INTRODUCTION

The content of teacher training, or education, needs to include not only the linguistic features of English and how these may be taught and learned, but also its social and cultural position in the world and its subsequent impact on the lives of both teachers and language learners. If teachers of history do not address with their students the way in which often uncertain events can be used by governments and movements to promote political agendas, the teaching of history can be reduced to propaganda. There will be a similar effect if English is not presented as a postcolonial language that is deeply socially and culturally involved in world politics, which is often unequal.

SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS

Much of prevailing second language education practice remains dominated by an essentialist view of culture in which students and their language-learning attitudes and abilities are very much characterized by imagined and problematic stereotypes of their national, ethnic, regional, or religious cultures. To counter this, there has been a call for a decentered, or locality driven, approach to the way in which teachers and students recognize and explore the cultural complexity and diversity within their own experiences (e.g., Kumaravadivelu 2007), and to the way in which students are exposed to curriculum content that addresses the political nature of English in the world and non-center forms of English (e.g., Holliday 2005). Attention to the social “contexts” of language teaching has gone some way to meeting this need; but these contexts have often been overgeneralized or oversimplified as a result of superficial center-led investigation. Attention to specific contexts can also suffer from inattention to the bigger political picture.

In this chapter we are going to address this state of affairs by juxtaposing two sets of experiences that we feel have often remained apart. The first is the very generalized international arena called Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), which although it has produced critical understandings of English in the world, has few examples of rich decentered research. The second derives from the more localized contexts of publicly funded education, which is often described as English as a Second Language (ESL), and which includes immigrant and adult English language programs (often termed ESOL).