Global English, Global Teachers, Global Values?

Global English, Global Values, Global Teachers?
Tamas Kiss
In this paper I am going to examine how globalisation affects the way English teachers work in different contexts around the globe. I will look at whether the fact that we live in a globalised world and whether Global or international English is being taught and learned have an influence on teachers work in their different educational and cultural contexts. This, I believe is very important when one wishes to understand how classroom decisions are made and what guides teachers in their everyday work. Do teachers operate differently in their local environments? Do they actually teach in different ways or is English Language Teaching (ELT) is becoming a globalised profession? These are the important questions this paper sets out to answer. Globalisation in Education Globalisation, in a very simplified way, works through four different modes. These are globalisation through i) trade; ii) investment; iii) human resources; and iv) exchange of knowledge. In the field of education, all four modes can be experienced to varying degrees. The first two, trade and investment, do not typically characterise education, although there are certain signs that they are gaining more grounds. One way to think of some of the large publishing houses whose books are available all over the world to understand immediately that global trade does have some influence in education. Global investment, on the other hand, is hardly present in education. One form of investment is manifested in the foundation and management of international schools. However, this is far from being global. Although these schools seem to flourish in some contexts, they are hardly present in others. For example, in Singapore the Ministry of Education website (c.f. http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/privateeducation/school-list/) lists 45 schools which follow a curriculum other than the Singaporean national syllabus. These are labelled as foreign system schools by the ministry and run by different organisations some obviously with the aim of earning a profit, rather than providing sound education for the students. A completely different scenario can be found in CentralEastern European countries which can only list a few such institutions within their borders. The two more prominent modes of globalisation in the educational world are globalisation through human resources and the exchange of knowledge. There is hardly any explanation needed to illustrate how these work, but I will nevertheless offer a few examples to illustrate
Paper presented at the Access: The 1st Philippine International English Language Conference and 11 UK Education Fair. Manila, 31 January 1 February, 2009.
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my point. Nowadays people travel all across the globe to take up jobs in far away countries. Brain-drain, as it is commonly referred to, is typically practised in education. Countries with readily available resources and budgets offer bright minds from less fortunate countries the opportunity and means to work in their educational systems. As a result, it is often easy to find a colourful mix of people at prospering universities. My department, for example, is employing professors and lecturers from a multitude of countries including Singapore, China, Malaysia, Myanmar, the United States, the UK, Democratic Republic of Congo, Vietnam, Philippines, Hungary, etc. The second prominent mode of globalisation in education, through exchange of knowledge, is very easy to recognise. It is especially so when ELT is considered. I will briefly explain why. ELT has its origins from BANA countries, i.e. from Britain, Australia and North America, where the need arouse to teach people of other languages English. Major trends in language pedagogy started from these countries and reached every corner of the world. With the development of telecommunication and information technology new ideas and achievements have easily reached far away places and thus knowledge is shared more easily in our time than ever before. Therefore, it is quite possible that two language educators in opposite corners of the world are reading the same article at the same time through an internet portal they both subscribe to, or that teachers who use the British Council TeachingEnglish website (http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/language-assistant/teaching-tips) are checking out the same teaching tips during the course of their preparation for their classes. This indicates that ELT is indeed globalised to a certain extent.
Is English Language Teaching a Global Profession? Whereas in some areas of business globalisation has reached its pinnacle by offering exactly the same services or products all over the world, e.g. the way certain fast-food chains offer the same design and food in their outlets, it is questionable whether the same can be found in education. With English becoming a truly global language and education is being influenced by the processes of globalisation we need to examine how the everyday classroom reality is affected. One way of doing this is to examine the values and believes that guide teachers work in their classrooms. If they show similar features and trends in different parts of the world, then we may possibly arrive at the conclusion that ELT is globalised and classrooms should be similar regardless of their physical location. However, examining values is not an easy task. It is very
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difficult to define what motivates teachers actions or how they make decisions in the classroom. One of the reasons behind this difficulty is - besides the complex nature of values formation - that teachers do not seem to follow a language teaching methodology systematically in their practice any more. As early as in the 1990s, Richards (1990) pointed out the fact that teachers seemed to move beyond methods in their classes. Teachers have not been applying methodology in any rigorous manner, that is following strictly and consistently what the principles and theories behind the chosen methodology would require, but they are trying to use whatever makes sense for them in their own work contexts. Another researcher, Kumaravadivelu (1994) talked about language teaching as being characterised by the post method condition. He argued that the present-day language teaching was, and basically is, characterised by a pick and mix of activities, techniques and procedures that teachers apply in their classrooms. He pointed out that teachers did not use a method in the systematic way it was designed to be used, thus they arrived at a postmethod stage. Just like Richards (1990), he argues that methods no longer determine how teaching is done in the classroom. Brown (2002) makes a further step claiming that methods are actually dead. He points out that in present-day language classrooms teachers only use what they see pragmatically fit for their needs. They do not subscribe to any methodology, any organised school of thought about language teaching but choose whatever seems to be appropriate in the course of their work. Having seen the above trends, I strongly believe that the changes which take us beyond language teaching methodology emphasise the need to look at the educational values of teachers more carefully. I reckon that it is only by examining their values and beliefs we can understand what we see in classroom practices. It is imperative, therefore, that the formation of educational values is understood and studied thoroughly together with the individual teaching philosophies of classroom teachers.
The importance of values and beliefs in education Beliefs, values and feelings, besides the training teachers receive, actually determine how a professional behaves in the classroom and, thus, they have a significant impact on the teaching and learning process. Galan and Maguire (2001) point out the significance of values and teacher beliefs in their research in which an average class was divided into two equal sub-groups. Two different teachers were assigned to teach the groups but they were given contradictory
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information about the learners: one was told that his group was selected from the most able students, while the other teacher was informed that the students in his group were underachievers. At the beginning and at end of the research project the students were tested to determine their educational level and how much they had learned during the experiment. The results were rather surprising: the students, whose teacher thought that he was working with the clever ones, improved their previous scores; they managed to perform better on the test than their previous average. The other students whose teacher believed that he was working with poor ability students actually scored below their previous performance. What can be the explanation for this? Galan and Maguire (2001) believe this was due to their teachers beliefs about the students potentials and learning abilities. They say that the educators belief became the students reality (2001). If that is so, then we not only need to consider the existing educational values of teachers, but we should also try to understand how these are formed. This is what I will discuss in the next part of my paper.
The formation of educational values and beliefs Values and beliefs usually do not come out of blue skies. They have a history, either personal or social, and they tend to be very persistent in their nature. Changing values and beliefs is not an easy task; maybe that is the reason why education is generally considered to be a very traditional profession. The question, therefore, has to be raised: how are those ideas and concepts that guide us in our everyday practice formed? Any new idea or concept we encounter, let them be new teaching techniques or views on a certain group of people, is categorised and attached to an already existing schema in our mind. This is what psychology terms as anchoring (Lszl, 1999). If an idea cannot be connected to an existing category, then the brain would reject it as irrelevant for the individual. For example, when you hear about Hungarians, the new information will be grouped with already existing information about this group of people (if not to Hungarians, then to Eastern Europeans, or Europeans). This process is clearly illustrated by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), in a poem titled The Blind Men and the Elephant. Six blind men who meet an elephant (an unknown animal to them) try to figure out how it might look, or what it might be by relying on their intact senses. Thus, the one who touches the side of the animal compares it to a wall, while the one holding the tail is convinced that the elephant is like a rope. Basically they are all correct, but they are far from the truth since none of them can comprehend the whole picture of what it is
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to be an elephant. They use their existing knowledge of the world to make sense of the new experience. The result is what you can see in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Picture of the elephant as seen by the six blind men (source: www.wordinfo.info)
This is exactly how we construct our own understanding of teaching methods and techniques. New ideas are presented at conferences, perceived and attached to an already existing category in our mind. If they do not seem to fit perfectly, then they might be altered to allow anchoring and further interpretation. In other words, we always rely on our previous beliefs or philosophy of teaching when new educational concepts are introduced. These are evaluated mostly at an unconscious level and then we form our own beliefs about them. However, in the process of conceptualisation, or the formation of new beliefs about teaching and learning, our interpretations might result in a completely different set of practices which are far from their original intention. As I pointed out earlier, in ELT new teaching ideas usually come from English speaking countries, such as the UK, North America (US and Canada) and from Australia. These ideas are readily available, thanks to globalisation, through a multitude of traditional (e.g. books, journals, conferences) and modern (e.g. internet, television, etc.) channels and teachers in different parts of the world may apply them, either by following their intrinsic motivation or under the pressure of decision makers, what they learn in their own contexts. However, the question remains: how do people react to these new ideas? Are they actually put implemented in the same way in all classrooms or do teachers interpret them according to their already existing schemas about education? To what extent do their existing values (social, cultural and personal)
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prompt them to reinterpret new theories and see them in differently? How many elephants, as pictured in Figure 1, walk in the ELT classrooms?
English Language Teachers values across continents In order to examine and compare teacher values across cultural boundaries I designed a research project in which I worked with teachers from Europe, South Asia and South East Asia. I wanted to examine whether the educational values of teachers in the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Romania would be different from those influencing teachers classroom practice in Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The project was exploratory in its nature and thus it did not aim to provide conclusive evidence or a thorough analysis of teacher values in the above countries. It did aim, however, to identify trends in participants answers which may then inform a more rigorous research project. The research instrument was a questionnaire on educational philosophy which I adopted from a previous research project (Kiss, 2006) that aimed to examine the educational values and beliefs of Hungarian English language teachers, and which originally was developed by the Minnesota Department of Education. The data collected with the questionnaires were processed with a computer programme called Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The reason why educational philosophy was used to map out participating teachers values was that educational philosophy, in its simplest interpretation, is a discipline which is concerned with widening and deepening our knowledge of education with focusing tools of philosophy on educational ideas, theories, arguments, issues and problems (Farrel, Kerry and Kerry 1995:170). Since different schools of philosophy offer explanations and have created their own interpretations and explanations of our world, it is worthwhile examining how their views can be interpreted in education. Each school has had its own thought of human nature (metaphysics), knowledge (epistemology), and finally, on what people hold as valuable, and how value is defined in society (axiology). As a result of this, philosophical tools examining these areas can indeed be used to measure what constitutes teacher values. Of course, teacher values cannot be considered as the products of schools of philosophies or professional thinking, which in our case is language teaching - only, since they originate from the values that stem from a particular society. Pacek (1996:335) rightly says that, peoples attitudes and beliefs reflect the cultural values of a given society, and are deeply rooted in
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tradition. Philosophy, therefore, not only offers a framework in which teacher values can be fully understood and appreciated, but it also provides an opportunity to examine whether teachers who have been raised up and socialised into different societies hold similar values as a result of their professional education, or whether they follow different routes to professional practice as a result of their cultural differences.
Data collection As was pointed out in the previous section, a questionnaire was used to collect data. The questionnaire consisted of 90 statements from five different schools of philosophy: idealism, essentialism, existentialism, pragmatism, and behaviourism. The statements were organised into three different parts: 30 statements were attached to metaphysics, i.e. human nature, 30 were connected to epistemology, that is teaching and learning, and finally, the last 30 statements focussed on axiology, which discusses values and what is valuable in our life. Within each of these areas, six statements were connected to each school of philosophy and presented in a mixed order. Therefore, participants were not able to guess which statement was attached to which school of philosophy. When they filled out the questionnaire participants simply had to indicate whether they agreed or disagreed with the statements. Altogether, 71 teachers participated in the project from 12 countries which could be grouped into three major regions: Europe, South Asia, and South East Asia.
Discussion of findings During the data analysis, I examined the answers participants gave to the list of statements in the questionnaire and calculated how many they agreed or disagreed with. I primarily focussed on those statements which they agreed with. The percentage of positive answers suggested the degree of support different philosophies received. Of course, it would have been nave to think that research participants would support only one or two schools of thought since we develop our values in a much more complex way, similarly to Kumaravadivelu (1994) explanation in connection with choosing and using activities from a diverse pool of language teaching theories, rather than following one methodology rigorously. First of all, I had to decide how the data was going to be analysed. The data indicated that teachers did not necessarily live and work in the cultures where they grew up and where they
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may have formed the basics of their educational and social values. Quite a few Europeans were working in South and South East Asia, whereas some Asians, typically Pakistani and Pilipino teachers worked in Europe. Therefore, I had to examine whether the work context in which one is immersed or the cultural background that one brings with themselves is what determines educational values. I grouped research participants in two ways: according to i) the regions they filled the questionnaires in and ii) where they originally came from, i.e. their nationalities. This means that the answers of people who filled in the questionnaire in Europe were considered as those coming from the European region and compared with data obtained from people who were categorised as Europeans (as indicated by their nationality) regardless of their then present work contexts. Figure 2 shows the results of this comparison in a bar chart format.
80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Idealism Essentialism Pragmatism Existentialism Behaviourism Region Nationality
Figure 2: Support for schools of philosophies (in percentages) according to the work context of participants and their nationalities in Europe.
As can be seen from Figure 2, the results show a difference in the amount of statements participants agreed with when they were grouped according to the region they worked in and their nationality. The data show significant differences in the support of certain schools of philosophy, namely pragmatism and idealism. Since these schools of thought can be regarded as opposites of each other in their views on human nature, education and values, it is not surprising that those who agree with the tenants of one would probably reject the other. Further probing revealed that participants when they were grouped in their nationality groups provided fairly similar answers. The data, thus, seem to suggest that it is not the work context, but rather the cultural, social background of the research participants that determines what
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values they embrace during their everyday work. This result prompted me to look further into the differences that may exist among the different nationalities.
When the data was arranged according to the participants nationality it supported the earlier assumption that there would be different degrees of support for philosophies in the different regions. The data also showed that Europeans were more divided in their answers and rejected many more statements than participants in any other regions. This is presented in Table 1 below.
Idealism Essentialism Pragmatism Existentialism Behaviourism 71.11 64.88 55.77 68 64 68.93 79.21 87.24 83.12 71.60 74.60 73.01 60.31 77.38 74.20 67.69 71.98 82.85 80.55 67.77
Europeans East Asians South Asians Whole sample
Table 1: Acceptance of statements (in percentages) from different schools of philosophy
Having determined that there were differences among participants beliefs and values as far as the regions were concerned, I decided to investigate this aspect more thoroughly and examined some of the European, South Asian and East Asian nationalities separately. It must be stated that the number of participants in the different countries was rather low; therefore, this data is far from being representative. Still, I reckon that it could be used as an indicator for national differences because correlation analysis of the answers showed a high significance in many cases, the correlation coefficient ranging between 0.0054 and 0.0438 (significance determined at the 0.05 level). For the nationality analysis I selected Polish, Lithuanian, and British participants to represent a European, and Filipino, Pakistani, and Indonesian participants to stand for an Asian perspective. Altogether 19 Europeans and 35 Asian participants were included in this analysis. The data, presented in Figure 3, shows various support for the different schools as philosophy as was predicted earlier.
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100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Idealism Essentialism Pragmatism Existentialism Behaviourism Polish (8) Lithuanian (6) British (5) Filippino (20) Pakistani (10) Indonesian (5)
Figure 3: Nationality profiles of participants (number of participants indicated in brackets)
This data clearly indicates a difference in participating teachers values and beliefs, or at least it suggests that there is a very high likeliness for such differences to be found if researchers set out to examine this phenomenon with larger samples. However, one question was still puzzling me and that was the high degree of support for most schools of philosophies. In fact, participants seemed to provide rather unanimous answers for many questions. More than 90% of the participants gave the same answer, either positive or negative, to 19 statements, and a further 20 statements produced the same answers from 80% of the research population. It means that for almost half of the statements in the questionnaire there was hardly any difference in the respondents opinion. A closer look at these statements revealed that they almost exclusively belonged to the statements focusing on human nature and values, rather than to the ones which addressed teaching and learning. I believe this is an important finding since it seems to indicate that teachers, just like parents, may have some universally shared beliefs, regardless of their work or cultural contexts, about how people behave and what values education should embrace. However, not all the answers reflected such agreement, thus one should assume that the disagreement can be accounted for as diversity in the participants thinking about education. In order to test this hypothesis, I focused on the statements on epistemology, i.e. the study of teaching and learning. The examination revealed that there is a difference in participants thinking about this issue. The statements from 31-60, which belonged to the area of epistemology showed the highest
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degree of dispute among the participants. Actually, the statement which managed to completely divide respondents was statement No. 36: Such exercises as repeating information or memorizing are good ways of helping to train the mind. Almost half of the participants indicated that they agreed with this statement, whereas the other half said that they did not (Table 2).
Frequency No Yes No Answer Total 34 34 3 71
Percent 47,9 47,9 4,2 100,0
Valid Percent 47,9 47,9 4,2 100,0
Cummulative Percent 47,9 95,8 100,0
Valid
Table 2: Participants answer to statement No 36 - Such exercises as repeating information or memorizing are good ways of helping to train the mind.
One possible explanation for the differing opinions on educational practices can be that education is generally considered a very traditional profession where change is difficult to bring about. The reason for this is the wide social support for certain modes of education. Very often people think that what worked for them in schools should work for their children, underlining the most fundamental aspect of educational practices: values transmission in society. Since teachers are part of society they usually embrace similar values to everyone else in their cultural context. Even if they had differing opinions about how education should be delivered, they are under social pressure to stand in line and do what is expected, or else leave the profession and take on another job. Another explanation may be connected to the school culture and teacher education in the respective countries. Every nation has a slightly different structure and content focus in their teacher education programmes and thus they promote slightly different modes of teaching and learning. The teacher training institutions prepare their students to work in the school context specific to their countries and thus equip graduates with skills and values which are necessary for effective practice in that particular environment. It is enough to think about the class size, equipments available or the curricula to understand how teachers need to form different ideas about what is working and what is not in their contexts. In other words, by selecting what to accept as working is making a decision about what is valuable for them as professionals. Of course, I do not want to assume that there are no other explanations for the divergence of teacher values in the sample I examined. Values and beliefs are delicate issues and they have several layers that are simply impossible to unfold and understand without a thorough
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knowledge of the cultural context from which they originate. What the data seems to suggest is that there is a need to further study and understand professional values which are connected to a cultural context, or in this case to a country.
Conclusions In this paper I tried to examine whether globalisation and global English have brought about some universality in the teaching of English. My study revealed that although teachers have a large area of commonly shared values and beliefs regardless of their cultural and work contexts they also have different ideas about how teaching and learning should take place. I argued that this may have to do with the differing educational traditions specific to their cultures and the school contexts which impose some limitations on what would work or fail in the classrooms. This latter actually determines what teachers find effective, i.e. valuable in their professional practice and what they would reject as ineffective, i.e. not valuable. I believe that further studies are needed to map out culture specific educational values since they can provide useful information for educational decision makers when it comes to initiating and managing educational innovations or change. However, I am also certain that the finding of such research can only act as indicators and will lack the scientific accuracy expected from research in general. The reason for this is very simple: educational values and beliefs are very complex and therefore they present many extraneous variables, i.e. variables which the researcher has no means of controlling, that the results should be carefully considered as indicators, rather than facts. Having said that, however, I still believe that the study of educational values is important and educational decision makers should consider them in their course of work.
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References Brown, H. D. (2002). English language teaching in the post-method era: toward better diagnosis, treatment, and assessment in J. C. Richards and W. A. Renandya (eds.). Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farrell, M., Kerry, T., & Kerry, C. (1995). The Blackwell Handbook of Education. Oxford: Blackwell. Galan, M. & T. Maguire. 2001. Education and Beliefs ELT Newsletter. http://www.eltnewsletter.com/ Kiss, T. (2006). Investigating the influence of mentor training programmes on the formation of educational values and beliefs of Hungarian English language teachers. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Warsaw: Warsaw. Kumaravadivelu, B. (1994). The postmethod condition: (e)merging strategies for second/foreign language teaching. TESOL Quarterly 28/1: 2747. Lszl J. (1999). Trsas tuds, elbeszls, identits. Budapest: Scientia Humana-Kairosz. Ozmon, H.A. & Craver, S.M. (2003). Philosophical foundations of education. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc. Pacek, D. (1996). Lessons to be learnt from negative evaluation. ELT Journal, 50(4), 335-343. Richards, J. C. (1990). Beyond methods in J. C. Richards (ed.). The Language Teaching Matrix.
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Global English, Global Teachers, Global Values?

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80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Idealism Essentialism Pragmatism Existentialism Behaviourism Region Nationality

Europeans East Asians South Asians Whole sample

Table 1: Acceptance of statements (in percentages) from different schools of philosophy

Figure 3: Nationality profiles of participants (number of participants indicated in brackets)

Frequency No Yes No Answer Total 34 34 3 71

Percent 47,9 47,9 4,2 100,0

Valid Percent 47,9 47,9 4,2 100,0

Cummulative Percent 47,9 95,8 100,0

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