Social Justice and Classroom Practices: Towards an EAP Pedagogy of Transformation and Empowerment

Fernando, W., Winiarska-Pringle, I. , le Roux, M., Kukuczka, J. and Palanc, A. (2021) Social Justice and Classroom Practices: Towards an EAP Pedagogy of Transformation and Empowerment. BALEAP Conference 2021: Exploring Pedagogical Approaches in EAP Teaching, 06-10 Apr 2021.

Abstract

In recent decades, EAP pedagogy has been a field of rapid development. Starting with the university provision that emerged in mid-1960s from the need to support students’ perceived lacks in academic language and literacy, EAP teaching practices have since evolved significantly. They currently include the focus on linguistic features of academic discourse (Baffy 2018), genre analysis (Cotos, Huffman and Link 2015) and socio-cultural contexts in which academic language is used and reproduced (Benesch 2008; Hyland 2002). While these directions have contributed to research-driven pedagogical applications and have attempted to ‘mov[e] EAP beyond its traditional pragmatic and accommodationist orientation’ (Riazi, Ghanbar and Fazel 2020: 3), the socio-political aspects of EAP pedagogy have largely remained under-researched and under-reported. This paper aims to address this gap and to contribute to the scholarship in this area by reporting on a study investigating how social justice considerations have impacted on the classroom practices and pedagogical choices of EAP tutors at different stages of their professional careers. At the theoretical level, the research reported in this paper draws on critical pedagogy (Giroux 2020) and the social study of language and literacy (Street 1984). At the empirical level, it uses ethnography as its central approach to research design and data collection (Heath and Street 2008). The study participants have been recruited from a recently-formed BALEAP SIG on Social Justice in EAP and from the wider EAP community. The data includes semi-structured questionnaires, follow-up conversational interviews and examples of teaching materials. The analysis employs qualitative methods of thematic and inductive coding (Vaismoradi, Turunen and Bondas 2013), aimed at establishing patterns and tendencies across the data. The findings of the study suggest that in their pedagogic work EAP tutors are often guided by broad understandings of social justice which include issues related to economic inequality, ethnicity, race, linguistic and cultural imperialism. Embracing this complexity, the tutors choose to underpin their EAP classroom practices with social justice considerations by adapting teaching materials and motivating students to question assumptions about the nature of academic discourses and the goals of a neoliberal university. The findings indicate that this approach can be both transformative and empowering: it affords tutors to create pedagogical spaces which go beyond the textual and contextual focus of EAP, and provide opportunities to negotiate meanings, contest academic conventions and place learner agency in the centre of the teaching and learning process.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Winiarska-Pringle, Mrs Iwona
• Authors: Fernando, W., Winiarska-Pringle, I., le Roux, M., Kukuczka, J., and Palanc, A.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > Language Centre

Related URLs

• Organisation