RÉGIMEN DE PERFECCIONAMIENTO ACTIVO

In mainstream education (i.e. that which takes place within state schooling), professionalism is often identified with the development and achievement of standards of best practice (Demirkasımoğlu, 2010), and as such, discourses of professionalism have arisen around this central conceit, including in the specific area of ELT. These discourses concern what it means for an individual to be a 'professional' teacher, or for a school or program to operate in a 'professional' way. The three key points which underlie discourses of professionalism, as demonstrated in the preceding sections, are (1) pre-service training and qualifications, (2) performance in the classroom and teaching approach, and (3) modes of continuing professional development. I will discuss each of these points in turn and explain how in the field of ELT they serve to uphold native-speakerism.

Pre-service training and qualifications

101 professional teacher. Crandall (1996) argues that TESOL masters programs should have certain essential elements, such as "opportunities to develop a deep understanding of the theories behind various approaches to language teaching", "opportunities to construct knowledge and develop an understanding of how to apply that knowledge to the processes of learning and teaching", and "opportunities to evaluate curriculum and materials" (pp.11-12), a view which tarries with that of other authors such as Alatis (2005). In other words, as noted earlier, despite there not being a standardised body of knowledge taught to the majority of language teachers (Govardhan et al., 1999; Long, 2015), there are certain things that a teacher is expected to gain a knowledge of through their training courses, and as such their understanding of the process of teaching and learning will be to an extent mediated by their professional training. Kubota (2002a) argues that "the field's knowledge of culture as well as language acquisition, teaching, and learning, is much more than a constellation of numerous random individual views. Rather, it is discursively structured in a more or less consistent way, producing, sustaining, or resisting certain relations of power" (p.85). I argue that in both pre-service and in-service training courses, these views of culture, teaching, and learning are essentially native-speakerist, relying as they do on simplistic representations of culture (Armenta & Holliday, 2015; Canagarajah, 1999b; Susser, 1998), and beliefs and constructs connected to teaching and learning that have been constructed in the West, and that represent Western educational methods as superior to those in other countries (Aboshiha, 2015; Holliday, 2005; Lowe & Pinner, 2016).

Canagarajah (2016) takes a somewhat different position, arguing that "the social orientation to knowledge and learning has motivated significant changes in teacher development" so that now "professionalization [i]s shaped by values and beliefs of the teachers, their pedagogical influences from society and classrooms, and their evolving and desired professional identities" (p.17). While Canagarajah is correct that writing on these points has increased substantially (the article is a review

102 of TESOL Quarterly literature), I would contend that these are largely academic discourses which are not central to many training programs. In fact, it seems that beyond master's degrees these ideas are little discussed, if at all. Certificate and diploma programs rarely cover such points, and instead encourage teachers to develop a fairly limited repertoire of pedagogical skills based around nominally communicative approaches, and even within the area of master's degrees, whether or not these particular approaches to development will take place varies from institution to institution, and will often be left up to the choices of the individual student teachers (Govardhan et al., 1999). Practice lags behind theory in this regard.

In other words, the training offered on these courses is largely based on Western-produced and -mediated knowledge and research, and the discourses of professionalism within ELT encourage teachers to seek this training, thus providing economic capital to these Western institutions due to their desire for the cultural capital thought to be embodied by these institutions (Lowe & Pinner, 2016). This upholds both the dominance of Western knowledge in ELT, and the hegemony of Western teaching approaches.

Performance in the classroom and teaching approach

Guy Cook (interviewed in De Bot, 2015), when asked about the impact of applied linguistic research on English language teaching, argues that contrary to popular belief (and contrary to the views of many contributors to de Bot's book), "many movements, such as SLA (second language acquisition), TBLT (task-based language teaching), have done a great deal of harm, by promoting anglo-centric native-speaker models to the detriment of more inclusive and bilingual approaches" (p.123). Cook's words point towards the fact that things which are seen as professional advances in the field of ELT often originate in the West and are exported to other educational settings at the expense of local technology. Indeed, discourses of professionalism in ELT are presented as neutral

103 and non-ideological, and yet simultaneously are based on and mediated by knowledge, principles, and techniques created by the Western ELT establishment. This position is argued strongly by Phillipson (2013), who claims that TESOL and applied linguistics try to distance themselves from any overarching political or economic agendas, despite propagating educational fallacies and promoting knowledge and concepts created by Western researchers and exported to other countries.

Holliday (2005) takes a more subtle approach, arguing that rather than a deliberate attempt to uphold Western power, discourses of professionalism in ELT are driven more by the professional reverance of 'icons'. While Holliday's discussion is more concerned with professional discourses than specifically discourses of professionalism, in this case the one feeds into the other. Holliday argues that there are a number of "major icons" of native-speakerist teaching methodology, including "the 'four skills', close monitoring, staged teaching, and oral elicitation" (p.39) which are direct descendants from the behaviourist audiolingual teaching approach of the mid-1970's.1

While Holliday notes that individuals and groups mediate their Western-gained knowledge through local

1

Holliday is slightly incorrect in conflating audiolingualism and behaviourism, as the chronology of these two ideas does not quite add up. The audiolingual approach is said by some writers to be variously traceable back to the structural method (Howatt & Widdowson, 2004), the 'army method' of the 1940s (Hall, 2011), or even as far back as the 1920s or 30s (Coady & Huckin, 1997). In addition, the major works (by Fries, Lado, etc.) on which audiolingualism was purportedly based make no mention of behaviourism (Mayne, 2015), which itself was not applied to language until Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (Skinner, 1957), and was in fact not attributed as a source for audiolingualism until the work of Rivers (1964). However, this is a terminological point, and the fact that audiolingualism was not explicitly based on behaviourism does not change the fact that it was essentially behaviouristic in nature.

104 practices and experiences, there are ideological 'cultural icons' which lie behind accepted classroom practice in TESOL, such as the 'four skills', oral expression, staged learning, and so on. Indeed, Holliday argues that "the cultural icons of a profession are...likely to be aspects and principles of practice" (p.41). Holliday notes that many features of audiolingualism have survived into modern communicative language teaching either unchanged (as in the case of elicitation, 'oral first' teaching, classroom layout, etc.) or with only minor changes (the 'structures' of audiolingualism give ground to 'functions', 'notions', and 'concepts'), and this results in much professional teaching methodology still being based on ideas such as 'learner training' and 'corrective surveillance' in monitoring. In short, Cook's observation is largely correct - even modern, 'enlightened', post-method communicative approaches are still inextricably tied to theories and ideas developed in the West, and require learners to be 'trained' in the correct way of learning. This is what Freire (2013) calls "assistencialism" - teachers, with a particular (and universally well-meaning) agenda concerning learning or issues in society, step in to solve problems on behalf of students, as if the students themselves were incapable of carrying out this action. This is, despite its good intentions, culturally chauvanistic. As Long (2015) argues, "problem-solving can lead to outsiders imposing solutions in the name of learner-centeredness" (p.74).

Again, we see here a professional discourse based on research and theories created in the West being exported in the form of Western methods and approaches to teaching. Within these methods it is possible to find both native-speakerism and associated culturist ideas about the 'deficiency' of teaching and learning styles of diverse cultures being propagated, and the training and monitoring of learners the common solution.

105 While continuing professional development (CPD) itself is no bad thing, the methods by which is it achieved in ELT are, I believe, largely native-speakerist. CPD can take the form of postgraduate study, reflective practice, discussion groups, observations from trainers or managers, and peer observations. While some of these are not necessarily native-speakerist (see Farrell, 2015, who attempts to help teachers achieve the classroom they want through reflective practice without mandating any particular approaches to teaching and learning), many of them are. As already noted, ELT postgraduate study is problematic in that it often reinforces native-speakerist ideas of best practice. Observations are often conducted with the intent of 'correcting' deviant teaching approaches (deviant, that is, from prescribed norms), and discussion groups often center on discussion of articles and research, which, as Cook (interviewed in De Bot, 2015) notes, promote Anglo-centric 'native speaker' models. While CPD can be an important part of a teacher’s professional life, the ways in which it is usually carried out, due to discourses of professionalism, all too often serve to propagate or strengthen native-speakerist beliefs, positions, and approaches to classroom teaching, management, and to teacher development. CPD can, of course, also be used to challenge native-speakerism, and that will be the topic of chapter 8 in this thesis.