This book offers unique insight into the role that English as a Foreign Language (EFL) discourse plays in shaping the ideological terrain of contemporary Israel/Palestine through constructing the subjectivities of those who plan, teach, and learn it. While the EFL curriculum is uniform across Hebrew and Arabic-speaking educational contexts, this book traces how its cultural content reproduces dominant hegemonic ideologies, and perpetuates the social misrepresentations of the Other that underlie inequality. The language of English teaching textbooks, the way that students understand their content, and the official policy documents that guide both EFL materials and teaching practices, are all thoroughly examined through Critical Discourse Analysis. The theoretical and methodological foundation for further cross-cultural studies of Anglo-centric and other forms of hegemonic EFL discourses within local/global contexts, and for contesting their ideological effects, are also laid down. Through promoting a transformative EFL cultural discourse which hopes to position EFL teaching as a possible arena for effecting social change, this book offers a unique context for students, scholars, and educators interested in linguistics, CDA, cultural discourse studies, English in local/global contexts, and EFL education.

This study analyses examples of classroom discourse, one of the most important influences on students? experience in schools, in EFL classes. The central idea of the author?s enquiry is to compare classroom discourse in two secondary schools in two European countries, namely Austria on the one hand, and Spain on the other hand. The focus of the study is on EFL classes taught by a team of a non-native speaker teacher and a native speaker assistant. The purposes of this study are to gain insights into classroom communication, to compare classroom discourse in two different countries to see whether culturally specific rules of classroom communication might apply, and to investigate the contact situation of two different (if existent) communication strategies in classroom discourse. Therefore, the study aims to answer the following research question: Do the cultural modes of classroom communication in EFL classes (taught by a team of a teacher and an assistant) differ from each other? The data needed for this study were collected by means of video-recording; audio-portions were transcribed; and the data was analysed using methods of Conversational Analysis. The author focuses in particular on turn-taking, the occurrence of the IRE / IRF sequence and simultaneous speech, as well as restarts and pauses. The analysis shows how certain conversational structures, such as simultaneous speech or the IRE / IRF sequence, work in classroom discourse. The results hint at different cultural modes of classroom communication, the main differences concerning the presence of the teacher in the discourse, the degree of smoothness with which the discourse proceeds and the students? degree of involvement in communication. Furthermore, the data shows that different communication strategies are indeed used in classes taught by a team. Interaction with an assistant might increase students? talking time and might, if the assistant is given enough freedom, also result in more fluent student discourse. In addition, the data suggests that some communication strategies are preferable in the context of EFL teaching with the aim of enhancing communicative competence, namely not interfering with regard to content, not selecting next speakers, and offering open discussion activities.

Associated with an important epistemological shift from language proficiency to language criticality in applied linguistic research, this book provides a sociological perspective on foreign language education in Japan. By employing ethnographic methods to investigate the relationship between three core analytical elements – foreign language education geared towards the development of learners’ intercultural communicative competence; nihonjinron and native-speakerism as potentially constraining ideological forces; and EFL practices observed at four Japanese junior high schools – the author not only shares valuable insights into how English is taught and learned in a stratum of the Japanese EFL system which has received limited attention from researchers over the years, but also clarifies the fundamental and complex changes currently taking place in the Japanese EFL landscape. This multi-faceted book also calls for greater consideration in postmodern ideology critique for the stratified nature of social processes as well as the material conditions and underlying generative mechanisms involved in the production and consumption of (including resistance to) ideological discourse. Accordingly, it outlines several challenges shaping ideology research in educational settings, and responds by developing a realist-oriented theoretical and methodological approach to address these challenges. This book serves as a unique point of reference for the study of parallel nationalist discourses embedded in foreign language education systems around the world.

Narratives of Learning and Teaching EFL can thus function as a source of ideas - and also as a tool kit."--BOOK JACKET.

Conceived through collaboration by activist academics from Israel and Northern Ireland, this book draws from experience to offer practical and theoretical insights and programs for promoting activist pedagogy for shared learning and shared life in divided societies.

Corpus Perspectives on the Spoken Models used by EFL Teachers illustrates the key principles and practical guidelines for the design and exploitation of corpora for classroom-based research. Focusing on the nature of the spoken English used by L2 teachers, which serves as an implicit target model for learners alongside the curriculum model, this book brings an innovative perspective to the on-going academic debate concerning the models of spoken English that are taught today. Based on research carried out in the EFL classroom in Ireland, this book: explores issues and challenges that arise from the use of "non-standard" varieties of spoken English by teachers, alongside the use of Standard British English, and examines the controversies surrounding sociolinguistic approaches to the study of variation in spoken English; combines quantitative corpus linguistic investigations with qualitative functional discourse analytic approaches from pragmatics and SLA for classroom-based research; demonstrates the ways in which changing trends and perspectives surrounding spoken English may be filtering down to the classroom level. Drawing on a corpus of 60,000 words and highlighting strategies and techniques that can be applied by researchers and teachers to their own research context, this book is key reading for all pre- and in-service teachers of EFL as well as researchers in this field.