Questões Militares de Inglês

      “It’s a very nice book and very lively, but in the section on ‘Processes’ for example all the exercises are about unusual things for our country. We are a hot country and also have many Muslims. The exercises are about snow, ice, cold mornings, and making wine. I can tell you I can’t do making wine and smoking pot in my country!” (Experienced school teacher from the Ivory Coast, Africa)

      “Previous materials were not based on life in Brazil which is why I don’t think they worked very well …” (Brazilian teacher of English in school)

      “Sir … what is opera?” (Iraqi student in mixed nationality class using materials designed to practise reading narrative)

     The implications of these three quotations are not simply linguistic; rather, they address the problem of appropriate contextual realisation for materials. For the teacher in the Ivory Coast, the materials offered would be outside the cultural experience of his students (possibly even threatening) and thus effectively useless; conversely, for the Brazilian teacher, the choice of Brazilian settings and familiar mores would have clear advantages over distant foreign contexts as they are essentially more motivating. The quote from the Iraqi student suggests that complete unfamiliarity with the notion of opera may reduce the efficacy of the reading exercises, but in this case the student is curious and likely to regard the material as exotic rather than merely alien.

        Many assumptions of a communicative orientation towards language teaching need questioning in a global context. Ozóg (1989) discusses the idea of the ‘information gap’, which is supposed to induce students to speak. ‘Are we as Europeans’, he asks, ‘not making a cultural assumption that speakers the world over are uneasy in silence and that they have an overwhelming desire to fill gaps which occur in natural discourse?’ (p.399). Silence is a salient feature of conversation in the Malay world, he points out, a feature that has also been noted in Japan and a number of other cultures.

       Indeed, the whole question of requiring others to speak needs to be questioned in terms of both cultural and gender differences. The point here is not to exoticize some notion of cultural difference, but rather to suggest that language is a cultural practice, that both language and thinking about language are always located in very particular social, cultural and political contexts. How language (including silence, paralanguage, and so on) is used, therefore, differs extensively from one context to another, and thus any approach to language teaching based on one particular view of language may be completely inapplicable in another context. If particular language teaching practices (advertised and exported as the best, newest and most scientific) support certain views of language, then such practices clearly present a particular cultural politics and make the English language classroom a site of struggle over different ways of thinking about and dealing with language.