When I was 10
years old I wanted to become a veterinary. What better job for an animal lover
like myself than spending the rest of my life saving those lovely creatures I
couldn’t stop reading about in encyclopedias and books? Fortunately (or maybe
not) I’ve always been a quite down to earth type of girl, so it wasn’t long
before my brain started thinking about the ugly truth: animals too must die.
Then I freaked out, how on earth was I going to tell a family that I couldn’t
save their beloved dog/cat/bird/anaconda and that it had died? And so, as that
dream came it also went away, I got overwhelmed by the responsibility of having
the life of something as dear to someone in my hands.
Many years
later, here I am in college, studying two careers I chose quite randomly, to be
honest. However, I have completely clear from which one I’m going to live off,
and even though Social Communication has a huge incidence in people’s life, it
isn’t as direct and blunt as it is Veterinary. It never occurred to me that my
other career is even scarier than animal or human medicine.
Not until last
year, when I began working on my thesis project. My partner and I want to study
the different ways in which student’s identities are molded and affected
(please, note that even though I use this word, I don’t mean for it to have a
negative connotation) by the L2 input they receive in school. And so it got me.
Even though I don’t plan on being a teacher, I will be one for at least a year;
enough time, in my own experience, to affect in some way the life of a student.
I will have some incidence in the life of a human being that I will personally
know and that will be there to run the world when I get old… oh-my-god.
Good thing, my
panic attack served to write a justification for our thesis project and to get
me thinking. I can’t run away again, if I’m going to do this I might as well do
it well. Besides, 13 years later, it doesn’t seem like a horror story anymore,
it is more like a challenge and the opportunity to learn new things and use
those that I’ve already learnt.
Even though, as
I admitted, my two careers were not chosen with a conscious process of
reflection, I’ve found that both share many aspects, and the
common basis of language, a phenomenon that fascinates me. “La lengua es el principal medio a través del cual
llevamos nuestras vidas sociales. Cuando es utilizada en contextos de
comunicación está ligada a la cultura en formas múltiples y complejas.” (Kramsch,
1993) Therefore, everything we, as teachers, say and teach to our students
will, one way or another, affect their lives: how they perceive the L2 and its
culture, how they perceive their L1 and its culture and how the use them both
in different contexts to construct themselves.
A key term here is
cultural identity, as defined by Díaz (2001) “…identificada en este sentido con
la percepción, conciencia, modo de actuar y pensar de los miembros de una
comunidad, pueblo o nación, acerca del medio natural y social en que se
desenvuelven, a la forma en que las personas se conocen como algo singular
respecto a otros, mostrado a través de sus sentimientos, actitudes ante la
vida, acciones creadoras y expresiones culturales. Un proceso consciente de reconocimiento,
asimilación y creación”. This will be a fundamental aspect during my
research and my observation process. We chose it, precisely, because it
understands the identity as something that, even though is partially given by
the context, it also has a conscious component and that affects every aspect of
the person’s life. Here are two aspects that I’m interested in seeing directly
in my school: first, what tools are given to the students and how they utilize
them to achieve an effective use of the L2 (and to learn what the school
considers to be effective); secondly, how is the balance between L1 and L2
(and, specially of each culture) managed inside the school and its other
activities, besides the English classes.
Doing my research for sources, I’ve found that not much
theory has been written about the implications of L2 teaching/learning, but
there is an extensive list of works that study this specific situation within
different contexts. It kind of difficult things, but this aspect also reveals
one of the main characteristics of dealing with this phenomenon: even though we
all as EFL teachers are, in general terms, giving the same input to our
students, our backgrounds, and especially those of our students, make each teaching/learning
experience completely different. Quintero (2009) found through her work with a
school from the Coffee Region that to involve the L1 culture meant a significant
teaching approach that proved to be much more effective than a curriculum that
didn’t take into account the students’ immediate reality. This is another important
aspect, since, whether our objective is to just teach the language or to embed
the student as much as possible into the target culture, establishing a
connection with what the student already knows and lives with on his daily life
will facilitate the teaching/learning process. How much of that L1 context is
used and why is also something that intrigues me. How such a decision is made?
My objective is not to judge the teaching methods of my
school, but just to analyze them. I think it is not my place to decide what is
wrong or right, but what I can do is look into the reasons behind the ways of
teaching and what they mean to the students. What type of English users are
they trying to educate and for what purpose? The phenomenon of bilingualism in
a country such as Colombia is quite complicated and, as far as I could see, it
is mainly studied in the context of indigenous populations, and the academy
tends to overlook the fact that higher strata schools with non-indigenous
students too represent a rich field that needs to be talked about; the social,
political and economical implications of raising the children of (a horrible
name, but I lack a better term) our higher and middle classes with certain
ideas regarding their Colombian heritage in comparison with the English culture
need to be analyzed carefully, as it is suggested by de Mejía (2006) “bilingualism
in internationally prestigious languages (particularly Spanish-English
bilingualism) has been privileged. This is seen as providing access to a highly
‘visible’, socially-accepted form of bilingualism, leading to the possibility
of employment in the global market-place. In contrast, bilingualism in minority
Amerindian or Creole languages has been generally undervalued and associated
with an `invisible` form of bilingualism related to underdevelopment, poverty
and backwardness”. In this work she also introduces the notion of multicultural
users, are we teaching students to be able to build bridges between the two
cultures or are we teaching them to “change their hard drives” to communicate
in each language?
To answer the question I used for the name of this entry, I
would like to think about the children, what is our profession making out of
them?
Bibliography
·
Díaz, R. (2001), citado por Macías, R. (2012) en El Trabajo Sociocultural Comunitario
Fundamentos Epistemológicos, Metodológicos y Prácticos para su realización.
Recuperado desde http://www.eumed.net/libros-gratis/2012a/1171/index.htm
·
Kramsch (1993), citado por Prathoomthin,S. (2009) en Learners’ Perceptions of Culture through
Movies. Electronic Journal of Foreign
Language Teaching, (6), 291-301. Recuperado desde http://e-flt.nus.edu.sg/v6sp12009/prathoomthin.htm#2.1
·
Mejía, A. (2006). Bilingual Education
in Colombia: Towards a Recognition of Languages, Cultures and Identities.Colomb.
Appl. Linguist. J, 0(8), 152-168. Recuperado desde http://revistas.udistrital.edu.co/ojs/index.php/calj/article/view/176
·
Quintero,
J. (2009). Contextos culturales en el aula de inglés. Íkala, 17(11), 151-177.
Recuperado desde http://aprendeenlinea.udea.edu.co/revistas/index.php/ikala/article/view/2784/2239
