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In her book titled Race, Empire, and English Language
Teaching, Suhanthie Motha (2014) asks educators to expand
their views of English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and to
“teach children and young adults about difference, hierarchy, and ...
the role played by English language teaching in the United States” (p.
48). Given the context that the immigrant children are learning and
thriving in the U.S. classrooms, we, the editors of SRIS’s newsletter,
identified the theme of Diversifying the TESOL Curriculum as important. We chose this theme
for this issue because we were inspired by beautiful stories from
bilingual/ multilingual and TESOL teachers around the world who are
silently working in their learning environments to deliver just,
equitable, and empowering instruction while embracing their students’
diversity. For this issue, we are excited to present articles, personal
reflections, and research reports bringing multicultural perspectives
into the TESOL classrooms.
Our first contribution is titled Envisioning a
diversified ELT curriculum in the postmodern era by Keith
Graham and Yungkyeong Choi. In this article, the authors explain the
five dimensions of the postmodern diversity framework and how it
challenges traditional practices, especially in English-teaching
contexts in Korea. In our second contribution titled Injecting
Leadership into the ESL/EFL Curriculum: Five best practices for
effective IEP Instruction, Adil Bentahar asks educators to go
beyondteaching students subject-verb agreement and thesis statement
creation, suggesting we bring the topic of leadership into classroom
discussions. Next, Tung (Ryan) Vu and Thao Nguyen share a report on a
case study conducted in an English as a foreign language (EFL) speaking
course in Vietnam. In this report, the authorsshow us how the
justice-oriented EFL curriculum benefits learners’ civic engagement and
skills, which fills existing research gaps to ensure academic and
non-academic development. Finally, Tabitha Kidwell shares a wonderful
lesson plan educators can use to teach proverbs while building students’
intercultural competence and addressing both cultural and linguistic
objectives.
We hope this issue will bring teachers, educators, and
researchers a variety of ideas to better diversify the TESOL curricula
in your classrooms. We urge you to continue to share your innovative
work and ideas with our community so we can continue to learn from one
another.
Enjoy this issue and be well.
Sincerely,
Luis and Ethan
References
Motha, S. (2014). Race, empire, and English language teaching: Creating responsible and ethical anti-racist practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. |
