Read Canagarajah (1993) and answer the following questions:
(1) What was the topic or issue investigated in the study?
(2) What cultural group was studied?
(3) How were the participants chosen, and who were they?
(4) What types of data were collected?
(5) How were they analyzed?
(6) What was the role of the ethnographer in the study?
(7) What claims were made? Do they ‘ring true’ for you? Why or why not?
Critical Ethnography of a Sri Lankan Classroom: Ambiguities in Student Opposition to
Reproduction through ESOL
Author(s): A. Suresh Canagarajah
Source: TESOL Quarterly , Winter, 1993, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter, 1993), pp. 601-626
Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3587398
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TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 27, No. 4, Winter 1993
Critical Ethnography of a Sri
Lankan Classroom:
Ambiguities in Student Opposition to
Reproduction Through ESOL
A. SURESH CANAGARAJAH
University of Jaffna
The article argues that the way in which domination is experienced
and oppositional tendencies are formed in classroom life have to b
observed closely rather than conceived abstractly. This ethnographic
study of 22 tertiary-level Tamil students following a mandatory English for general purposes (EGP) course reveals that whereas the
lived culture displays opposition to the alienating discourses inscribed
in a U.S. textbook, the students affirm in their more conscious statements before and after the course their strong motivation to study
ESOL. Interpreting this contradiction as reflecting the conflict students face between cultural integrity, on the one hand, and socioeconomic mobility, on the other, the study explains how students’ desire
for learning only grammar in a product-oriented manner enables
them to be somewhat detached from cultural alienation while being
sufficiently examination oriented to pass the course and fulfill a socioeconomic necessity. However, this two-pronged strategy is an ideologically limiting oppositional behavior that contains elements of accom-
modation as well as resistance and unwittingly leads students to
participate in their own domination.
T he recent introduction of poststructuralist perspectives on
guage and radical theories of schooling that view language te
ing as a political act is a long-awaited development in TESOL. S
theories enjoy much currency in L1 circles, almost becoming the or
doxy in areas like composition teaching, with words like discourse a
empowerment becoming cliched and posing the danger that they m
have lost their critical edge. TESOL, on the other hand, while b
a far more controversial activity, has managed to see itself as s
“apolitical” due to its positivistic preoccupation with methods and t
niques.
601
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In recent issues of the TESOL Quarterly, scholars such as Pennycook
(1989) and Peirce (1989) have deconstructed dominant methods and
the idea of method itself in order to expose the ideologies that inform
TESOL. Though their papers perform a pioneering function, the
force with which they are compelled to present their theses also involves
some simplification. Whereas Pennycook’s delineation of ideological
domination through TESOL appears overdetermined and pessimistic,
Peirce’s characterization of the possibilities of pedagogical resistance
appears too volitionist and romantic. We should now turn to the sober
task of analyzing the complexities of domination and resistance as
they are played out in ESOL classrooms and the confusing manner in
which they are often interconnected.
Pennycook (1989) is generally convincing when, after a detailed
analysis of the socially constructed nature of the concept of method,
he asserts, “The power of the Western male academy in defining
and prescribing concepts … plays an important role in maintaining
inequities between, on the one hand, predominantly male academics
and, on the other, female teachers and language classrooms on the
international power periphery” (p. 612). This scenario is so true that,
ironically, even pedagogies of resistance (of those like Pennycook and
Peirce) have to reach us in the periphery from the West. However, in
stretching the effects of the political economy of textbook publishing
and research at the macrolevel to language classrooms, Pennycook is
making too wide a leap-especially because his paper does not focus
on classroom realities. What Pennycook overlooks in the process is that
the classroom is a site of diverse discourses and cultures represented by
the varying backgrounds of teachers and students such that the effects
of domination cannot be blindly predicted. Such classroom cultures
mediate the concepts defined and prescribed by the Western academy
as they reach the periphery. It is possible that various modes of opposition are sparked during this encounter. Although Pennycook himself
eventually exhorts teachers and academics to envision a more democratic social environment, this will not be possible if a space is not
created for such resistance by acknowledging the relative autonomy of
the school from other social institutions and processes. Through this
term, Henry Giroux (1983) posits that the different social institutions
and cultural sites “are governed by complex ideological properties that
often generate contradictions both within and between them” (p. 102),
that a specific institution like the school is not ruled inexorably by the
interests of the state and economy, although necessarily influenced by
them. Giroux (1983) in fact criticizes reproductive perspectives of
schooling, such as those of Althusser (1971), Bowles and Gintis
(1976), and Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) for deterministically
conceiving the school as serving to inculcate only the culture, ideolo602
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gies, and social relations necessary to build and sustain the status
quo.
If Pennycook has to attend to the noun in the term relative autonomy,
Peirce has to note the adjective. That is, the attitudes, needs, and
desires of minority communities and students are only partially free
from the structures of domination in the larger social system. Hence,
whereas Peirce (1989) makes a powerful case for how “the teaching
of English can open up possibilities for students by helping them to
explore what might be desirable, as well as ‘appropriate,’ uses of English”
(p. 401), she assumes too much in considering “People’s” English as
what will be unanimously desired by the “minority” students of South
Africa. This is not to slight the importance of developing such pedagogies of resistance, that is, politically conscious approaches to learning/
teaching which critically interrogate the oppressive tendencies behind
the existing content and forms of knowledge and classroom relations
to fashion a more liberating educational context that would lead to
student empowerment and social transformation (see Giroux, 1983).
They are certainly a pressing concern in TESOL and a much needed
corrective to deterministic theories of schooling. However, with remarkable balance, Giroux (1983) also criticizes one-sided pedagogies
of resistance for “not giving enough attention to the issue of how
domination reaches into the structure of personality itself” (p. 106).
Minority students may then display a complex range of attitudes towards domination with a mixture of oppositional and accommodative
tendencies which have to be critically examined.
Pennycook and Peirce are unable to attend to the complexities of
the classroom culture in the face of domination because their papers
are broadly theoretical, focus on the politics of TESOL-related macrostructures, and only assume implications for language classrooms
rather than reporting empirical observations of the classroom itself
for how domination is experienced and oppositional tendencies are
formed there. We can understand the “ambiguous areas” (Giroux,
1983, p. 109) of student response, where a confusing range of accommodative and oppositional tendencies are displayed, only if we take a
closer look at the day-to-day functioning of the classroom and the
lived culture of the students. It is by doing so that we can attain a
realistic understanding of the challenges as well as the possibilities for
a pedagogy of resistance in TESOL. The objective of this paper is not
to outline one more pedagogy of resistance, but to interrogate the
range of behaviors students display in the face of domination-the
awareness of which should precede and inform any development of
such pedagogies. The ethnographic study below of an ESOL classroom
in Sri Lanka creatively complicates the perspectives on domination
and resistance presented by Pennycook and Peirce.
ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SRI LANKAN CLASSROOM 603
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CONTEXTUALIZING THE STUDY
Ever since the British colonial power brought the w
(then) Ceylon under its control in 1796 and instituted
tion to create a supportive lower administrative work
has functioned as a valued linguistic capital over the
and Tamil languages to provide socioeconomic advant
Lankans. Although since 1956 (8 years after independ
governments have professed to raise the status of Sin
limited extent, Tamil), it is the English-speaking bilin
dominated the professions and social hierarchy. On the o
democratization or popularization of English promised
governments has only amounted to providing limited
lower-middle-class rungs for aspirants whose newly a
is marked as a nonprestige “sub-standard Sri Lankan
Kandiah, 1979). These developments have historically
monolingual majority to make them perceive English
edged weapon that frustrates both those who desire it as
who neglect it (Kandiah, 1984). Similarly, in the Tamil so
the emergent militant nationalism has unleashed a T
even “pure Tamil” movement, such parallel developme
dus to the West or the cosmopolitan capital as econom
refuges have bolstered English to assure the dominan
bilinguals and to attract monolinguals.
As for English language teaching, the teachers, admi
general public in Sri Lanka agree that English languag
“colossal failure” (de Souza, 1969, p. 18) considering th
expended on this enterprise by the state and Western cu
Though all identify the problem as one of student mo
differ as to why students are unmotivated. Hanson-S
U.S. TESOL consultant, and Goonetilleke (1983), a loca
English, fault the educational system. In the universit
they perceive that the requirements for English are
enough to motivate students to take the subject as ser
subjects. Both, however, are in agreement that Englis
of good for Sri Lankan students: “English is learned n
communicate with other Lankans … but to converse with the world
at large-and not just the world of technology and machines,
also of dreams, aspirations and ideals” (Hanson-Smith, 1984, p. 3
Because Kandiah (1984), on the other hand, is of the view that t
dreams encouraged by English are illusory (as English learning d
not challenge but in fact perpetuates inequality) and its ideals ar
suspected by students of resulting in cultural deracination, he sees th
problem of motivation differently: “[The] reasons why they lack
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motivation are socioeconomic-political” (p. 132). The present study
developed as an attempt to arbitrate between these divergent approaches to the problems of motivation with empirical data because
the papers of the above scholars were largely impressionistic and simply
imputed to students attitudes neither systematically observed nor
elicited.
Method
The methodological orientation and fieldwork techniques develop
by ethnography enable us to systematically study the students’ o
point of view of English language teaching in its natural contex
Though ethnography is noted for its intensive, detailed focus on t
local, contextualized, and concrete, the challenge in this study is
analyze how the attitudes formed by students in daily classroom l
are impinged upon by the more abstract sociopolitical forces outs
the walls of the classroom. However, current ethnography is taki
up the challenge of “how to represent the embedding of richly d
scribed local cultural worlds in larger impersonal systems of politi
economy” (Marcus & Fischer, 1986, p. 84). This new orientation in
fieldwork and writing of ethnography is inspired by a more complex
politicized view of culture in both anthropology and political economy
Such developments account for a small but growing body of ethn
graphic literature that looks at the culture of classrooms and stud
communities in relation to social conflict and political domination (see
Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Ogbu, 1986; Weis, 1985; Willis, 1977).
In order to conduct such politically motivated ethnography, we hav
to go beyond the dominant descriptive ethnography that is practiced tod
in TESOL circles (see, e.g., Benson, 1989) and theorized in definitiv
terms for TESOL practitioners by Watson-Gegeo (1988). What w
need in its place is a critical ethnography-an ideologically sensitive orie
tation to the study of culture that can penetrate the noncommit
objectivity and scientism encouraged by the positivistic empirical atti
tude behind descriptive ethnography and can demystify the intere
served by particular cultures to unravel their relation to issues
power (see Marcus & Fisher, 1986). Willis (1978), whose 1977 stud
of working-class black students in an urban British school is a pioneer
ing and sophisticated example of this orientation, defines the proj
of critical ethnography thus:
We must interrogate cultures, ask what are the missing questions the
answer, probe the invisible grid of context, inquire what unsaid propositio
are assumed to the invisible and surprising external forms of cultural life
If we can supply the premises, dynamics, logical relations of respons
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which look quite untheoretical and lived out “merely” as cultures, we will
uncover a cultural politics. (p. 18)
Practicing such a committed, value-laden ethnography does not
mean that we can ignore Watson-Gegeo’s (1988) warning that “true
ethnographic work is systematic, detailed and rigorous, rather than
anecdotal or impressionistic” (p. 588). Hence, an intensive participant
observation of the ESOL class I taught 6 hr/week was carried out for
an academic year (November 1990 to July 1991). Though it is possible
that my dual roles as teacher and researcher could create certain tensions (as could be expected in any observation by a participant), my
teaching also created certain advantages which I would have lacked
as a detached observer. My daily interaction with the students in negoti-
ating meanings through English and participating in the students’
successes and failures, with the attendant need to revise my own teaching strategy, provided a vantage point to their perspectives. Moreover,
I enjoyed natural access to the daily exercises and notes of the students
and the record of their attendance without having to foreground my
role as researcher. As the teaching progressed, I stumbled into other
naturalistic data that provided insights into students’ own point of
view of the course, such as the comments students had scribbled during
class time in the margins of the textbook (which, due to frequent losses,
was distributed before each class and collected at the end).
To add a chronological dimension to the study, I situated the other
methods of data collection at significant points in the progression of
the course. During the first week of classes, I conducted a free recall
procedure, asking the students to jot down their impressions of English. I also gave a detailed questionnaire covering their social and
linguistic background to be completed at home. At the end of the
course, but before their final examination, I conducted an oral interview with the students in my office to analyze their responses to the
course, textbook, and learning English in general. Though I invited
the students for a 15-min interview, eventually each interview ranged
from 70 to 90 min. Because some students preferred to converse with
me in the company of another classmate, I permitted them to meet
me in pairs. Even then, 7 students, all females, failed to turn upprobably reflecting the taboo on close interpersonal relations between
the sexes in Tamil society. The interview, like the questionnaire, was
in Tamil so that students could express themselves freely. (Such data
is presented below, in translation, unless otherwise stated. The original
Tamil is cited only when discursively significant.)
The questionnaire and the interview modules were constructed in
such manner as to enable cross-checking of students’ opinions. In the
questionnaire, the first part surveyed students’ educational back606
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grounds and exposure to English. The second part surveyed the educational and socioeconomic background of the parents. The third part
provided a set of true/false statements to test more obliquely students’
attitudes toward the use of English. The final part contained openended questions that further sampled their attitudes, allowing comparison of these with their previous statements. Though the final interview
was prestructured, I shifted topic freely according to the flow of conversation. Questions 1-3 queried the attitude of the students towards
English in relation to their other courses; Questions 4-7 checked their
response to the organization and cultural content of the textbook; 8
and 9 sampled the effects of English learning on their thinking and
identity; 10-12 invited a critique of the pedagogy and curriculum;
13-15 explored their use of English outside the class; and 16-18
solicited their recommendations for the improvement of the course.
Some of the similar questions in the interview then enabled me to
compare the motivation and attitudes of the students with their opin-
ions stated in the questionnaire in the beginning of the course. The
other modes of data collection, too, enabled me to authenticate the
data more effectively through triangulation (see Denzin, 1970). For
instance, the lived culture of the students (as recorded in my field
notes and students’ comments in the textbook) was at odds with their
stated opinions in the interview and questionnaire, compelling me to
reconstruct more complex hypotheses to explain their attitudes.
The Course
The class that I observed consisted of 22 first-year student
arts and humanities at the University of Jaffna. The ESOL
mandatory for all students of the faculty of arts. A pass is
in ESOL to qualify for admission to the second year. For elig
specialize in a specific subject from the second year onwards, st
are required to score at least a B on the ESOL exam in the first
It is from the second year that English teaching is structu
English for specific purposes (ESP), catering to the differen
specialties. The first-year course is based on English for gen
poses (EGP), providing practice in all four skills.
Because the course is structured around a core text, it is n
to discuss the organization of American Kernel Lessons (AKL): Inte
(O’Neill, Kingbury, Yeadon, & Cornelius, 1978). We have to re
that such prepackaged material, which comes with a teachers
testing kit, and audiotapes for listening comprehension, repr
direct assault on the traditional role of the teacher as an intellectual
whose function is to conceptualize, design and implement learning
experiences suited to the specificity and needs of a particular classroom
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experience” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985, p. 149). Although teachers
in the University of Jaffna realize these problems, the limitations of
time, funds, stationery, and printing facilities in war-torn Jaffna eventually drive them to use texts such as AKL which have been amply
gifted by Western agencies such as the Asia Foundation. If existing
books become dated, teachers have to simply wait for the next consignment of material.
As the title implies, the text is targeted towards intermediate-lev
students and focuses on the tenses, using eclectic methods organiz
around a predominantly situational approach (see Richard & Roger
1986). Each unit contains five parts. Part A introduces the grammatica
item for that unit through a set of “situations,” accompanied by visual
Part B, labeled Formation and Manipulation, introduces the gramma
cal item more overtly and provides pattern practice. Part C is a serialized detective story that introduces new vocabulary in addition to pro-
viding practice in reading/listening comprehension. Part D present
conversation for role playing, whereas the final part contains guid
composition. The last two parts also provide grammar revision exe
cises. Though grammar is presented overtly in some sections, in mo
others, students are encouraged to formulate their own hypothes
inductively through active use of the language in specific skills.
It is also necessary to analyze the ideologies that structure the te
in order to place in context the attitudes and responses of the students
to the course. What stands out in the note, “To the Student and
Teacher,” in the beginning of the text is the concern with providin
adequate “practice” so that students will “progress” in the “fundame
tals of English” which intermediate students “still cannot seem to u
correctly, easily and as automatically as they would like” (O’Neill
al., 1978, p. vi). The language echoes behaviorism and assumes that
with sufficient drill, students can be made to display habit-oriente
automatic responses. Furthermore, the fundamentals of English a
considered autonomous, value-free grammatical structures (in the
fashion of U.S. structuralism), ignoring the culture and ideologies that
inform the language or the textbook. The students themselves ar
isolated from their social context, and there is no consideration of how
their own linguistic and cultural backgrounds can affect or enhanc
their learning. In its concern with correctness (which, of course,
based on standard U.S. English rather than on the Englishes studen
bring with them), the textbook empowers the teacher as the sole autho
ity in the classroom to regulate, discipline, and arbitrate the learnin
process. Such assumptions amount to what Giroux (1983) has identified
as instrumental ideology (p. 209). Though AKL acknowledges the nee
to make learning an “enjoyable experience” and also provides opportu
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nities for collaborative pair work, these attempts provide only occasional relief from the largely positivistic pedagogy.
In fairness to AKL, we have to note that certain sections are influ-
enced by the notion of communicative competence with advice to
students that “the situations themselves are more important than iso-
lated words” (O’Neill et al., 1978, p. v). However, the interactions
and the discourse employed in such situations assume an urbanized,
technocratic, Western culture that is alien to the students. Even such
simple speech activities as conversations are conducted in a strictly
goal-oriented manner (see Unit 2d), whereas Tamil discourse values
the “digression” and indirection typical of oral communities. The values that emerge through the situations are not hard to decipher, such
as upward social mobility and consumerism (4d). The work ethic (12a)
and routine of factory life (13a) are presented positively, whereas
strikes and demonstrations (5a) and the lifestyle of blacks (in the story
of Jane and her boyfriends) are not. The potential of the textbook to
influence students with certain dominant values of U.S. society is subtly
effective because AKL disarms its users by presenting language learning as a value-free, instrumental activity.
The Class
The class consisted of 13 female and 9 male native Tamil
of whom 3 were Roman Catholics and the rest Hindus. These students
had failed the initial placement test in English and fared among
worst among the new entrants for that academic year. They we
enrolled in a range of subjects related to the humanities and soc
sciences besides the mandatory ESOL. A majority of these studen
were from rural communities and from the poorest economic grou
Except for 4 students whose parents were in clerical or teaching prof
sions (thus earning the relatively decent sum of 1000 rupees, or US$2
a month!), the other parents did not have steady jobs or salaries.
the latter group, some were tenant farmers, and others were seaso
casual laborers. The families of the students had also had limited
education. Only one student’s parents had proceeded beyond Gra
10. The parents of 5 others had not completed an elementary sch
education.
Furthermore, the students came from backgrounds in which Englis
held limited currency. Only 8 students said their parents had manage
to study some elementary English in school. Of these, 3 reported that
their parents might listen to English programs on the multilingu
television or radio. Five reported that their parents could be expec
to utter some English words if they encountered foreigners or if nee
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arose in their workplace. None of them could read or write English,
Considering the students themselves, although 18 had sat for the Grade
10 English language test, only 10 had managed to score a simple pass
(i.e., a grade of 40%). Three students reported that they had read
English newspapers/books or seen English films-although they could
not remember the titles of any. Fourteen reported that they might
occasionally switch on some English programs on radio or television.
The same number said they might code-mix English with friends or
when they needed a link language.
CONTEXTUALIZING CLASSROOM LIFE
Precourse Determination
When the university reopened belatedly for the academic y
was after much doubt as to whether it would continue to function at
all because renewed hostilities between the Sinhala government an
Tamil nationalists had brought life to a standstill in the Tamil regio
Yet students trickled in from jungles where they had taken refu
from the fighting-in some cases, trekking hundreds of miles by foot.
In a country where only a small percentage of all those who annual
qualify for tertiary education do get admission, the students value
their university degrees sufficiently to turn up for classes. As a grim
reminder of the violence and tension that would continue to loom
behind their studies, government fighter jets screamed overhead
bombed the vicinity of the university while the students were t
the English placement test during the opening week of classes.
Despite these problems or because of them, students were hi
motivated for studies (including English), as is evident in an in
questionnaire I gave them. Asked whether they wanted to study
glish at the university, all of the students replied in the affirm
However, the intensity of the feelings that accompanied their moti
tion is conveyed through some of the other data in which stu
enjoyed more scope for free expression. Thiru wrote the follo
personal note at the end of his free recall procedure:
1. It is difficult to study English in the village. And I am from Kaddaipar
chan in Mutur. There was no English from Grade 3 to 7. I la
opportunities. But I really (extremely) desire learning English (Pl
don’t reveal this to anybody else in the class: Here in Jaffna ther
a lot of opportunities, and I am presently studying English fro
private tutor also).
Students from remote villages profoundly regretted not having e
joyed opportunities to learn English earlier and admitted that it
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belatedly that they had realized the need for the language. Some of
the male students including Thiru caught me alone a couple of times
in the first month (while I walked back to my office after class) to
impress upon me their previous frustrations with the language and
their present desire to master it in the university.
The reasons for learning English however seemed predominantly
utilitarian. In the questionnaire, 76.1% stated “educational need” as
their first preference (including 61.9% who considered this their sole
choice). “Job prospects” was cited by 19.2%, and “social status” by
4.7%. “To travel abroad” was cited by none. But the categories students
themselves proffered suggest motives that are more pragmatic or ideal-
istic as they emerge through a relatively open-ended later question.
Students needed English (a) because ESOL is mandatory in the university, 5.8%; (b) because a pass is required in the first-year test, 5.8%;
(c) to pursue postgraduate studies, 5.8%; (d) to understand other
cultures, 11.7%; (e) to interact with a wider group of people, 14.7%;
(f) to gather more information, 20.8%; (g) to know an international
language, 23.5%; (h) “to become a complete person,” 11.7%. Although
Motives a-c show a narrowly pragmatic view of education, Motives
d-g are less so. And the final reason, which is the most idealistic
stated, suggests that students are not always purely utilitarian in their
perspective. Some, like Lathan insisted, “Through English a student
becomes a mulu manithan [i.e., a complete man].” In fact, when the
question was reframed as “What are the disadvantages of being a
Tamil monolingual?” students expressed a paralyzing sense of powerlessness in the face of diverse peoples and circumstances.
Such high notions as Lathan’s about the functions of English are
confirmed in the students’ attitudes toward English as a language.
Although students would be expected to resist English at a time of
heightened linguistic nationalism and purism in the community with
political leaders daily condemning English, students’ attitudes were, on
the contrary, quite positive. Except for one student (i.e., Supendranwhose remarkably consistent opposition will be discussed later), the rest
disagreed with the statement “Studying English as a second language
would create damage for Tamil language and culture.” Similarly, for
the more personalized variant of this statement, “What are the social/
personal disadvantages that would occur to you by your use of English,”
all answered “none.” Such a favorable attitude on the part of the
students is partly explained by a phrase that kept recurring in their
responses: English as a pothu moli (i.e, common language). It was evident
that students were not using this synonymously with sarvathesa moli or
akila ulaka moli (i.e., international language) with its usual connotations.
When they used pothu moli in addition to the latter terms, they seemed
to use it with the meaning that it was an “unmarked” language that
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transcended the specific cultures and ideologies of different nations.
So Gnani stated, “Although it is the language of a particular nation,
it is a common language for all people and nations.”
Although the relatively more spontaneous impressions of the students in the free recall procedure largely confirm their positive attitudes toward English, they are also tinged with fears and inhibitions.
Hence, though a majority of the students associated English with development, progress, learning, civilization, literacy, culture, social respect,
and personality, one can also detect other comments which suggest
that students are not unaware of the sociopsychological damage and
politics of the language. Shanthi wrote:
2. British mother tongue. We were forced to study it because of colonialism.
If we have a knowledge of this language we can live in whichever country
we want. Brings to mind the developed life of the white people. A
language that everybody should know.
Though conflicting impressions are mixed in Shanthi’s stream of
consciousness, what is remarkable is that she remains detached from
the negative features and fails to take a perspective on them. The
fact that students are probably consciously rationalizing their fears or
suppressing their inhibitions is evident from Ratnam’s comments. He
argued, “Since the dominance of English is uncontestable, the best
strategy is to exploit its resources to develop our own language and
culture.”
Midcourse Resistance
The inhibitions towards English which lay partly suppresse
the initial period of the course in the conscious responses of
dents, came into relief in their largely unconscious lived cultur
course proceeded. It is evident from the record of daily attenda
students faced problems in the course. Although students rec
impressive 94% daily turn out for most of the first 2 month
end of the second month, attendance fell to 50%. Students b
miss classes for the slightest reason: to write tutorials for
subject, to prepare for a test, to attend funerals of friends’
At times intense fighting in the district or the imposition o
also affected attendance. But none of this deterred 90% of the stu
from attending from the eighth month as the final examina
approaching, demanding that past test papers be done and
undertaken.
The comments, drawings, and paintings students had penned in t
textbook are more subtle evidence of the flagging interest of students
Because students had written these during class time, this activity sug
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gested that topics other than English grammar had preoccupied them
while teaching was going on. Although students had appeared to be
passively observing or listening to the teacher, as required by the
instrumental pedagogy in the class, the glosses in the text suggest a
very active underlife. Unknown to the teacher, students were communicating with each other or sometimes with themselves through these
glosses. The glosses suggest the discourses and themes that seem to
have interested the students more than those in the textbook. In one
sense, these are the discourses which mediate for the students the
situations, grammar, and language taught by the textbook. In another
sense, these are students’ counterdiscourses that challenge the textual
language, values, and ideology. Hence, they deserve close examination.
Many of the glosses are inspired by the ongoing nationalist struggle
for a separate Tamil state. For this reason, in Unit Ic, the picture of
Fletcher (the protagonist in the detective story) as he is seated in a
prison cell is modified in a couple of textbooks. He has been painted
with a traditional thilakam (a mark on one’s forehead symbolizing a
Saiva identity), given a mustache, worn spectacles and referred to
below as Thileepan (i.e., the name of a popular Tamil resistance fighter
who had fasted unto death protesting against the Indian “occupation”
forces in 1987). Two police officers talking to each other after setting
up a roadblock to arrest an escaping convict (in Unit 10c) have been
referred to as LTTE and PLOTE-two rival Tamil militant groups.
When Fred joins the army in Unit 25a, the guns in the background
are labeled AK-47 and T-57-the arms typically used by Tamil fighters.
There are also refrains from Tamil resistance songs penned all over
the textbook which talk about the domination of the Tamil nation and
the need to resist.
Other glosses seem to seek cultural relevance from the situation
and pictures. Jane and Susan are painted thilakam and kondai (i.e., a
traditional hairdo) to resemble Tamil women. Some other characters
are drawn with traditional dress to Tamilize them. Tamil proverbs
and aphorisms comment on the moral of some of the situations pre
sented in the textbook. Other situations are glossed by titles of film
and refrains from cinema songs, reflecting the important place cinema
occupies in Tamil popular culture. Bruce’s success story, in Unit 4a
from a factory worker to a factory owner, accompanied by the purchase
of a bigger car, bigger house, having another child, and eventually
second marriage is aptly satirized by romantic film titles at each stage
of the development.
Romance and sex, which are glorified by university students, inform
other glosses. Because these experiences are often associated with a
liberal Western culture (different from the conservative Tamil ethos),
most of these comments, interestingly, are written in English. Fletcher
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driving with Marilyn in Unit 14c is a target for many such comments.
In one book Fletcher is presented as saying, “I love you darling.” In
another it is Marilyn who says, “My dear lover.” Susan, whispering to
Joe in a concert in Unit 9a, is made to say, “Love me,” while Laura
leaning towards Bruce says, “Kiss me.” There are also comments
through which students send messages to each other: “Meena loves
Sugirthan.” Ironically, though students find it difficult to produce
correct sentences in transformation exercises and pattern practice, in
these comments they produce fairly complex sentences which have
not been taught in the class: “I love all of the girls beautiful in the
Jaffna University.” “Reader! I love you. Bleave me” has been replied
to by another student: “I don’t love you because I do not believe you.
You are terrible man.”
The sexual component gets expressed when the private parts of
characters in the textbook are highlighted with ink. There are al
different postures of the sex act drawn all over the book. Such drawin
would create much sensation in a mixed class of students in a conserva-
tive society. However, it is impossible to avoid the impression that some
of the drawings deliberately vulgarize sex. Perhaps they are aimed at
insulting the English instructors, or the publishers of the textbook, or
the U.S. characters represented.
While the cultural distance of the textbook from the discourses of
the students is dramatized by these glosses, it intrudes more direct
into the daily lessons to affect the learning process. Although th
textbook expects teachers to use its visual aids to help students formulate interpretive schemata for comprehension passages, such exercis
in fact end in frustration as the attempts of students are complicated b
the cultural difference. After reading the first episode of the serialize
story in which Fletcher, an ex-army officer, is presented in a fede
penitentiary, I asked the students to reconstruct what they had heard
with the help of the picture. (In the conversation below, reproduc
from field notes, the contribution of the students was in Tamil):
3.a. Teacher: Where do you think Fletcher is? … Shanthi!
b. Shanthi: In the army barracks.
c. Teacher: Army? What makes you say that?
d. Shanthi: He is wearing a uniform.
e. Teacher: Well … Indran?
f. Indran: He is in the hospital …. He is seated on a bed.
g. Teacher: But what about the bars? … Don’t you see the bars?
actually in prison.
h. Shanthi: Okay, but he is wearing good clothes. He is wearing
i. Indran: And he is said to be going to the library and having r
meals …. And he is seated alone in the room.
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j. Teacher: (Explains in detail the difference between prison life in Sri
Lanka and the U.S.)
The students’ image of prison life as overcrowded, dirty, and more
repressive (based on Sri Lankan conditions) interferes with their interpretation. The other situations visually represented, such as an orches-
tra playing, air travel, department store shopping, and apartment
living, also confused the students. Such cultural estrangement created
an additional layer of problems to the linguistic ones students were
already confronted with.
Other tensions in the course resulted from the styles of learning
desired by the students. The students seemed uncomfortable with a
collaborative approach to learning whenever it was encouraged. Be-
cause the textbook specified pairwork occasionally, and I myself
wanted to create more linguistic interaction among students, I insisted
that the desks be arranged in a circle. But before each class, the students
rearranged the desks into a traditional lecture-room format, with the
teacher’s desk in front of the room and their own in horizontal rows.
Thus, students minimized interaction among themselves and failed
take initiative in the flow of classroom discourse. As the conversation
cited above suggests, typical interactions follow the features of tradi-
tional teacher-centered classroom discourse (see Mehan, 1985; Stubb
1976), in which the teacher regulates and dominates talk. Turn tak
follows the tripartite structure of Question (see Turn a above), Answe
(Turn b), and Evaluation (Turn c); such sequences follow in c-d
e-f-g. Turns for students are assigned by the teacher (see Turns a a
e); for each single turn by the student, the teacher takes two, th
dominating the quantity of talk. The questions asked are display qu
tions for which the teacher already knows the answer. In a quite atypic
move here, Shanthi and Indran attempt to contradict the teache
explanation; significantly, these were not framed as questions but sim
ply as casual asides. It was only Supendran who asked for clarifications
or challenged my explanations more explicitly. For most of the tim
the rest preferred to sit, pen in hand, and write down whatever w
on the board or simply listen to the teacher’s lecture (as in Turn
Ironically, one of the glosses above an interactive pair-work exerc
said, “This is a job for the jobless.”
Accompanying this desire for teacher-centered learning, studen
made learning a product rather than process. Students expected
be provided with the abstract forms and rules of language deductively
or prescriptively for them to store in memory rather than to inductiv
formulate the rules for themselves through active use of the language
in communicative interactions. Disregarding activities, students d
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manded notes. Whenever charts or grammatical paradigms were presented, the students eagerly wrote them down. They demanded more
written work rather than speech or listening exercises because they felt
that they could retain it for personal study and revision before tests.
My diary records much time taken in discussing the importance of “use
rather than rules.” But the slogan failed to create changes in their attitude. Gradually students noted my practice of reserving the 2-hr classes
for activities and 1-hr slots for the more overtly grammar-oriented sections of the textbook and attended the latter while cutting the former.
Students also resisted the active use of English as a medium for
instruction or interaction in the classroom. During the first week when
I asked students to introduce themselves in English by making use of
simple syntactic structures I had written on the board, they simply
giggled and found it embarrassing to do so. Students responded in
Tamil even though I used English for questions, commands, and explanations, whether in formal or informal situations. Thiru displayed the
most paralyzing sense of inhibition. It was simply impossible for him
to produce a single word of English from the textbook or by himself.
The long moments of silence would become embarrassing as the class
waited patiently for Thiru to open his mouth when his turn came to
do an exercise or read a passage orally. Although Thiru was very
voluble in class in Tamil about matters related to university policies
and regulations, in English he was simply tongue-tied.
Much of the stress seemed to result from the implications of English
for the identity and group solidarity of the students. A particularly
trying time was the correction of pronunciation as required by the
textbook. Because Tamil lacks syllable-initial fricatives, the students
pronounced he and she as /ki/ and /si/. The discomfort of the students
in my repeated attempts to correct such pronunciation was explained
by their later comments that revealed their awareness of such pronun-
ciation being identified as “nonstandard” Sri Lankan English. These
students had been the target of insults by middle-class speakers of
“educated” Sri Lankan English. Not only pronunciation but the very
language was a class marker. Supendran said that he simply avoided
contexts in which students (from “better backgrounds”) used English
with him because he felt that they were flaunting their knowledge of the
language in order to make him look ignorant. English then provided
unfavorable subject positions to such students, making them feel disad-
vantaged, helpless, inferior, and uneducated. Students also felt that
the use of English for interactions would be interpreted by their peers
as an attempt to discard their local rural identity and pass off as an
anglicized bourgeois or even a foreigner. It was probably for this reason
that in the questionnaire, although 50% stated that they would use
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English “with a foreigner who also knew Tamil,” all except one rejected
the possibility of using English “with a Tamil who also knew English.”
The conflicts English created for the representation of their identity
become more explicit in the conversation pieces students had to roleplay in each unit. Students typically uttered their parts in a flat reading
intonation when they were asked to dramatize the dialogue in front
of the class. My model renditions with an eye for realism only increased
their inhibition. Students said that it was “funny” or “unbecoming of
themselves” to speak in such manner. It soon became apparent that
the discourse behind these dialogues was itself so alien to these students
that they had difficulty entering into the roles specified. One such
conversation was between Joe and Susan in Unit 4d while they budgeted their weekly expenses: Joe’s casual remark that he has to hold
a party soon for 35 people in his office to celebrate his promotion irks
Susan because of insufficient notice and the amount of additional
expenses involved when they have just purchased a new house. W
as usual, students found it difficult to imaginatively enter int
situation, I tried to construct local situations where such dialogue c
be expected to occur. Students however pointed out that the gen
“money talk” or “budgeting conversation” was alien to their pe
background. “We spend as we earn,” according to one student,
their lifestyle. Even the consumerism, thrift, delayed gratification
drive for social mobility assumed by the conversation turned o
be alien. It was not surprising then that such role-playing exer
were purely of academic interest to them and, therefore, not
better could be employed for these other than the reading inton
for descriptive prose. Indran’s notes in his notebook at the end of
class were a telling comment on his attitude to the exercise. He
simply jotted down Tamil synonyms for new lexical items like add
tradition, and promotion and identified some examples of count/no
count structures which the unit was supposed to teach: “How m
employees are at the bank? How much money did you spen
week?” Indran had simply filtered out the necessary grammatic
vocabulary items from the supposedly interesting conversation.
What the lived culture of the students suggests is a dual oppositi
trend. On the one hand, they oppose the alien discourses behin
language and textbook. On the other hand, they oppose a proc
oriented pedagogy and desire a product-oriented one. Indran’s n
book suggests that both trends could be connected: Seeing little pos
bility of relating what they learned to their sociocultural backgrou
students saw little meaning for the course other than the formal,
demic one of acting through the examination and satisfying the En
requirements of the institution.
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Postcourse Contradiction
Although the final interview with the students soliciting their
impressions of the content and organization of the course con
some of the observations on their lived culture, it also contra
many findings-at least at face value. Asked which subjects th
enjoyed most and which they had worked hardest in, student
tioned their different subjects of specialization for the form
unanimously cited English for the latter. When I pointed ou
flagging attendance in English and contradicted their claim
confronted with a surprising piece of evidence. The majority
students in the class had been going for private instruction in En
outside the university. As Indran put it conclusively, “For no
subject in the university do we go for tutoring, thus spending add
time and money on it. The fact that we do this only for English
our motivation to master the language.” The students contin
affirm, as they had done at the beginning of the course, the nee
English and the priority they had given to it.
The admission that students had sought help outside the cla
potentially an indictment of the university ESOL course. I the
exploring what it was that the students were getting in their
instruction that they were not getting in the university. It a
that the tutors were using Sri Lankan or Indian textbooks-i
used any at all. But it was not the cultural relevance that st
seemed to value in these courses as much as the grammar inst
In fact, the texts and pedagogy were overtly grammar orien
were rarely contextualized. Tharma praised his tutor (using
borrowings from English): “He ‘cleared’ the ‘grammar.”‘
Other questions in the interview confirm the desire of the stu
for grammar-oriented instruction. When asked which section
textbook they had enjoyed and which they had found useful
of the 15 interviewed) replied that they found the gramma
and exercises (Sections b and e) useful although they had var
enjoyed the serialized story, conversation, and listening sections.
conflated these distinctions: Jeyanthi said that she enjoyed the g
mar section “because it is useful for the test.” Statements such as
Jayanthi’s revealed that the desire of the students to learn th
of grammar prescriptively was related to an examination-oriented
tivation. In fact, the final 3-hr written test featured mostly disc
item questions on formal aspects. Later, asked specifically wh
students had initially hoped to achieve through this course a
extent to which the course had fulfilled their expectations, Siv
“I expected that the course would prepare me for the test … t
cover the necessary grammar comprehensively.” It was not surpri
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then, when all eventually agreed that the course had failed to satisfy
their expectations.
The recommendations of the students for a more effective ESOL
course that would also successfully motivate Tamil students was
predictable. Tharma argued that a more grammar-based textbo
should replace AKL. Vilvan expounded, “Grammar should be giv
primacy and covered first since this is crucial for other areas
listening, reading, or speaking.” Most students agreed that gram
has to be taught first before “wasting time” on skills and activities. O
recommendations also confirmed a product-oriented, examinat
based motivation: “More notes should be provided … more ho
work should be given to retain grammar … allow textbooks to
taken home for personal study … teach more slowly …. ” O
a couple also added: “Provide more communicative tasks …
more culturally relevant textbooks.”
Moving on to the attitudes of the students to the cultural con
of the textbook, here again some observations on their lived cul
were contradicted. Students did not perceive any threats stemm
from the foreign culture. Some students disclosed that they had act
ally enjoyed learning about life in the U.S. In fact, because stude
failed to understand the force of my questions, I often had to refra
the questions to highlight the issue of the damage U.S. values a
lifestyle could do to their subjectivity or culture. When I pointe
instances where details of people, places, and situations had conf
them, students agreed that these had created some confusion especia
at the beginning of the course but added that these difficulties
outweighed by the new and interesting information that they c
gather from the textbook. They went on to state that AKL was “inter
ing,” although not “useful”-perhaps from the examination poin
view.
Discussing next their impressions of U.S. society, they listed a var
of both positive and negative features with typical academic po
Although they observed the individual freedom, technological de
opment, comfort, and liberal relationship between the sexes, they a
stressed the subtle forms of racism, social inequality, “decadence,” a
imperialism (although it was not clear where in the text they saw th
last feature displayed). Asked how these had influenced their o
values and behavior, students displayed a remarkable detachment
wards this clash of cultures. Jeyanthi said, “We don’t have to ac
everything: We can take the good and leave out the bad.” It has t
observed that the students’ relaxed attitude toward U.S. cultur
least in their statements) might result from making culture, to
product-something to be learnt for its information value and sto
in memory.
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Although the retrospective statements of most students are at tension
with their lived culture, it was Supendran who displayed a remarkable
consistency. Supendran, who came from a remote rural community
and whose nonliterate parents lacked any formal education, entered
the university relatively late after working as a teacher in his community. He did not go for private tutoring-partly due to lack of finances.
Rather than being examination oriented or desiring grammar-based
instruction, Supendran wanted English to equip him to serve his own
community: “to enable me to help my village folk to draft official
letters to institutions, to read documents we receive from the state, to
understand foreign news broadcasts, to read labels on fertilizers and
farm equipment.” Therefore, Supendran was the only student who
categorically stated “AKL has to go.” He wanted a textbook and pedagogy that was not just communicative, but also based on local culture:
“Rather than talking about apples, talk about mangoes; rather than
talking about apartment houses, talk about village huts. Are we all
emigrating to America? No! Some of us will continue to live here.”
Being the single student who consistently stated that English posed a
cultural threat, he sought deep social relevance from the teaching and
textbook.
Before concluding the story of our classroom life, it is necessary to
provide at least sufficient information to enable a consideration of how
my own subject positions could have contributed to the construction of
student attitudes and classroom culture. Young (in my early 30s), male,
“progressive,” Christian, culturally Westernized, middle class, native
Tamil, bilingual, director of English teaching at the university are the
identities that I believe were most salient for the students. So students’
insistence on the use of Tamil in the classroom, for example, is moti-
vated by my being a bilingual Tamil. If there had been a native-
English-speaking teacher, students would have been compelled to use
English. Additionally, use of English with me would have been perceived to violate our Tamil in-group solidarity. (However, my class
and cultural identities separate me from the rural poor and would
likely have increased students’ inhibitions in using their marked English.) Our common Tamil identity would likely have also forced students to sound more nationalistic, especially as the present communal-
ist mood tends not to tolerate neutrality. In this context, however,
their affirmation of English is daring. On the other hand, because I was
in an institutionally powerful role, instances of opposition to English (as
their failing attendance) are significant. The same identity, however,
would have motivated students to affirm the language, textbook, and
the course. (In a sense, then, my multiple subject positions seem to
qualify each other.) Although the uniqueness of each teacher/researcher-student interaction should not be slighted in favor of the
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generalizability of this study, we have to note that almost all Sri Lankan
ESOL teachers are Westernized, middle-class, bilingual, native
Lankans like me.
CONTEXTUALIZING STUDENT OPPOSITION
At face value, the findings of the study seem inco
contradictory. On the one hand, students seemed to
motivation in the course, as it was most objectively d
record of attendance. There is reason to believe tha
motivation was related to an oppositional response to th
by the discourse inscribed in the language, pedagogy, an
At the very least, students were experiencing a tension
in the confrontation between the discourse they pre
discourses informing the ESOL course. But, on the ot
dents insisted that they worked hardest in English com
other subjects (which is true because they had been at
classes as well). They maintained, as they did in the
the course, the importance of English and the high p
learning the language. They went further to insist th
learning Western culture and using the U.S. textbook
did not find them useful from the examination poi
general, the oppositional attitude was manifested in t
flected, untheorized lived culture of the students emerg
glosses in the textbooks and my field notes; the rec
emerges from the more conscious expression of the
questionnaires and interviews.
As a way of reconciling this tension, we have sever
can suppress one set of data in favor of the other; w
students as confused and contradicting themselves; or
fault the methodology. Not seeing valid reasons to d
find it challenging to preserve both sets of data and con
attitudes of the students display a complex response
of English. It appears that these dual attitudes simpl
conflict students faced in the course between the threat
alienation experienced intuitively or instinctively and th
a socioeconomic necessity acknowledged at a more con
students experienced discomfort in the face of the a
although they do not theorize about it. But this expe
juxtaposed with their awareness of the powerful dis
glorify the role of English (such as those of policymake
1983, and Hanson-Smith, 1984), the pressure from t
system to display proficiency in English, the prom
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economic advancement English holds, and (especially for Tamil students today) the uses of English as a buffer against Sinhala nationalism
and passport for exodus as political or economic refugees abroad.
The grammar-based, product-oriented learning which students al-
ternatively desired (as exemplified in the lived culture as well as their
statements) is one way for them to reconcile this conflict. That is,
grammar learning enabled the students to be detached from the language and the course, avoid active use of the language which could
involve internalization of its discourses, and thereby continue their
opposition to the reproductive tendencies of the course. At the same
time, this strategy enabled them to maintain the minimal contact neces-
sary with the language in order to acquire the rules of grammarwhich in their view was the most efficient preparation for getting
through the examination. This strategy while enabling them to preserve their cultural integrity (however tenuously) also enabled them
to accommodate the institutional requirement of having to pass English
and thus bid for the socioeconomic advantages associated with the
language.
Although noting that grammar learning functions as a possible strategy to negotiate the conflicts students face in the ESOL classroom, we
have to realize that there are significant historical and cultural reasons
which motivate them to adopt this strategy. The popular demand for
grammar among all Sri Lankan university students is attested to by
the chairperson for English Language Teaching Centres in the country
(R. Raheem, personal communication, September 28th, 1991). Students’ desire to be simply given the abstract rules of the language by
the teacher could be influenced by traditional styles of learning in
Tamil society (or, for that matter, Sri Lankan society), which have been
largely product oriented and teacher centered. Although it is hard to
generalize about the different institutions of learning that have existed
historically (such as thinnai, or “house front,” and temple schools), it
can be said that typically the teacher (always male) passed on his stock
of received knowledge orally to the disciple at his feet (see Jayasuriya,
no date; Sirisena, 1969; Somasegaram, 1969). The disciples had to
cultivate the art of listening meditatively and memorizing accurately
the huge stock of information to be preserved without corruption.
The reverence paid to the guru, as to the knowledge he transmitted,
was almost religious in character. This tradition is directly inherited
by private institutes in contemporary Tamil society, enjoying immense
popularity among parents and students (and pitted by my own students
as a corrective to the university ESOL course), which intensively prepare passive students for competitive examinations.
Moreover, traditional descriptions of language and pedagogies of
language teaching display a penchant for prescriptive, deductive, and
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formalistic methods. Although the well-known Dravidian scholar Emeneau (1955) outlines the fundamental influence of Hindu linguistic
tradition on Western descriptive linguistics, he also notes: “Intellectual
thoroughness and an urge toward ratiocination, intellection, and
learned classification for their own sakes should surely be recognized
as characteristic of the Hindu higher culture …. They become grammarians, it would seem, for grammar’s sake” (pp. 145-146). Similarly,
as late as the colonial period, the teaching of local languages to European administrators was primarily based on studying and memorizing
learned grammatical treatises (see Wickramasuriya, 1981).
Anthropological approaches based on a narrowly conceived egalitarianism would encourage us to fashion a method of language teaching
that resembles the native tradition of a community (see, e.g., a description of the KEEP project in Watson-Gegeo, 1988). However, the grammar-focused tradition of Tamils-which resembles the now disreputed
grammar-translation method in TESOL-drives to a reductio ad absurdum such attempts. Critical ethnography would posit that native
learning traditions have to be interrogated for the interests they serve
because minority cultures are steeped in traditions of domination as
well as resistance. Without delving too much into how this favored
pedagogy of Tamils traditionally bolstered their caste structure and
religious hierarchy, we can proceed to its contemporary implications
for the students discussed in this study. We must remember that such
a pedagogy encourages a teacher-controlled, nondialogic, “banking”
style of learning that is known to reproduce the dominant values and
social relations of an oppressively stratified society (see Freire, 1970;
Giroux, 1983).
Furthermore, though a formalistic approach to the abstract rules of
“standard English” might appear to preserve students from the more
obvious cultural content associated with the communicative orientation
of the course, it in no way saves them from other forms of domination:
It disconfirms the Englishes students bring with them; it prevents
students from interrogating their own culture and society through
literacy; it fails to alter the unfavorable subject positions belonging to
monolingual and English-incompetent Lankans. Nor does the formalistic approach enable students to effectively internalize the rules of
the language or progress rapidly in fluent language use. In the in-
course assessments carried out to monitor their progress, the majority
of the students continued to score below the passing grade. They
remained with the smattering of “marked” English they brought with
them. What all this implies is that these students will continue to occupy
the marginalized position accorded to the monolingual, poorly edu-
cated, rural poor in a social system dominated by the English-speaking,
bilingual, urban middle class (see Kandiah, 1984). Ironically, the desire
ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SRI LANKAN CLASSROOM 623
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for grammar-oriented learning only influences students to accept these
limitations more uncritically and give in to social reproduction.
Hence, although on one level the grammatical approach-which is
a culturally mandated, indigenous form of learning-enables students
to somewhat resist the ideological thrusts of the foreign language and
textbook, it is doubtful whether we can glorify this as a form of radical
“resistance” as Kandiah (1984) implies. This is not to deny that the
study sympathizes with Kandiah’s explanation of lack of motivation
in ESOL students as being a result of the sociopolitical implications
of English in Sri Lanka; the study also refutes the alternative explana-
tions of Goonetilleke (1983) and Hanson-Smith (1984) that this is
simply a consequence of the educational policy which makes students
give more time to rival subjects even though students are convinced
of the benefits of English. Yet Kandiah fails to grapple with the complexity of students’ opposition which has to be qualified by their belief
in the benefits of English, resulting in examination-oriented motiva-
tion. This tension results eventually in their giving in to social and
ideological reproduction through English.
It becomes important therefore to unravel the ambiguous strands
of students’ behavior with the help of Giroux (1983) who warns that
the concept of resistance must not be allowed to become a category
indiscriminately hung over every expression of “oppositional behavior” (p. 109). Thus, Giroux distinguishes between resistance, which he
sees as displaying ideological clarity and commitment to collective action for social transformation from mere opposition, which is unclear,
ambivalent, and passive. Having analyzed the effects of classroom
behavior in the larger historical and social contexts, we can say that
the responses and attitudes of the students do not fall under Giroux’s
definition of radical resistance. Students fail to sustain consciousness-
raising or collective critical action. Theirs is largely a vague, instinctive
oppositional behavior which, due to its lack of ideological clarity, ironically accommodates to their reproductive forces. It is perhaps in Supendran we see any signs of conscious resistance that display potential for
the development of a radical pedagogy for the Lankan context. The
behavior of most other students in the class is an ambivalent state
which contains elements of accommodation as well as opposition in
response to the conflicting pulls of socioeconomic mobility, on the one
hand, and cultural integrity on the other.
However, the prospects for a pedagogy of resistance for such students is not all that bleak. Giroux (1983) is quick to point out:
On the other hand, as a matter of radical strategy all forms of oppositional
behavior, whether they can be judged as forms of resistance or not, need
to be examined in the interests being used as a basis for critical analysis
and dialogue. Thus oppositional behavior becomes the object of theoretical
624
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QUARTERLY
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classification as well as the basis for possible radical strategy considerations.
(p. 110)
The foregoing study has been conducted in the same spirit and for
the same objectives. It attempts to disentangle the conflicting strands
in the classroom culture of marginalized students, to expose the accommodative impulses and encourage the potential for resistance, in order
to fashion a pedagogy that is ideologically liberating as well as educationally meaningful for such students.
THE AUTHOR
A. Suresh Canagarajah is Senior Lecturer in English and He
Language Teaching Centre at the University of Jaffna, Sri La
working in Sri Lanka after completing an ethnography of black
writing for his PhD in applied linguistics at the University of
May 1990.
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Session 12_Narrative Inquiry and Ethnography
Research Literacy (A&HL 5575)
Fall 2019
Narrative Inquiry
! We use stories to entertain, to inform, and to instruct. In fact, much of
our cultural heritage is transmitted to us through some genre of narrative
– fairy tales, fables, parables, and novels, to name a few.
! Not only do stories play an important role in our lives but some scholars
would argue that our lives are stories – stories about ourselves that we
tell ourselves and other people.
! In the last century, social scientists working in a number of disciplines
decided that one way to understand human experience would be to
document these stories and study them.
! As a result, narrative inquiry has emerged as a form of research.
! An illustrative example from the field of second language studies
(Murry, 2009.
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Narrative Inquiry
! Narrative inquiry is based on the premise that we understand or make
sense of our lives through narrative.
! Narrative inquiry is a story or a collection of stories. Doing narrative
inquiry involves eliciting and documenting these narratives.
! In the field of applied linguistics, researchers have made use of a variety
of genres, including case studies, life histories, learner autobiographies,
diary studies, biographies, and memoirs.
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Narrative Inquiry
! Among other topics, narrative inquiry has been used in the field of
applied linguistics to explore:
” Motivation (Norton Pierce, 1995; Schumann, 1997; Shoaib & Dörnyei,
2004);
” Identity (Benson, Chik, & Lam, 2003; Kanno, 2003; Murphey, Jin, & Li-
Chi, 2004; Norton, 2000);
” Multilingualism (Block, 2006; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004);
” Learning strategies (Oxford & Green, 1996);
” Language loss (Kouritzin, 1999);
” Communities of practice (Murray, 2008); and
” Autonomy and self-directed learning (Murray, 2003; Murray & Kojima,
2007
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Narrative Inquiry
! A story can be research when it is interpreted in view of the literature of
a field, and this process yields implications for practice, future research
or theory building.
! Critical narrative inquiries allow individual voices to be heard (Benson,
2004), especially those of the disenfranchised – people who have
historically been marginalized in the research process, such as disabled
people, gays and lesbians, and racial and ethnic minorities.
! These voices from the margins have the potential to change theory by
prompting us to take a critical look at the existing canon or standard
(Kouritzin, 2000).
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Narrative Inquiry: Collecting Data
Step 1: Develop your research design
”
Determining the research question (what I will study)
”
Developing a rationale (why I will study it)
”
Selecting an appropriate approach (how I will study it)
Step 2: Prepare interview questions
Step 3: Conduct a pilot study
Step 4: Select the participants
Step 5: Establish a rapport with the participant
Step 6: Conduct and transcribe the interviews
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Narrative Inquiry: Organizing and Interpreting Data
Step 1: Code the interview transcripts
Step 2: Look for connections between codes and start to group codes into categories
Step 3: Configure the participant’s story from the interview data
Step 4: Send the story to the participants for their comments
Step 5: Carry out a ‘cross-story’ analysis
Step 6: Note themes as they emerge from the stories
Step 7: Present your findings
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Ethnography
! Ethnography has its roots in anthropology and refers to both the process
and product.
! Ethnographic approaches are particularly valuable when not enough is
known about a context or situation’ (Mackay & Gass, 2005, p. 169).
! Ethnographers’ main purpose is to learn enough about a group to create
a cultural portrait of how the people belonging to that culture live, work,
and/or play together.
! They do this through fieldwork – extended observation of and
engagement with participants.
! Fieldwork, which has also been referred to as ‘deep hanging out’,
typically uses participant observation, interviews, and artifact analysis.
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Ethnography
! Through ethnographic studies, researchers look at cultures for:
” what people do (behaviors),
” what they say (language),
” the potential tension between what they do and ought to do,
” and what they make and use, such as artifacts, which include
standardized test scores, photos, handouts, and surveys.
! What is “culture”?
Culture is an abstract concept used to account for the beliefs, values,
and behaviors of cohesive groups of people. It is a narrower term than race
(which accounts for biological variation); a racial group may contain many
different cultures, and a cultural group may contain members of different
races. Although cultural group may refer to a
particular nationality, cultures
may cross political boundaries and a nation may contain many cultural
groups … Within a cultural group, behaviors are patterned and values and
meanings are shared. (Richards & Morse, 2007, p. 53).
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Ethnography
!
Ethnographic studies are fluid and flexible. This means that ‘the research
question employed in these studies can be dynamic, subject to constant
revision, and refined as the research continues to uncover new
knowledge’ (Mackay & Gass, 2005, p. 169).
!
The group studied may be a sample of participants who share a particular
feature, but not necessarily the same location, such as a group brought
together in an online chat room (Angrosino, 2007).
!
Focused ethnography: the focal point of the research is typically on an
issue about which researchers may mold a guiding question before the study
begins (Richards & Morse, 2007).
!
Critical ethnography: researchers aim to go beyond rich cultural
description to promoting change (Madison, 2005; Sleeter, 1992).
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Ethnography
!
A critical ethnography example:
Over a ten-year period, Heath (1983) examined two cultural communities in
the southeast of the United States, a black working class community and a
white working class community. By studying how the children learned to
socialize through the use of language, she revealed how black children’s verbal
socialization significantly disadvantaged them when they entered school, as
school norms were based on white culture. To achieve the depth of cultural
illumination she gained, she had to devote an extensive amount of time to study
these people’s practices: she observed them in daily life, listened to their
stories, participated in their cultural practices, and studied their related artifacts
in detail. From a wide perspective that included sociocultural and political
considerations, she continued to analyze her data throughout the course of her
study and allowed her discoveries to direct, and redirect, her research. By
doing this, she made important contributions well beyond her field.
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Data Collection in Ethnography
!
Participant observation:
” In Participant observation observer should make a conscious effort to note:
setting (space and objects), systems (procedures), people, and behavior.
” At first, it is difficult to know what to focus on in observation, and it usually
begins with a ‘big net approach’. In this approach the researchers try to
focus on as many systems, people, and behaviors as possible in their
observations until their focus naturally narrows to more specific issues or
questions.
” Whatever the extent of your participation in a study, you must maintain a
balance between your roles as an insider and an outsider and be conscious of
your own part in your research.
” The observer should maintain an emic (insider or participant perspective)
and etic (outsider or researchers’ perspective) position simultaneously.
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Data Collection in Ethnography
!
Interviewing and artifacts:
” For interviews, each researcher formulates questions based on his or her
own unique etic position.
”
Researchers should find good informants, people who are articulate and
gifted at description, is essential because the information researchers get
from their informants can provide some of the mainstays of the research
data.
” The artifacts can take a variety of forms. They can be pre-existing
documents such as past English grades, standardized test scores, handouts
from lessons, end of term tests, or preexisting video footage or photos.
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Ethnography: Key Principles and Features
! Key principles and features of ethnographic studies:
” The focus of ethnographies is on group behavior and the cultural
patterns underlying that behavior.
” They study people’s behavior in everyday rather than experimental
context.
” Ethnographic research is the holistic approach taken to describing and
explaining a particular pattern in relation to a whole system of patterns.
” Gathering data from a range of sources chiefly by observation and/or
relatively formal conversation.
” Collecting data that are not based on pre-set categories or explicit
hypotheses but that arise out of a general interest in an issue or problem.
” They are typically small in scale and focused on a single setting or
group.
” Prolonged engagement by the researcher in the research setting.
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Ethnography in Applied Linguistics
! If you see writing, reading, speaking and listening and language learning
as primarily shaped by the social contexts in which they occur and you
are interested in uncovering the meanings that participants in these
processes bring to the communicative events in which they engage.
! Main use of ethnographic research in AL : to inform us about the ways
that students’ cultural experiences in home and community compare
with the culture of the schools, universities, and communities where they
study, and the implications of these differences for second language and
culture learning.
! An illustrative example from applied linguistics
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Ethnography in Applied Linguistics
!
In AL Ethnographic approaches have been used in:
”
Ethnographies of schools and language programs to personal accounts and
narratives or life histories of learning and teaching (e.g., Duff, 2002; Pavlenko &
Lantolf, 2000).
”
Home-school discontinuities among Native American children (e.g., Macias,
1987; Philips, 1972, 1983).
”
Bilingual language use outside educational settings (Goldstein, 1997).
”
Cultural and ideological processes in first and second language learning (King,
2000).
”
Research on specific aspects of the L2 process, such as second language writing
in different cultural contexts (e.g., Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995; Carson &
Nelson, 1996).
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Ethnography in Applied Linguistics: Advantages
!
Research questions employed in these studies can be dynamic, subject to constant
revision, and refined as the research continues to uncover new knowledge.
”
!
Example: an ethnographer studying second language writing classrooms may enter
the research process with the aim of describing the patterns of interaction between
teachers and students and illustrating how those patterns are related to the writing
process. However, over the course of many classroom observations, analyses of
student essays, and interviews with both students and teachers, the researcher may
alter the focus of the study and begin concentrating on the types of feedback that are
provided by both teachers and students.
Ethnographic approaches are particularly valuable when not enough is known about
the context or situation to establish narrowly defined questions or develop formal
hypotheses.
”
Example: why does a particular group of heritage language learners do poorly when
learning in formally instructed foreign language classroom settings? An ethnographic
approach to this question could examine the context, the attitude of the teacher and
the students, the influence of home and social groups, and so on in an attempt to
uncover information relevant to addressing the question. If the researcher shares the
heritage language background, participant observation could be used; that is, the
researcher might be able to participate in the language classes or share social
occasions in which the language is used in some way.
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Ethnography in Applied Linguistics: Caveats
!
Ethnographies involve intensive research over an extended period of time.
They require a commitment to long-term data collection, detailed and
continuous record keeping, and repeated and careful analysis of data
obtained from multiple sources.
!
Ethnographic approaches to research may create potential conflicts between
the researcher’s roles as an observer and a participant. If the researcher
participates in an event he or she is observing, this may leave little time for
the carefully detailed field notes that ethnographies may require.
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Ethnography in Applied Linguistics: Caveats
!
It has been argued that an ethnographer’s focus on describing a culture is
problematic, because “there is no such thing as a social group that is not
constantly destabilized by both outside influences and personal idiosyncrasy
and agency (Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999, p. 45).
!
Because research reports adhere to certain (culturally influenced) standards
of writing, the otherwise accurate picture an ethnographer has recorded may
come out skewed.
!
It is often difficult to generalize the findings of ethnographic research to
other problems or settings because of the highly specific nature of such
work.
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Ethnography: Validity and Trustworthiness
! Using multiple recording devices and observers
! Triangulation or the collection of data from different sources
! Using a flexible observation schedule
! Practicing prolonged engagement
! Using a language that is not overly colored by the writer’s
interpretations
! Using peer-debriefing and using member checking
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