Language Teachers, Politics and Cultures

Author: Michael Byram, Karen Risager

Format:
Hardback
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ISBN:
9781853594410
Published:
Publisher:
Multilingual Matters
Number of pages:
216
Dimensions:
210mm x 148mm
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Available
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The issues which foreign language teachers meet in their professional lives are usually considered to be of a 'technical' nature: how to motivate learners, what methods to use, how to assess learning etc. This book takes a different perspective and shows that foreign language teaching has a strong political character and responds to the social and political changes of the contemporary world. This is particularly evident in the cultural dimension of language teaching through which learners are introduced to other countries and their values and beliefs. The book demonstrates the importance of these issues for all language teachers in their day-to-day teaching by investigating the effect of major social and political change in two countries, England and Denmark. The authors have interviewed teachers in both countries to analyse the effects of such change. They ask, for example, about the ways in which increased mobility – one of the declared aims of European organisations – have affected their experiences of target language countries. On the basis of teachers' views, they make recommendations as to how the language teaching profession in general should face its social and political responsibilities in the education of young people in the contemporary world.

Michael Byram is Professor Emeritus at the University of Durham, UK. He has published numerous books, including most recently Teaching Intercultural Competence Across the Age Range: From Theory to Practice (edited with Manuela Wagner and Dorie Conlon Perugini, Multilingual Matters, 2017).

Karen Risager is Professor Emerita in Intercultural Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. Research interests: the relationships between language and culture in a transnational and global perspective; cultural representations in language textbooks; the intercultural learning of the global citizen; intercultural dialogue and multilingual policies at the international university. Some publications: Language and Culture: Global Flows and Local Complexity (Multilingual Matters 2006); Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a National to a Transnational Paradigm (Multilingual Matters 2007). Researching Identity and Interculturality (co-edited with Fred Dervin) (Routledge 2015), Representations of the World in Language Textbooks (Multilingual Matters 2018).

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 European Integration and the European Dimension: Teachers' Views
2 European Integration: Political and Educational Trends
3 The Cultural Dimension in Foreign Language Education
4 Teachers' Views on the Cultural Dimension
5 Stereotypes, Prejudice and Tolerance
6 Learning by Experience: Contacts Abroad
7 New Relationships Between Language and Culture: The Way Forward
Appendices
References

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