ESL Classroom Case Study

Today, racial discrimination in ESL classrooms has become much more a challenge for educators, and most especially to non-native speakers of the English language. In a global scale, we can assume a reduction in overt racism in ESL classrooms, however, this does not seem to erase the problem as the latter continues to pervade albeit covertly. In a case study “Doing culture, doing race: everyday discourses of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural difference’ in the English as a second language classroom” by Ena Lee, it was found out that everyday common-sense discourse of culture and culture differences can serve to racialize.

The study was conducted on the ESL programme at Pacific University, a multicultural Canadian institution, whose programme distinguished

Discourses of culture as evident in the data gathered though class observations, interviews and questionnaires, sometimes served as a metonym for ‘race’ (Appiah, as cited in González 2004, 19). Despite the effort of teachers to use culture to create common grounds in discourse, they have actually established a sense of border between himself (as Canadian) and his students and among his students by critical inquiry into the differences in ‘their’ culture. Inadvertently, racism is subtly manifested in ‘everyday talk’. The way in which culture (as depicted by ‘otherness’ or ‘foreignness’) is objectified in everyday talk does produce race, instead of understanding cultural differences, the supposed-to-be positive vision of the university’s ESL

In the 1990s, Michael Bryam’s intercultural communicative competence (ICC) theorised that nation-based understanding cultural ‘incompatibilities’ in foreign language education is a means to empathise with the values of others that are incompatible with one’s own however, it is still susceptible to becoming too standardized and stereotypical. Consequently, a teacher’s desire to understand difference to establish comfort and safety in education may lead to ‘doing of race’ by proxy of ‘doing culture’. It is important to compare ‘doing race’ with ‘doing gender’ in the sense that the notion of repetitive socialisation into the discourse of foreignness produces racialized identities. A habitual frame of action that is the daily common-sense discourse on culture and cultural difference thus eventually creates individualistic social stereotyping among the teacher and ESL students.

Conclusively, as language educators sought to resolve the problem of racism in everyday talk in an ESL classrooms, Lee emphasizes that it is acute to think outside of the customary pedagogy in second language teaching and to critically analyse the challenges and complexities of talking about culture in the classroom and the pedagogies and ideologies related to