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Education for Active Democratic Citizenship through English. A Challenge for Academia
Abstract
The present-day globalized society and its extremely competitive labour market pose numerous challenges which universities should be able to anticipate, reflect on and address in a consistent and coherent manner. It becomes increasingly clear that to be successful, graduates should show flexibility, openness, autonomy, self-determination and empowerment, while constantly demonstrating they are engaged in active democratic citizenship along with being prepared for their specialized subject. This chapter explores the opportunities offered by coherently integrating these transversal skills and trans-curricular competences within language learning programmes with the aim of better preparing graduates for democratic citizenship. Also, it outlines a possible methodology: integrating education for active citizenship and plurilingual competence at university level can be done through specially dedicated subject courses of intercultural communication, gender studies or cultural studies and connecting them to language learning syllabi, as tools to develop self-reflection and autonomy-building strategies for students, in order to enable them to take over their own learning and thus better cope with the challenging labour market facing them.
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This paper seeks to present some of the effects the new media and e-tools usage have on learning styles in the context of foreign language education, with an emphasis on the English language, which is the most widely learned and used 'foreign language' in Europe. In connection with this, the notions of 'international English', along with 'English as a lingua franca', 'British English', 'American English' are explored to verify their functionality within the European space. The hypothesis is that the increased use on a large scale of social media (such as facebook and twitter), as well as the widely spread educational e-tools, affect the way people select and design their educational strategies in general, and in particular their English language learning strategies. In order to verify this hypothesis a small scale survey was conducted within the Bucharest University of Economic Studies among students and staff on how they use the new media and technologies in formal and informal language learning and on the effects of this usage on how they learn English. The results, presented in the paper, were collected by means of a questionnaire and informal discussions. Also this paper presents some of the possible future opportunities, as well as future challenges that the inclusion of the use of new media and technologies in educational policies may pose. The paper puts forward some ideas concerning assessment of English language proficiency and language competence acquired through formal, informal and non-formal learning, and questions the usefulness of the existing systems and mechanisms designed to recognize and certificate language proficiency, while also making suggestions on ways to improve them.
How can we envisage a new language and culture pedagogy that breaks with the tradition of viewing language as part of a closed national universe of culture, history, people and mentality, and begins to see itself as a field operating in a complex and dynamic world characterised by transnational flows of people, commodities and ideas? Initially, to understand the field and its current challenges, we must understand its history, and the first part of this book contains a critical analysis of the history of the international field of culture teaching - the first historical treatment of this field ever written. The next part of the book focuses on how we can build a framework for a new transnational language and culture pedagogy that aims at the education of world citizens whose intercultural competence includes critical multilingual and multicultural awareness in a global perspective.
Intercultural communication and gender studies are a must for business and economic academic education in Romania nowadays for obvious reasons: the world of transnational communication systems and of globalized economic, social and health issues is increasingly becoming a space of intercultural encounters, and students, as well as professors, are more and more exposed to different cultural mindsets and behaviours.
This article proposes the introduction of intercultural communication and gender studies in academic education in Romania. Although ideally they could be included in business academic education in an integrative manner, within an interdisciplinary and underlying model of intercultural and gender mainstreaming and capacity building, unfortunately that is not possible at the moment. Thus, one simple solution would be to create as many modular courses as possible, and to hope that in time a more integrative model will be initiated and put into practice. Another possibility of integrating concepts from these two subjects could be done through foreign languages education, mainly through teaching English for business communication, as this language is the most studied one in Romanian business and economics universities. From the methodological point of view, the focus should be on a learner-centered approach, through which learners internalize their already acquired knowledge and find their motivation and ability to enhance it. At the same time, assessment of intercultural communication and gender studies could be done in parallel with assessment of English language content, and it could be rendered more relevant by taking into consideration the way students learn, thus including informal and non-formal educational contexts. Self-assessment and peer-assessment, besides teacher assessment, could be used to increase students’ confidence in work ethics and fair treatment.
The article also presents the findings of two small-scale studies (2009, 2012) I conducted with students of two master’s programmes and students of bachelor programmes of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. The findings show the openness of these students in the largest business and economics university in Romania to the introduction of modular courses of both Intercultural Communication and Gender Studies. Together with their study within language learning programmes, this could constitute valid models for the acquisition of these skills in academic economic education in this country.
Keywords: intercultural communication, gender studies, international English, learner-centred approach, integrative assessment
The rapid pace of developments in the world economy requires new language skills constantly. Language learning, in turn, involves very intimate processes that transcend the individual and belong to the capacity of societies to develop intelligently. Research has moved from the optimism of using English as a lingua franca in the global village or merely in the single market of the European Union to the sobering reality that only a very small percentage of Europeans use English for online services. Multilingualism seems to be a good answer for the intercultural communication problems of Europe and language technology is seen as a possible connector among the various languages. The role of the new media and technology to support fast and meaningful language learning need to be evaluated in order to distinguish between the industries' claims to constant and vital improvements and the realities of the learning/teaching process in contexts that vary across Europe. This paper will explore some of the challenges that the use of qualitative research raises in this field, will present the results of a small scale qualitative investigation and the impacts that the authors perceive as critical for the awareness of decision makers in the educational field.
This paper explores the role of culture in the teaching of English as an international language in an Asian context. The paper opens with a description of the features of an international language. Then the author discusses how culture plays an important role in language learning in the teaching of semantics, pragmatics, and rhetoric, in the development of language materials, and in the choice of teaching methodology. Throughout the paper, the author argues that the role of culture in teaching an international language needs to be significantly different from the role of culture in teaching other languages. One of the major aims of the paper is to explore what this means for English teaching in Asian contexts.
More and more human beings find themselves not sharing in the collective identity of their host countries, while enjoying certain rights and benefits as guest workers or permanent residents. The entitlement to social rights, which T. H. Marshall had considered the pinnacle of citizenship, has been dissociated from shared collective identity and political membership. This chapter begins by considering the disaggregation of citizenship; then, building on the promise of "jurisgenerative politics," it develops the concept of "democratic iterations" as offering normative and institutional solutions to the paradoxes of democratic legitimacy. Examining several cases from contemporary European debates concerning the rights of foreigners and immigrants, the chapter then illustrates processes of democratic iteration at work. Democratic iterations are complex ways of mediating the will- and opinion-formation of democratic majorities and cosmopolitan norms. In conclusion, the chapter discusses the ontological puzzles of cosmopolitan norms. © In this volume The Regents of the University of California 2006. All rights reserved.
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