Who is at the center of our language teaching?

Abstract

The terminology of student- and teacher-centeredness is familiar to most language teachers as a metric of effective teaching. In this report, I explore the challenge of applying such limiting terminology to language classrooms and detail additional questions that instructors should ask. First, Kumaravadivelu’s three categories of language teaching methods—language-centered, learner-centered, and learning-centered—are directly relevant to the principles and practices of language teaching. However, recent critical and intercultural approaches to language instruction highlight the intentional decentering of the classroom in order to better engage in effective communication and relationship building with members of local and global language communities. In this report, I propose expanding our understanding of who or what is at the center of our language teaching to include not just the people and ideas in the classroom itself, but to embrace an outward orientation that centers language communities.