Extracts from “Teaching for a Better World: Global Issues and Language Education” – (Cates,
2005)
Views of language educators
A number of leaders within the English language teaching (ELT) profession have addressed the
importance of global education for teachers of English as a second language (ESL) and English
as a foreign language (EFL). Some stress how global issues can provide meaningful content for
language classes. Others stress the mission language teachers have to teach for a better world.
Alan Maley, for instance, argues that a global education approach to English language teaching
would bridge the gap between the classroom and real life:
Global issues are real: the spoilation of the rainforests, the thinning of the ozone layer, acid rain,
nuclear waste, population growth, the spread of AIDS, state violence and genocide in Kurdistan,
Tibet and Bosnia, ecological disaster and war in Ethiopia and Somalia... the list is depressingly
long. What has this to do with the teaching of EFL? English language teaching has been
devilled with three perennial problems: the gulf between classroom activities and real life; the
separation of ELT from mainstream educational ideas; the lack of a content as its subject
matter. By making global issues a central core of EFL, these problems would be to some extent
resolved. (Maley, 1992: 73)
Speaking at the start of the 1990s Brown, whose principles for language teaching inform many
language teaching courses, said:
Global, peace and environmental issues intrinsically affect every human being on earth. These
issues provide content for your content based humanised ESL teaching of the 90s. We teachers
have a mission, a mission of helping everyone in this world communicate with each other to
prevent the global disaster ahead. The 90s are in your hands. (Brown, 1990)
The idea that foreign language teaching can contribute to creating a better world is not new, of
course. Indeed, much traditional language teaching makes vague references to global
education ideals. However, as one noted language educator points out, this has mostly
remained wishful thinking:
It may be well to ask ourselves whether international understanding, let alone world peace, can
be said to have been promoted by the considerable amount of foreign language teaching in the
world. Diligent learning of foreign words and phrases, laborious copying and recitation of
irregular verb paradigms, and the earnest deciphering of texts in the foreign language can
hardly be considered powerful devices for the development of international understanding and
good will. (Rivers, 1968: 262)
In other words, teaching grammar and language structures is not enough. If our language
students are truly to become socially responsible world citizens, then global issues and the four
goals of global education (global knowledge, skills, attitudes and action) must appear explicitly
in our language teaching curricula.
Global issues in the language classroom
There are a variety of ways in which EFL teachers in Japan are working to integrate global
issues and global education into their teaching. These involve language teaching content,
methods, materials, course design, teacher training and extra curricular activities.
Content Language teachers have a degree of topic flexibility that other subjects do not. It is not
surprising, then, that content is one area of teaching where instructors are attempting to
integrate a global perspective. This approach is described by one Japan-based language
educator as follows:
'Global issues' and 'global education' are hot new buzzwords in the language teaching world.
Global education is the process of introducing students to world issues, providing them with
relevant information and developing the skills they will need to help work towards solutions.
Those who support global education usually defend it in this way: we all need to use reading
passages, dialogues and discussions in our teaching, so why not design these with content that
informs students of important world issues and challenges them to consider solutions? (Provo,
1993)
Global issues can be addressed even when students are just starting to learn the sounds of a
foreign language. One example is the Japanese junior high school text Cosmos English Course
(Oura et aI., 1989: 5) which teaches the English sound /p/ by using the word 'peace'. Grammar,
usually felt by students to be the dullest area of language study, can also be taught with a global
perspective through a change of content. Starkey (1988), for example, describes how teaching
past, present and future tenses becomes more meaningful when students study the past,
present and future of global issues. This can involve students in studying the historical
background of an issue such as environmental pollution, looking at the present situation of
pollution in their community or country, then doing future-oriented activities concerned with
solving this problem. Comparatives can similarly be practiced through comparing human rights
in different countries or through contrasting global inequalities of First World wealth and Third
World poverty. Some teachers have designed exercises to teach students the conditional
'iLthen' while promoting environmental awareness. These revolve around pattern practice based
on model sentences such as 'If we recycled paper, we'd save more trees' or 'If we all picked up
litter at our university, we'd have a beautiful, clean campus' (Hockman et al., 1991). The four
language skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking can also be integrated with global
issues content. (Cates: 2005)
