolitical and ahistorical investigative
procedures, it starts to become clearer how SLEs isolation may have come about.

2. The need to look to critical pedagogy as the most provocative area of

educational thought today.
The critical pedagogy theorists view (e.g. Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren,
Roger Simon) are two predominant elements: a notion of critique that also carries with
it a sense of possibility for transformation, and an exploration of the nature of and
relationship between culture, knowledge and power. Viewing schools as cultural arenas
where diverse ideological and social forms are in constant struggle, critical pedagogy
examines schools both in their contemporary sociopolitical context and in their
historical context. Drawing on various critical traditions-the work of European critical
theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, the North American tradition from
Dewey through the social reconstructionists of the 1930s and more recent work in the
new sociology of education, feminism and post-modernist and post-structuralist
thought-these theorists articulate a position strongly opposed to positivistic, ahistorical
and depoliticised analyses of politics and power in education.
The strongest and most pressing criticisms have, not surprisingly, been aimed at the
conservative discourse on education, especially in its newly resurgent form embodied in
the work of writers such as Bloom and Hirsch. These writers, as Aronowitz and Giroux
(1988) and Feinberg (1989) point out, link apparent crises in American economic and
military power with a crisis in schooling and suggest that this has in turn been caused by
the liberal educational reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. From this human capital
perspective, a position is then made for forms of schooling that emphasize
monoparadigmatic forms of culture either as a programmatic list of cultural literacy or
the Great Books, and forms of knowledge and skill deemed necessary to produce a
labor force that can compete aggressively in the world market. As Giroux (1988) points
out-and David (1989) and Apple (1989) suggest that similar trends are occurring under
Thatcherism in Britain-this position has led to a stress on extreme authority in the
classroom, to curricula that emphasize a narrow selection of both skills and forms of
culture and knowledge and to a view of education that ignores all political issues around
minority, race, class, or gender issues.
Furthermore, through the perception that society is actually unequal and unfair, critical
approaches to second Educators of English as a Second Language (ESL) who believe in
critical pedagogy find it significant to adapt the theory of critical pedagogy into their
curriculum and syllabuses particularly as ESL teaching mostly deals with racial and
language minorities (i.e. immigrants and foreign students). According to the studies
conducted on second language learner identities by Norton, 2000; MaKay and Wong,
1996; Miller, 2003, some second language learners, without social, communicative, and
linguistic competencies, and often with damaged identities, face hardships living in
anew country. Language teaching and learning must be connected to the objectives of
educating students, to understand why things are the way they are and how they got to
be that way (Simon, cited in Morgan, 1998). Critical ESL pedagogy is the pedagogy of
hope (Freire, 1992).

REFERENCES
FREIRE, P. (1984). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Publishing Corporation.
GIROUX, H. A. and SIMON, R. (1989) Popular culture and critical pedagogy: everyday life as a
basis for curriculum knowledge. In Giroux, H. A. and McLaren, P. (eds), Critical Pedagogy, the
State, und Cultural Struggle, pp. 236-252. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
MORGAN, B. (1998). The ESL classroom: Teaching, critical practice and community
development. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
NORTON, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educationalchange.
Harlow, England: Longman/Pearson Education.
SPOLSKY, B. (1980) The scope of educational linguistics. In Kaplan, R. B. (ed.), On the Scope of
Applied Linguistics. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
STERN, H. H. (1983) Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: OUP.
PENNYCOOK, A. (1989) The concept of method, interested knowledge, and the politics of
language teaching. TESOL Quarterly 23, 589-618.