Page 16 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
Chapter 1
Concepts of language education – abandoning labels
"If it were possible to learn a foreign language in the way I have been taught, I should now know that language." Jacques Barzun (1954)
What should we call this form of language education? Theoretical? Hypothetical? These are the questions that the French-American historian and philosopher Jacques Barzun asked himself in 1954 when speaking about language education in the United States. These questions seem just as pertinent today in many parts of the world, including in Poland.
To begin with, I would like to make a brief analysis of bilingual, multilingual, and intercultural language education programmes in order to determine whether these models of language education could be combined and treated as elements supporting translingual education. The question is: Is it possible to abandon the labels ascribed to different forms of language education, which often define only what is prestigious and what is inferior, and instead focus on developing the competence of plurilingualism, emphasising the diversity of learners?
Working methods and techniques in language education have been discussed since the 1950s8. Since then, 70 years have passed, and teachers have a wide range of methods, approaches and techniques in teaching and learning foreign/second languages at their disposal. However, it seems that as long as we think about each subject or each language separately, we will not be able to change much in education. I believe that a plurilingual, intercultural, and pluriliteracies approach to learning could be the answer to the question of how to influence language education in a theoretical and practical way, so that these changes lead to more effective teaching of the target language itself, and also foster diversity and encourage critical thinking, reflection, and action, leading to a better understanding of ourselves and others. This could allow us to better understand the complexity of the world, but also of ourselves when confronted with the challenges of today. To this end, we should draw on critical pedagogy, which, as Canagarajah (2015, p. 932) believes, in the context of language education, is oriented towards practical action and is not a set of ideas, but rather a way of "doing, learning, and teaching." It is a practice motivated by a different attitude towards school and society. In this perspective, both students and teachers bring their real life experiences and needs to the educational process in order to make a change in the educational process, including changing the means and purposes of learning to create a more ethical, educational, and social environment for learning (Canagarajah, 2015). The discourse of critical pedagogy is one of liberation and hope (Akbari, 2008, p. 277). Researchers following this view explore how social relations and issues of power are resolved in language (Norton & Toohey, 2004). They believe that language is not only a means of communication but is also a practice that constructs and is constructed by the way language learners understand
8 When the first methods of teaching English as a second language began to be developed in the United States. 1