Global English, Global Teachers, Global Values?

Paper presented at the Access: The 1st Philippine International English Language Conference and 11th

UK Education Fair. Manila, 31 January – 1 February, 2009.

Global English, Global Values, Global Teachers?

Tamas Kiss

In this paper I am going to examine how globalisation affects the way English teachers work in

different contexts around the globe. I will look at whether the fact that we live in a globalised

world and whether Global or international English is being taught and learned have an influence

on teachers’ work in their different educational and cultural contexts. This, I believe is very

important when one wishes to understand how classroom decisions are made and what guides

teachers in their everyday work. Do teachers operate differently in their local environments?

Do they actually teach in different ways or is English Language Teaching (ELT) is becoming a

globalised profession? These are the important questions this paper sets out to answer.

Globalisation in Education

Globalisation, in a very simplified way, works through four different modes. These are

globalisation through i) trade; ii) investment; iii) human resources; and iv) exchange of

knowledge. In the field of education, all four modes can be experienced to varying degrees. The

first two, trade and investment, do not typically characterise education, although there are

certain signs that they are gaining more grounds. One way to think of some of the large

publishing houses whose books are available all over the world to understand immediately that

global trade does have some influence in education. Global investment, on the other hand, is

hardly present in education. One form of investment is manifested in the foundation and

management of international schools. However, this is far from being global. Although these

schools seem to flourish in some contexts, they are hardly present in others. For example, in

Singapore the Ministry of Education website (c.f. http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/private-

education/school-list/) lists 45 schools which follow a curriculum other than the Singaporean

national syllabus. These are labelled as ‘foreign system schools’ by the ministry and run by

different organisations – some obviously with the aim of earning a profit, rather than providing

sound education for the students. A completely different scenario can be found in Central-

Eastern European countries which can only list a few such institutions within their borders.

The two more prominent modes of globalisation in the educational world are globalisation

through human resources and the exchange of knowledge. There is hardly any explanation

needed to illustrate how these work, but I will nevertheless offer a few examples to illustrate

http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/private-education/school-list/

http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/private-education/school-list/



my point. Nowadays people travel all across the globe to take up jobs in far away countries.

Brain-drain, as it is commonly referred to, is typically practised in education. Countries with

readily available resources and budgets offer bright minds from less fortunate countries the

opportunity and means to work in their educational systems. As a result, it is often easy to find

a colourful mix of people at prospering universities. My department, for example, is employing

professors and lecturers from a multitude of countries including Singapore, China, Malaysia,

Myanmar, the United States, the UK, Democratic Republic of Congo, Vietnam, Philippines,

Hungary, etc.

The second prominent mode of globalisation in education, through exchange of knowledge, is

very easy to recognise. It is especially so when ELT is considered. I will briefly explain why. ELT

has its origins from BANA countries, i.e. from Britain, Australia and North America, where the

need arouse to teach people of other languages English. Major trends in language pedagogy

started from these countries and reached every corner of the world. With the development of

telecommunication and information technology new ideas and achievements have easily

reached far away places and thus knowledge is shared more easily in our time than ever before.

Therefore, it is quite possible that two language educators in opposite corners of the world are

reading the same article at the same time through an internet portal they both subscribe to, or

that teachers who use the British Council TeachingEnglish website

(http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/language-assistant/teaching-tips) are checking out the

same teaching tips during the course of their preparation for their classes. This indicates that

ELT is indeed globalised to a certain extent.

Is English Language Teaching a Global Profession?

Whereas in some areas of business globalisation has reached its pinnacle by offering exactly the

same services or products all over the world, e.g. the way certain fast-food chains offer the

same design and food in their outlets, it is questionable whether the same can be found in

education. With English becoming a truly global language and education is being influenced by

the processes of globalisation we need to examine how the everyday classroom reality is

affected. One way of doing this is to examine the values and believes that guide teachers’ work

in their classrooms. If they show similar features and trends in different parts of the world, then

we may possibly arrive at the conclusion that ELT is globalised and classrooms should be similar

regardless of their physical location. However, examining values is not an easy task. It is very

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/language-assistant/teaching-tips



difficult to define what motivates teachers’ actions or how they make decisions in the

classroom. One of the reasons behind this difficulty is - besides the complex nature of values

formation - that teachers do not seem to follow a language teaching methodology

systematically in their practice any more.

As early as in the 1990s, Richards (1990) pointed out the fact that teachers seemed to move

beyond methods in their classes. Teachers have not been applying methodology in any rigorous

manner, that is following strictly and consistently what the principles and theories behind the

chosen methodology would require, but they are trying to use whatever makes sense for them

in their own work contexts. Another researcher, Kumaravadivelu (1994) talked about language

teaching as being characterised by the post method condition. He argued that the present-day

language teaching was, and basically is, characterised by a pick and mix of activities, techniques

and procedures that teachers apply in their classrooms. He pointed out that teachers did not

use a method in the systematic way it was designed to be used, thus they arrived at a post-

method stage. Just like Richards (1990), he argues that methods no longer determine how

teaching is done in the classroom. Brown (2002) makes a further step claiming that methods

are actually dead. He points out that in present-day language classrooms teachers only use

what they see pragmatically fit for their needs. They do not subscribe to any methodology, any

organised school of thought about language teaching but choose whatever seems to be

appropriate in the course of their work.

Having seen the above trends, I strongly believe that the changes which take us beyond

language teaching methodology emphasise the need to look at the educational values of

teachers more carefully. I reckon that it is only by examining their values and beliefs we can

understand what we see in classroom practices. It is imperative, therefore, that the formation

of educational values is understood and studied thoroughly together with the individual

teaching philosophies of classroom teachers.

The importance of values and beliefs in education

Beliefs, values and feelings, besides the training teachers receive, actually determine how a

professional behaves in the classroom and, thus, they have a significant impact on the teaching

and learning process. Galan and Maguire (2001) point out the significance of values and teacher

beliefs in their research in which an average class was divided into two equal sub-groups. Two

different teachers were assigned to teach the groups but they were given contradictory



information about the learners: one was told that his group was selected from the ‘most able’

students, while the other teacher was informed that the students in his group were

underachievers. At the beginning and at end of the research project the students were tested

to determine their educational level and how much they had learned during the experiment.

The results were rather surprising: the students, whose teacher thought that he was working

with the ‘clever’ ones, improved their previous scores; they managed to perform better on the

test than their previous average. The other students whose teacher believed that he was

working with ‘poor ability’ students actually scored below their previous performance. What

can be the explanation for this? Galan and Maguire (2001) believe this was due to their

teachers’ beliefs about the students’ potentials and learning abilities. They say that “the

educator’s belief became the student’s reality” (2001). If that is so, then we not only need to

consider the existing educational values of teachers, but we should also try to understand how

these are formed. This is what I will discuss in the next part of my paper.

The formation of educational values and beliefs

Values and beliefs usually do not come out of blue skies. They have a history, either personal or

social, and they tend to be very persistent in their nature. Changing values and beliefs is not an

easy task; maybe that is the reason why education is generally considered to be a very

traditional profession. The question, therefore, has to be raised: how are those ideas and

concepts that guide us in our everyday practice formed?

Any new idea or concept we encounter, let them be new teaching techniques or views on a

certain group of people, is categorised and attached to an already existing schema in our mind.

This is what psychology terms as anchoring (László, 1999). If an idea cannot be connected to an

existing category, then the brain would reject it as irrelevant for the individual. For example,

when you hear about Hungarians, the new information will be grouped with already existing

information about this group of people (if not to Hungarians, then to Eastern Europeans, or

Europeans). This process is clearly illustrated by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), in a poem

titled The Blind Men and the Elephant. Six blind men who meet an elephant (an unknown

animal to them) try to figure out how it might look, or what it might be by relying on their intact

senses. Thus, the one who touches the side of the animal compares it to a wall, while the one

holding the tail is convinced that the elephant is like a rope. Basically they are all correct, but

they are far from the truth since none of them can comprehend the whole picture of what it is



to be an elephant. They use their existing knowledge of the world to make sense of the new

experience. The result is what you can see in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Picture of the elephant as ‘seen’ by the six blind men (source: www.wordinfo.info)

This is exactly how we construct our own understanding of teaching methods and techniques.

New ideas are presented at conferences, perceived and attached to an already existing

category in our mind. If they do not seem to fit perfectly, then they might be altered to allow

anchoring and further interpretation. In other words, we always rely on our previous beliefs or

philosophy of teaching when new educational concepts are introduced. These are evaluated –

mostly at an unconscious level – and then we form our own beliefs about them. However, in

the process of conceptualisation, or the formation of new beliefs about teaching and learning,

our interpretations might result in a completely different set of practices which are far from

their original intention.

As I pointed out earlier, in ELT new teaching ideas usually come from English speaking countries,

such as the UK, North America (US and Canada) and from Australia. These ideas are readily

available, thanks to globalisation, through a multitude of ‘traditional’ (e.g. books, journals,

conferences) and ‘modern’ (e.g. internet, television, etc.) channels and teachers in different

parts of the world may apply them, either by following their intrinsic motivation or under the

pressure of decision makers, what they learn in their own contexts. However, the question

remains: how do people react to these new ideas? Are they actually put implemented in the

same way in all classrooms or do teachers interpret them according to their already existing

schemas about education? To what extent do their existing values (social, cultural and personal)



prompt them to reinterpret new theories and see them in differently? How many ‘elephants’,

as pictured in Figure 1, walk in the ELT classrooms?

English Language Teachers’ values across continents

In order to examine and compare teacher values across cultural boundaries I designed a

research project in which I worked with teachers from Europe, South Asia and South East Asia. I

wanted to examine whether the educational values of teachers in the United Kingdom,

Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Romania would be different from those influencing

teachers’ classroom practice in Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The

project was exploratory in its nature and thus it did not aim to provide conclusive evidence or a

thorough analysis of teacher values in the above countries. It did aim, however, to identify

trends in participants’ answers which may then inform a more rigorous research project.

The research instrument was a questionnaire on educational philosophy which I adopted from

a previous research project (Kiss, 2006) that aimed to examine the educational values and

beliefs of Hungarian English language teachers, and which originally was developed by the

Minnesota Department of Education. The data collected with the questionnaires were

processed with a computer programme called Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).

The reason why educational philosophy was used to map out participating teachers’ values was

that educational philosophy, in its simplest interpretation, is a discipline which “is concerned

with widening and deepening our knowledge of education … with focusing tools of philosophy

on educational ideas, theories, arguments, issues and problems” (Farrel, Kerry and Kerry

1995:170). Since different schools of philosophy offer explanations and have created their own

interpretations and explanations of our world, it is worthwhile examining how their views can

be interpreted in education. Each school has had its own thought of human nature

(metaphysics), knowledge (epistemology), and finally, on what people hold as valuable, and

how value is defined in society (axiology). As a result of this, philosophical tools examining

these areas can indeed be used to measure what constitutes teacher values.

Of course, teacher values cannot be considered as the ‘products’ of schools of philosophies– or

professional thinking, which in our case is language teaching - only, since they originate from

the values that stem from a particular society. Pacek (1996:335) rightly says that, “people’s

attitudes and beliefs reflect the cultural values of a given society, and are deeply rooted in



tradition”. Philosophy, therefore, not only offers a framework in which teacher values can be

fully understood and appreciated, but it also provides an opportunity to examine whether

teachers who have been raised up and socialised into different societies hold similar values as a

result of their professional education, or whether they follow different routes to professional

practice as a result of their cultural differences.

Data collection

As was pointed out in the previous section, a questionnaire was used to collect data. The

questionnaire consisted of 90 statements from five different schools of philosophy: idealism,

essentialism, existentialism, pragmatism, and behaviourism. The statements were organised

into three different parts: 30 statements were attached to metaphysics, i.e. human nature, 30

were connected to epistemology, that is teaching and learning, and finally, the last 30

statements focussed on axiology, which discusses values and what is valuable in our life. Within

each of these areas, six statements were connected to each school of philosophy and presented

in a mixed order. Therefore, participants were not able to guess which statement was attached

to which school of philosophy. When they filled out the questionnaire participants simply had

to indicate whether they agreed or disagreed with the statements. Altogether, 71 teachers

participated in the project from 12 countries which could be grouped into three major regions:

Europe, South Asia, and South East Asia.

Discussion of findings

During the data analysis, I examined the answers participants gave to the list of statements in

the questionnaire and calculated how many they agreed or disagreed with. I primarily focussed

on those statements which they agreed with. The percentage of positive answers suggested the

degree of support different philosophies received. Of course, it would have been naïve to think

that research participants would support only one or two schools of thought since we develop

our values in a much more complex way, similarly to Kumaravadivelu (1994) explanation in

connection with choosing and using activities from a diverse pool of language teaching theories,

rather than following one methodology rigorously.

First of all, I had to decide how the data was going to be analysed. The data indicated that

teachers did not necessarily live and work in the cultures where they grew up and where they



may have formed the basics of their educational and social values. Quite a few Europeans were

working in South and South East Asia, whereas some Asians, typically Pakistani and Pilipino

teachers worked in Europe. Therefore, I had to examine whether the work context in which one

is immersed or the cultural background that one brings with themselves is what determines

educational values. I grouped research participants in two ways: according to i) the regions they

filled the questionnaires in and ii) where they originally came from, i.e. their nationalities. This

means that the answers of people who filled in the questionnaire in Europe were considered as

those coming from the European region and compared with data obtained from people who

were categorised as Europeans (as indicated by their nationality) regardless of their then

present work contexts. Figure 2 shows the results of this comparison in a bar chart format.

Figure 2: Support for schools of philosophies (in percentages) according to the work context of

participants and their nationalities in Europe.

As can be seen from Figure 2, the results show a difference in the amount of statements participants agreed with when they were grouped according to the region they worked in and their nationality. The data show significant differences in the support of certain schools of philosophy, namely pragmatism and idealism. Since these schools of thought can be regarded as opposites of each other in their views on human nature, education and values, it is not surprising that those who agree with the tenants of one would probably reject the other. Further probing revealed that participants when they were grouped in their nationality groups provided fairly similar answers. The data, thus, seem to suggest that it is not the work context, but rather the cultural, social background of the research participants that determines what

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Idealism Essentialism Pragmatism Existentialism Behaviourism

Region

Nationality



values they embrace during their everyday work. This result prompted me to look further into the differences that may exist among the different nationalities. When the data was arranged according to the participants’ nationality it supported the earlier assumption that there would be different degrees of support for philosophies in the different regions. The data also showed that Europeans were more divided in their answers and rejected many more statements than participants in any other regions. This is presented in Table 1 below.


Europeans 71.11 64.88 55.77 68 64

East Asians 68.93 79.21 87.24 83.12 71.60

South Asians 74.60 73.01 60.31 77.38 74.20

Whole sample 67.69 71.98 82.85 80.55 67.77

Table 1: Acceptance of statements (in percentages) from different schools of philosophy

Having determined that there were differences among participants’ beliefs and values as far as the regions were concerned, I decided to investigate this aspect more thoroughly and examined some of the European, South Asian and East Asian nationalities separately. It must be stated that the number of participants in the different countries was rather low; therefore, this data is far from being representative. Still, I reckon that it could be used as an indicator for national differences because correlation analysis of the answers showed a high significance in many cases, the correlation coefficient ranging between 0.0054 and 0.0438 (significance determined at the 0.05 level). For the nationality analysis I selected Polish, Lithuanian, and British participants to represent a European, and Filipino, Pakistani, and Indonesian participants to stand for an Asian perspective. Altogether 19 Europeans and 35 Asian participants were included in this analysis. The data, presented in Figure 3, shows various support for the different schools as philosophy as was predicted earlier.



Figure 3: Nationality profiles of participants (number of participants indicated in brackets)

This data clearly indicates a difference in participating teachers’ values and beliefs, or at least it suggests that there is a very high likeliness for such differences to be found if researchers set out to examine this phenomenon with larger samples. However, one question was still puzzling me and that was the high degree of support for most schools of philosophies. In fact, participants seemed to provide rather unanimous answers for many questions. More than 90% of the participants gave the same answer, either positive or negative, to 19 statements, and a further 20 statements produced the same answers from 80% of the research population. It means that for almost half of the statements in the questionnaire there was hardly any difference in the respondents’ opinion. A closer look at these statements revealed that they almost exclusively belonged to the statements focusing on human nature and values, rather than to the ones which addressed teaching and learning. I believe this is an important finding since it seems to indicate that teachers, just like parents, may have some universally shared beliefs, regardless of their work or cultural contexts, about how people behave and what values education should embrace. However, not all the answers reflected such agreement, thus one should assume that the disagreement can be accounted for as diversity in the participants’ thinking about education. In order to test this hypothesis, I focused on the statements on epistemology, i.e. the study of teaching and learning. The examination revealed that there is a difference in participants’ thinking about this issue. The statements from 31-60, which belonged to the area of epistemology showed the highest

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20

30

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50

60

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90

100


Polish (8)

Lithuanian (6)

British (5)

Filippino (20)

Pakistani (10)

Indonesian (5)



degree of dispute among the participants. Actually, the statement which managed to completely divide respondents was statement No. 36: “Such exercises as repeating information or memorizing are good ways of helping to train the mind.” Almost half of the participants indicated that they agreed with this statement, whereas the other half said that they did not (Table 2).

Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cummulative Percent

Valid

No 34 47,9 47,9 47,9

Yes 34 47,9 47,9 95,8

No Answer 3 4,2 4,2 100,0

Total 71 100,0 100,0

Table 2: Participants’ answer to statement No 36 - “Such exercises as repeating information or memorizing are good ways of helping to train the mind.”

One possible explanation for the differing opinions on educational practices can be that education is generally considered a very traditional profession where change is difficult to bring about. The reason for this is the wide social support for certain modes of education. Very often people think that what worked for them in schools should work for their children, underlining the most fundamental aspect of educational practices: values transmission in society. Since teachers are part of society they usually embrace similar values to everyone else in their cultural context. Even if they had differing opinions about how education should be delivered, they are under social pressure to stand in line and do what is expected, or else leave the profession and take on another job. Another explanation may be connected to the school culture and teacher education in the respective countries. Every nation has a slightly different structure and content focus in their teacher education programmes and thus they promote slightly different modes of teaching and learning. The teacher training institutions prepare their students to work in the school context specific to their countries and thus equip graduates with skills and values which are necessary for effective practice in that particular environment. It is enough to think about the class size, equipments available or the curricula to understand how teachers need to form different ideas about what is working and what is not in their contexts. In other words, by selecting what to accept as ‘working’ is making a decision about what is valuable for them as professionals. Of course, I do not want to assume that there are no other explanations for the divergence of teacher values in the sample I examined. Values and beliefs are delicate issues and they have several layers that are simply impossible to unfold and understand without a thorough



knowledge of the cultural context from which they originate. What the data seems to suggest is that there is a need to further study and understand professional values which are connected to a cultural context, or in this case to a country.

Conclusions In this paper I tried to examine whether globalisation and global English have brought about some universality in the teaching of English. My study revealed that although teachers have a large area of commonly shared values and beliefs – regardless of their cultural and work contexts – they also have different ideas about how teaching and learning should take place. I argued that this may have to do with the differing educational traditions specific to their cultures and the school contexts which impose some limitations on what would work or fail in the classrooms. This latter actually determines what teachers find effective, i.e. valuable in their professional practice and what they would reject as ineffective, i.e. not valuable. I believe that further studies are needed to map out culture specific educational values since they can provide useful information for educational decision makers when it comes to initiating and managing educational innovations or change. However, I am also certain that the finding of such research can only act as indicators and will lack the scientific accuracy expected from research in general. The reason for this is very simple: educational values and beliefs are very complex and therefore they present many extraneous variables, i.e. variables which the researcher has no means of controlling, that the results should be carefully considered as indicators, rather than facts. Having said that, however, I still believe that the study of educational values is important and educational decision makers should consider them in their course of work.



References Brown, H. D. (2002). ‘English language teaching in the ‘‘post-method’’ era: toward better

diagnosis, treatment, and assessment’ in J. C. Richards and W. A. Renandya (eds.). Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Farrell, M., Kerry, T., & Kerry, C. (1995). The Blackwell Handbook of Education. Oxford: Blackwell. Galan, M. & T. Maguire. 2001. ‘Education and Beliefs’ ELT Newsletter.

http://www.eltnewsletter.com/ Kiss, T. (2006). Investigating the influence of mentor training programmes on the formation of

educational values and beliefs of Hungarian English language teachers. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Warsaw: Warsaw.

Kumaravadivelu, B. (1994). ‘The postmethod condition: (e)merging strategies for second/foreign language teaching’. TESOL Quarterly 28/1: 27–47.

László J. (1999). Társas tudás, elbeszélés, identitás. Budapest: Scientia Humana-Kairosz. Ozmon, H.A. & Craver, S.M. (2003). Philosophical foundations of education. New Jersey:

Pearson Education, Inc. Pacek, D. (1996). Lessons to be learnt from negative evaluation. ELT Journal, 50(4), 335-343. Richards, J. C. (1990). ‘Beyond methods’ in J. C. Richards (ed.). The Language Teaching Matrix.

http://www.eltnewsletter.com/

Global English, Global Teachers, Global Values?

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