The hobby course: towards a

languaging curriculum
Richard Watson Todd and Ronnakrit Rangsarittikun

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The English as a lingua franca (ELF) and languaging research areas have
challenged the norm that the goal of ELT is to teach a standardized language.
This article reports on a course following the principles of ELF and languaging
where the goal is to support students to use and grow their existing repertoire of
resources to do things in English. The course was taught at a Thai university and
was organized around each student learning a hobby of their choice. Focusing
on strategies for using language, the course provided support for students to
learn about their hobby, to interact with others through social media, and
to create videos. Students’ reflections on their learning show substantial
developments in their ability to do things in English and preliminary changes
in attitude. The shift from teaching linguistic features to exploring strategies for
exploiting existing learning resources provides a new paradigm in ELT.
Introduction As English teachers, it is generally taken as a given that the object we teach
is a language. This object has been codified in grammars and dictionaries,
and our goal is usually to help learners understand and produce language
that matches these codified descriptions. Two recent areas of research
challenge this view. First, research into English as a lingua franca (ELF)
challenges the validity of the codified descriptions and the view that
matching these descriptions, or accuracy, is a primary goal of language
learning. Second, languaging (perhaps most familiar in the concept of
translanguaging) does not view a language like English as a fixed object.
Rather, language is a process and the goal of language learning is for
students to ‘participate in cultural worlds and learn that they can get
things done with others in accordance with the culturally promoted norms
and values’ (Thibault 2017: 76). While these two research areas have had
a major impact on the research community, their impact on the teaching
community, especially in terms of how English is taught, has been limited
(Bayyurt and Dewey 2020). In this article, we report on a course taught at
a Thai university which is based on the principles of ELF and languaging.

ELF and In its short lifespan, ELF has undergone major shifts in how it is
languaging conceptualized (Jenkins 2015). Initially influenced by work in World
Englishes, ELF was seen as a variety and attempts were made to describe
its features. However, researchers quickly realized that variability and
complexity in the use of features was a more prominent characteristic

ELT Journal Volume 76/3 July 2022; https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccab052 387

© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Advance Access publication 3 September 2021
 of ELF than a shared common core. In the second stage of ELF, then,
the focus shifted to the strategies ELF users used to enable intelligible
communication, an approach reminiscent of the work on communication
strategies that was common in ELT in the 1980s. While productive, the
strategy approach was limited in the extent to which it could explain ELF
use. For example, the communication strategy of using L1 did not reflect
the complexities of how ELF users drew on their multilingual resources
to communicate. The multilingual nature of much ELF use shifted

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understandings of ELF into a third stage which Jenkins (2018) terms,
somewhat oxymoronically, English as a multilingua franca—which is
similar to translanguaging.
Translanguaging focuses on how multilinguals use and mix all
of the linguistic resources available to them to achieve successful
communication. This may appear similar to code mixing and code
switching which examine how multilinguals shift between their
languages. A translanguaging perspective, however, treats the forms
used as selections from a speaker’s repertoire of linguistic resources,
rather than being selections from particular languages (Cogo 2016).
Given the prevailing social perceptions of what English is and what
should be taught in ELT, taking a translanguaging perspective where
mixing of languages is accepted practice in an ELT course is likely to
attract substantial criticism from administrators, parents, and students
themselves. Rather, the curriculum needs to take into account the social
expectation that ELT should focus on English only, especially for language
production (although this does not preclude any role for other languages).
A languaging perspective with a focus on strategies of English use from
the second stage of ELF is more likely to be accepted by stakeholders.
In the first and second stages of ELF, there was a move away from
describing the language to investigating how people use the language.
Similarly, languaging in ELT involves a move away from teaching the
language to teaching how to use resources to do things with the language.
Second-stage ELF largely focused on communication strategies in spoken
interaction, such as adjusting to interlocutors’ repertoires and pre-empting
communication breakdowns (Cogo and Pitzl 2016), but encouraged users
‘to employ any means at their disposal to establish mutual intelligibility’
(Murray 2012: 322). In focusing on process in all four skills, languaging
also views any strategies that exploit any resources as potentially valuable,
including, for instance, judicious use of automated translation, use of
phrases taken from examples of successful communication, and even (for
one student in this study) asking a more proficient girlfriend for help.
Languaging does not view English as an object to be learnt. Following
Lado’s (1979: 3) original use of the term, ‘in languaging our attention
is not on the language’ but on achieving communicative goals. In other
words, we need to distinguish ‘the institutional entity English’ from
doing things with the language (Pennycook 2007: 111), and it is these
processes, not the products, that are fundamental (Thibault 2017). In the
languaging curriculum described in this article, the things getting done
in English are, at a general level, learning about a hobby, communicating
with other hobby enthusiasts, and presenting the hobby to the world.

388 Watson Todd and Rangsarittikun

 The actual things which get done, or the specific goals, depend on each
student’s purposes. For example, one student, in communicating with
other enthusiasts, might ask for advice while another might want to share
a finished product. The goal of the languaging curriculum is to support
learners to get things done in English using all of their available resources,
which include other languages they speak, their world knowledge, and
technological tools. In focusing on doing things, achievement is evaluated
based on success in reaching goals (such as writing a question for a forum

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which elicits appropriate responses). A languaging curriculum then aims
to help learners exploit their available resources to do things in English.

Designing the There have been several suggestions for how ELF courses might work
languaging in ELT contexts which Hino and Oda (2015) classify into five categories:
curriculum teaching about ELF, ELF role-plays, exposure to ELF, content-based
teaching, and participation in communities. The languaging curriculum
as experiential learning combined with reflection (Tudor 2001) falls into
the last of these categories, but differs from most previous ELF curricula
in its focus on processes. This means that there are no models or norms
of English underpinning the curriculum, in contrast to, for example,
Kirkpatrick’s (2012) lingua franca approach where the norm is successful
Asian multilinguals or Dewey’s (2012) postnormative approach where
curriculum designers consider the appropriacy and relative level of
importance of a range of potential norms. In addition, much (but not all)
previous work in ELF has focused on spoken interaction, whereas the
languaging curriculum treats all skills as potential focuses depending
on what things learners want to do with English. We therefore believe
that taking a languaging perspective in ELT can lead to an approach that
represents a paradigm shift in how ELT is conceptualized.
In the context that is the focus of this study, students have learnt English
for twelve years but many still try to avoid engaging with English outside
the English classroom and have limited communicative abilities. In
designing a languaging curriculum, then, we started from four key
principles:
• The curriculum should help students see the importance of
English for doing things.
• The curriculum should motivate students to want to do things in
English.
• The curriculum should help students realize the potential of their
existing resources for doing things in English.
• The curriculum should provide support so that students can have
more success in doing things in English.
The focus of the course therefore is on doing things in English rather than
the English language. Because of this, any evaluations should be based on
the students’ success in doing things in English.

The context of The languaging course we are focusing on in this paper was piloted
the course as a free elective course at a Thai technological university with twenty-
nine Thai undergraduate students from a mix of departments and years
choosing to take the course. Their English levels were mixed with most

The hobby course: towards a languaging curriculum 389

 at the B1 or B2 levels of the CEFR. The teacher was a Thai with five years
of teaching experience but none on a course like this. The course was
scheduled for three hours of classroom contact time per week for fifteen
weeks. However, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the second half of
the course was conducted online.

Overview of the Since we view student engagement and motivation as crucial, the course
hobby course was designed to match students’ interests while also encouraging them

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to do meaningful things in English. We therefore decided to organize the
course around the topic of learning hobbies—either hobbies new to the
students or hobbies they already engaged in but wanted to improve. This
means that, with each student choosing their own hobby, each student
was exposed to different inputs and communicated on different topics.
Students chose a variety of hobbies, including coin magic, cooking with a
microwave, and carving, but to illustrate how to do things in English about
hobbies, origami was used as an example hobby in classes.
The course consisted of five main stages:
Weeks 1–2: Introduction to the philosophy and purpose of the course,
and choosing a hobby
Weeks 3–6: Learning about the hobby from reading and watching videos
Weeks 7–9: Interacting about the hobby on Reddit
Weeks 10–14: Creating a video about the hobby
Week 15: Reflecting on learning on the course
Students’ reports on learning about the hobby, their postings on
Reddit, and the videos they created were used for evaluation purposes,
with criteria focusing on the extent to which their work achieved their
purposes.
Students were also asked to write two reflections on their learning.
The instructions for these reflections were fairly open but typical
areas of possible content, such as what had been learnt and problems
encountered, were given as guidance. Students’ consent was sought for
using these reflections as data (one student did not give consent and his
reflections have been removed from the data). The reflections comprise
20,305 words in total. The quotations included below are taken from
these reflections.

Introducing In the first lesson, it was explained that the course would involve
the course and experiential learning, that the focus would be on doing things in English
choosing a hobby rather than the language itself, and that the teacher would be non-
judgemental about how the students expressed themselves. The students’
reflections suggest that these principles were achieved in practice:
In other subject all you have to do is lecture, it is very rare to have
chance to learning from doing like this course and every week you will
always doing somethings new. (Student Y)
This course is different from other subjects which are the practice
of using English language openly without fearing that you will use
the wrong language Which at first, I don’t like English at all but after
studying in this subject, it made me like English more. (Student E)

390 Watson Todd and Rangsarittikun

 Hobbies were used as the focus of the course primarily to create
engagement and motivation. However, to do things in English the hobbies
needed to be ones where learning from input could help students improve
in their hobby (meaning that first-person shooter computer games were
not likely to be appropriate), and where there were sizeable but not
excessively large interest groups on Reddit to facilitate interaction (Reddit
groups of 500–100,000 members proved appropriate). These criteria led
to frustration for a couple of students when their first choice of hobby

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was rejected. Most, though, appreciated the freedom of choice which they
found motivating:
The difference between this class and other classes is I can choose how
learn English by what I’m interested. Learning must start from passion
or curiosity, for example, I want to understand the technical or find
a new trick of pen spinning, I will find the information from English
resources because it will provide a variety of information and also
improve the English language. (Student N)

Learning about The first experiential stage of the course focused on learning about the
the hobby hobby from written or video input. The aspects covered included the
reasons for learning from English input, the pros and cons of reading and
watching videos, finding appropriate sources of input, and how to gain
information from the input.
To provide a justification for why students should learn about their hobby
through natural English, students were asked to compare the English,
Thai, and simple English Wikipedia pages on origami, which show
massive differences in the breadth and depth of information available.
They could then compare the information available in English and Thai
for their hobbies:
When we search in Thai and English we will get different pros and
cons of information. If we search in Thai we will read easily and easier
to understand but the information is not too much and some things
might be wrong because some information is translated from English.
In English will get more information and is more accurate since it is the
common language of every country. (Student Q)
The students were then asked to compare different sources of information
about their hobby. Again, origami was used as an example, with factual
information, such as the uses of different types of origami paper, more
clearly explained in written texts, but processes, such as sequences of
folds to produce a model, clearer in videos. The students found their own
preferences:
Reading a book needs a lot more attention than that of watching
videos. That is the reason for the slowness in process of reading.
Though this slowness results in more retention of information. On
the other hand, Videos are time efficient and more convenient option.
(Student Q)
Having found English sources about their hobbies, students were
encouraged to use any techniques available in their repertoire to gain

The hobby course: towards a languaging curriculum 391

 understandings. Many students turned to Google Translate, but quickly
became aware of its limitations (the rules for the Reddit group on origami
provided a nice example where one of the rules translated into Thai
becomes ‘Don’t give credit where it’s due’):
Google translate is not so useful for translating Thai–English or
English–Thai because there are so many times it gives the user the
wrong translation, but it works pretty well as a dictionary. They still have
to improve more. It works well only for some sentences. (Student L)

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From these first stages of the languaging course, the overall pattern is
that students were motivated by having a relatively free choice of hobby,
that they accessed numerous sources, predominantly in English, to
learn about their hobby, and that they could gain understandings using
various strategies (such as choosing media appropriate to their purpose)
and accessing various aspects of their repertoires (including judging the
appropriacy of automatic translations).

Interacting about Moving from reception to production, the next stage was for students
the hobby to interact about their hobbies using Reddit discussion groups. Reddit
describes itself as a network of communities based on people’s interests.
There are over 100,000 active communities, called subreddits, including
thousands on various hobbies with each subreddit containing a discussion
forum where members can post questions, links, images, and videos.
As novice Reddit users, the students engaged in ‘legitimate peripheral
participation’ in the hobby community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991).
Students were asked to examine existing posts to categorize them into
different functions and to identify useful phrases that they could use in their
own posts while also considering which posts received the most responses.
They then posted their own discussion starters; these could be asking
specific questions to improve techniques (e.g. ‘This is my first try of
doing double exposure. Is there anyone who know how to do double
exposure? Please suggest me, thank you’), asking more general questions
about the hobby (e.g. ‘I have find out that rock balancing can help a lot
in mediation!!! do your guy say so? come share your experiences about
rock balancing’), and sharing finished work (e.g. ‘Take a picture beautiful
atmosphere hope you enjoy:)’). For some students, interacting on Reddit
had a large impact on them personally:
I have never ever tried discussing particular stuffs online with strangers
before because I was shy to do it and I really didn’t have any occasion
that encourage me to do it. But because of this course, I tried using
techniques and some interesting types of questions, even showing my
own photographs that I captured it by my film camera, to get comments
and see if there are any point that needs to be improved. It was really
fun knowing that there are many people on this planet who is more
than happy to discuss about these things and it’s fun to be in a nice
community where people are actually talk about their interests and
works rather than bullying each others. I think this is what I loved about
this course the most—encourage me to converse with people outside
my circle through internet connections. (Student V)

392 Watson Todd and Rangsarittikun

Creating a video The final stage of the languaging course was for students to create and
upload a video about their hobby. Initially, students were asked to watch a
selection of videos to identify certain choices they could make in designing
the video. These included camera angles, types of information to include,
and whether to include subtitles and schematics in the video. Issues in
scripting videos, such as creating a hook, were also discussed. Some of
the students went beyond what had been taught, looking at applications
beyond videos and identifying useful aspects of videos that had not been a

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focus in the teaching:
The lesson of scripting a video was useful for me, It can be adapted to
use in various ways, such as scripting a presentation, scripting a blog,
and etc. In addition, Using lay languages makes it easy for viewers to
understand the content and also to feel that the content within the video
in not too difficult to understand. (Student G)

Overall The hobby course was built on four principles, and the students’ reflections
impact of the imply that these principles were realized in the curriculum. Students saw
languaging course the importance of English (‘English is all around and that is definitely
why your can learn it from everywhere and everything you do’: Student L);
they were motivated (‘It’s not boring at all because I have an afford to do it
because I want to be expert in my hobby so that’s really motivate myself’:
Student D); and they realized the potential of the resources available to
them through the support provided on the course while also developing
new resources (‘It helped me recognize the importance of selflearning
… There are a lot of reading and video resources that provide knowledge,
suggestions, and precautions’: Student G).
The course also encourages students to use English more in the future,
providing further potential opportunities for learning, in part by removing
existing barriers:
The grammar scared is one of the biggest problem that made Thai
people scared to communicate in English it might affect from their
classroom because teacher always says that ‘if wrong grammar will
affect to your score…’ This class can removed this thing out from the
students mind. (Student A)
This last point illustrates how the hobby course started to change students’
attitudes towards using language. ‘What I essentially learned from this
class is that the key to understand people is not about speaking correctly’
(Student L), since ‘they don’t mind if you use wrong tense they use care
that you can communicate and make other understand’ (Student A)
and ‘even the native speakers sometimes are not very good in grammar’
(Student B).

Discussion The hobby course as a languaging curriculum runs counter to many

of the norms of ELT. No judgements are made on the students’ use of
English. If their language use allows them to successfully achieve their
goals, even if it deviates noticeably from any norms, they have managed
to do things with English. Consequently, there is almost no treatment
of language points on the course (in a few cases where the students’

The hobby course: towards a languaging curriculum 393

 language use could lead to misunderstandings, the teacher did intervene).
Instead, the course focuses on supporting students to use and grow
their existing resources to achieve their communicative goals. This could
involve learning to analyse existing texts as models, learning to identify
useful phrases to incorporate in their own production, learning to use
technological tools, such as automated translation, judiciously, and
learning to apply new technological tools. This shift in focus away from
teaching linguistic features towards exploring strategies for exploiting

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existing resources represents a potentially valuable shift in direction for
ELT. As one student notes, ‘this course is really helpful for people who are
trying desperately to learn English but never find the right way to get the
noticeable result’ (Student V).
The hobby course is a general English course where students have some
freedom in choosing what things they do in English. In ESP contexts,
however, the norms of language use may be clear and there may be an
expectation that students should meet these clear norms. In some cases,
such as job applications, the norms may include accurate language use
matching a given standard and thus there may be a need to teach certain
language features.
As a pedagogic innovation, the languaging curriculum is not without
its challenges. The hobby course does not easily fit into the current
educational system in Thailand, which places heavy emphasis on clear,
measurable objectives and reliable evaluation of students. Given the
centrality to the course of each student following their own interest,
setting their own specific goals, and exploiting their unique resources in
their own way, creating a set of measurable outcomes equally applicable
to all students is very challenging. How to reliably evaluate success in
achieving varied communicative goals is an area where further research
and new ideas are clearly needed.
A second challenge is the mismatch between a languaging perspective,
on the one hand, and current theories in ELT and the beliefs of many
teachers, on the other. For example, much language teaching theory
outlaws translation (Cook 2010), but languaging treats the students’ L1 as
an existing resource to exploit (and three of the students used Thai in their
course reflections to confirm their intended meanings). Teachers might also
be concerned about the potential for students to use plagiarism as a strategy
for communication. On the hobby course, the only time the students
plagiarized was an inauthentic practice activity when students were asked
to write a Reddit contribution about bonsai trees (which we now realize
was a mistake); none of the students’ communications about their own
hobbies included plagiarized language, suggesting that their motivations to
communicate their intended meanings precluded copying. Before running
a languaging curriculum, training to shift teachers’ beliefs may be required.
Despite these challenges, a languaging approach is ‘a good beginning to
change the education model in Thailand’ (Student M), since the hobby
course enables students to, in Thibault’s (2017) words, ‘learn that they can
get things done with others’.
Final version received March 2021

394 Watson Todd and Rangsarittikun

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The authors
Richard Watson Todd is Associate Professor at King
Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi
(Thailand). He has a PhD from the University of
Liverpool and is the author of numerous articles
and several books, most recently, Discourse Topics
(John Benjamins, 2016). His research focuses on
text linguistics, corpus linguistics, and educational
innovation.
E-mail: irictodd@kmutt.ac.th
Ronnakrit Rangsarittikun is a lecturer at King
Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi
(Thailand) where he teaches English to
undergraduate students. He began to develop his
interest in teaching while completing his master’s
degree in applied linguistics at the University
of Queensland, Australia. His main research
interests include teacher education, cross-cultural
communication, and English as a lingua franca.
Email: ronnakrit.ran@mail.kmutt.ac.th
395