Mike Byram, Durham University

This is a book – published by Springer – is the fruit of a decade of research and development led by Melina Porto in Argentina, ably supported and helped by Silvana Barboni and a number of teachers of English in Argentinian schools. I have worked with Melina for many years and this is not a classic review but simply my impressions and thoughts about this book and on the work that lies behind it.

It is an important book both in terms of the theory it develops and with respect to the detailed and richly illustrated accounts of the materials teachers used and the ways in which they worked in difficult circumstances. Those circumstances are perhaps to some extent peculiar to Argentina, but the transferability of what is described here is for me quite clear, even though I have no personal experience of the kind of classrooms which are described here.

Knowing Melina’s work as I do, I was not surprised by the thorough and comprehensive review of the nature of critical thinking and critical pedagogy and what this means for language teaching. In the third chapter, Silvana explains in considerable detail the significance of developing materials to address social justice and social practice in education in Argentina.

The notions of translanguaging and of English as a language for international communication are fundamental to the descriptions and analyses of what teachers and learners did in their classrooms. It is striking how much the teachers are concerned with introducing into their teaching complex social issues, making attention to language competence a secondary matter in these lessons. This is clearly intellectually demanding for the teachers in terms of making the issues accessible to the learners, and the detailed, richly illustrated descriptions reveal how this was done. These issues are also demanding for learners and perhaps the further development of this work can bring in learners’ point of view as might be done for example through action research. Each chapter finishes with a section called “Engagement options” which is part of the function of this book as a professional development book, and not just as an account of a project. The “Engagement options” are crucial to this and could well be the beginning of further work by teachers perhaps helped by other researchers.

I would certainly encourage teachers to read this book, if they think of language teaching in terms of its social significance and of its educational value beyond, but inclusive of, the traditions of teaching about language and teaching how to use language in communication. It is a demanding perspective and one which I suspect could not be undertaken by individual teachers without the support of a team and researchers such as Melina and Silvana. But this is a model for researchers and teachers in general, and especially for those who work in difficult contexts, whatever they may be.