Dr Inma Alvarez Puente

Our project is inspired by the conviction that language learning plays a vital role in our globalised world, not as a neutral instrument of globalization—a commercialised skill set—but as a means to understand and critically engage with the world. As Franz Fanon put it: ‘To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture’. For us, ‘to take on’ means both to acquire and to combat. Our context, therefore, is recent research that places language and multilingualism at the heart of attempts to rethink, from transnational and post-national perspectives, the dominant academic paradigms of national literature departments, programmes and research. The Open University will be leading strand 5 of the project: “Diasporic identities and the politics of modern language teaching”. As cultural transmitters, modern languages practitioners must make sense of and transfer cultural concepts, behaviours, values and attitudes as they seek to establish inter-connectedness among distinct worlds. Embodying Astrid Erll’s concept of ‘traveling memory’ (Erll, 2011), they are in a position to take advantage of new possibilities—in a world of communication flows and great migrant mobility—‘for shaping post-national citizenship and for creating new lines of solidarity within the global arena’ (Assmann, 2014, p. 548). The importance and sophistication of their work—which is fundamental to any contemporary discussion of ‘language acts and worldmaking’— is often under-valued or neglected and too often accorded second-class status in research-based Modern Language departments. Teachers’ cognition about their work—as well as their actual pedagogical practice—is influenced by beliefs and contextual factors that determine the values and attitudes they reveal to learners. As Duff and Uschida explain, socio-cultural identities and beliefs, very important in educational practice as in other aspects of social life, ‘are co-constructed, negotiated, and transformed on an ongoing basis by means of language’ (1997, p. 452). This strand investigates this vehicular role of language in making sense of the world and its history and culture. We examine this in relation to the ways in which modern languages practitioners construct and express their professional and personal identities through language, as well as through consideration of how they go about the teaching of cultural concepts.

The British Council is running a pilot across several countries to provide resources for technology enhanced education to the bottom of the pyramid schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. Primary and secondary schools have been provided with British Council digital audio material pre-loaded onto solar powered/ windup MP3 players (LifePlayers) which provide a reliable method of playing this audio even in locations where there is intermittent or no electricity. The main goal of this pilot is to affect change in English teaching practice moving it towards a learner centred approach in order to improve teaching and learning of English. Nigeria LEAP M&E is already in progress with the OU, focusing on primary schools in rural areas. The British Council now wishes to extend current M&E activities by the OU to three other countries in the region (South Africa, Ethiopia and Mozambique). The extent of use of LifePlayers and related materials will be monitored and evaluated in these three countries in the following contexts: primary English education in South Africa, secondary education in Mozambique and English language clubs and extra curricula English in Ethiopia. The OU will be responsible for the design of the M&E tools, data analysis, interim reports and a comprehensive final report providing a regional overview of the 4 countries. It will also be responsible for a baseline reconstruction and a scoping document following the first visits during April/May 2014.