Redesigning pedagogy in the ESL classroom: A case study

Adela Abu-Arab
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Abstract

A current trend in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages is the use of
genre-based curricula which explicitly address the text-types students might encounter in their
contexts of language use. However, such curricula can be unrealistic in their allegiance to
simplified written or spoken genres thus overlooking the increasing multimodality of texts or the
existence of non-standardised varieties of English, such as those used by the learners
themselves. This paper reports on the application of the pedagogical model of Multiliteracies
(New London Group, 1996, 2000) as an alternative to deal with those issues in an ESL genre-
based course of international students in Australia. Within the framework of the model, the
students carried out a project in teams, explored authentic multimodal texts and ultimately,
integrated three genres from the curriculum into a meaningful task in a realistic context. The
analysis and subsequent production of multimodal texts allowed for the students’ own subject
positions to emerge; their talents, interests and cultural practices to be recognised and valued.
Most importantly, the project allowed for the critical framing of personal and global issues
fostering in the students the development of a socially critical competence across languages
and discourses.

Introduction

The history of second or foreign language teaching (Richards & Rodgers, 2001) shows that support for one or
another teaching approach has been based on the prevailing theories of language and of language learning at
different times. Nunan (1999) points out that an important change in teaching approach derived from the
interpretation of language as a system for expressing meanings rather than a system of rules and patterns. The
focus of language teaching and learning changed accordingly, from learning about language to learning through
language; from accurately recognising and reproducing language structures to fluently, though not necessarily
accurately, constructing, expressing and interpreting meanings.

The competency-based approach to language teaching emerged from this view of language but unlike other
approaches that focus the syllabus on input in the form of materials, activities, and teachers and learners’ roles,
competency-based teaching looks at expected learning outcomes as the starting point for syllabus design
(Richards & Rodgers, 2001). Outcomes are described in terms of what a learner will be able to do with the
language on completion of a particular course of study and are determined according to the analysis of students’
language needs relative to their current and/or future contexts of language use. Competencies and outcomes in a
language course will naturally refer to the ability of learners to individually produce, to a certain standard, whole
unified texts within a selected range of text-types. The curriculum design is then, genre-based (Feez, 1998).

It has been argued (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993) that the mastery of genres in terms of social purpose, structure and
language features, while delivering a language competence that allows the learner to function in a particular
context does not per se imply literacy for most texts nowadays are multimodal and political. A more
encompassing type of literacy education is needed and a pedagogy that can accommodate this requirement
within the genre-based curriculum. These concepts are exemplified here in a case study in which a pedagogy of
Multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996, 2000) was employed in an ESL class of young adults in Australia.
The application of the Multiliteracies model constituted in itself an instance of reflective practice and action
research. The results suggest that such a pedagogy can effectively be employed in the teaching of ESL genre-
based courses.

The course

The Multiliteracies model was applied in an intermediate level ESL class of international students in Australia
enrolled at stage 3 of the accredited Certificate of Spoken and Written English [CSWE] (New South Wales Adult
Migrant English Service [NSW AMES], 1998). The CSWE curriculum framework is widely used in Australia in
adult ESL courses and although the current curriculum has changed, the general considerations described here
still apply.

-1-
The CSWE framework has several stages; allows for entry and exit at various points; recognises different
learning paces and offers different syllabus strands, such as general English or English for employment or study
purposes, according to students’ needs and goals in learning English.

A stage level of the curriculum is completed when the student has demonstrated competence to a set standard, in
a determined number of competencies related to different genres - such as procedure, information text,
persuasive text - and different language skills within the genres - such as the ability to read a persuasive text or
write a discussion. Assessment of each competency in the curriculum is criterion-referenced against benchmark
performance indicators and refer to all levels of language, namely, text, clause and expression (Feez, 1998).

The course referred to here was delivered in a 20-week semester comprising 20 weekly hours of English tuition
plus six extra hours of specialist studies, such as preparation for further studies or computer literacy. The core
ESL course was taught by three teachers who had divided among themselves the competencies and text-types
according to their teaching load with the group. Given the characteristics of the group (see Table 1 in the
Appendix) specific competencies were chosen from the ‘Further Study’ strand. The competencies I undertook
were: writing a 200-word report, reading a persuasive text and delivering an oral presentation. My teaching load
was of six weekly hours gathered in only one day.

The class

As Table 1 (appendix) indicates, the initial group was composed of 11 students (most of them under 18 years of
age) from different Asian countries and diverse language backgrounds, all intending to proceed to further
English, vocational or professional study in Australia. As student arrivals occur several times throughout the
year and the CSWE allows for flexible entry and exit points the composition of the group changed over the
length of the course, as is commonly the case.

Since the beginning, this group presented numerous difficulties to the teachers, such as absence of motivation
and interest, reluctance to participate in oral activities, lack of commitment to the completion of set classroom or
homework tasks, loss of handouts, repeated absences from class and late arrivals. Due to the reduced frequency
of my classes with the group as well as the intense six-hour lesson, it was particularly difficult for me as a
teacher to keep the students motivated and achieve any continuity in my teaching. The group progressively
adopted a disruptive behaviour during my classes and after a few weeks, discipline problems arose together with
my utter frustration at the growing gap between the apparent students’ aims in doing the course and the
prognosis of failure that I could foresee for the group.

Researching a solution

The first step undertaken was to seek advice from co-teachers, colleagues and supervisors. It seemed clear to all
that the situation had gone too far and there was no easy and quick strategy for improving it. The six-hour
weekly lesson was readily considered the cause of the problems; however, space and timetable constraints
allowed no choice but to continue operating in this way. A concrete suggestion that was advanced, and taken,
consisted of implementing a change of physical environment for at least part of the six hours.

As a second step, a detailed analysis of the student profile sheets, which is summarised in Table 1 in the
Appendix, was carried out and complemented with informal conversations with the students during class breaks.
In this way, it was discovered that with the exception of two people, the remaining nine students had not yet
completed secondary school in their own country, mainly due to two reasons, as follows. Five of the nine
students had not demonstrated in their home countries the standard of achievement required to be promoted to
the next school year and had, consequently, exited the school system being left with no career or study path to
follow. The other four stated they intended to finish their secondary schooling in Australia and had purposely
planned this as a way of increasing their chances of being granted a visa to Australia.

All of the students planned to apply for Australian permanent residency and eventually, either gain employment
or a government-funded place at university, or both. In case a stage did not proceed as expected, returning home
after having studied English and having lived for a period of time in an English-speaking country would anyway
expand their job or study prospects. Only one student out of the 11 had a vague idea of the kind of job he
aspired to in the future. Nonetheless, he shared with the rest a feeling of disorientation and insecurity as to
whether they really wanted to study or even to live in Australia. They seemed stressed by the pressure to
respond to family expectations and by the disparity between these and their own wishes. An example of this
disparity is the fact that most of the students that had previously studied English in Australia had not progressed
as desired and were repeating the course for lack of previous achievement.

It was becoming evident that, as a group and individually, these students were different from the generic
successful learner I was basing my syllabus on: one excited about studying English and undertaking other
academic endeavours and with a clear determination of advancing towards a goal. This was a group of students
troubled by an intricate weave of family plans, teenage disorientation and the discourses of English as an
international language (Pennycook, 1994) which portray English and everything English-related as beneficial
and desirable regardless of whether people intimately feel that way or not. Every attempt to address the class as
a homogeneous whole and to work with standardised materials and methods, was, thus, only extending the gap
between the actual students and the idealised student-in-my-class.

Regarding learning strategies, a superficial reading of students’ responses, coloured as it would be by the
Western assumption about students from Confucian heritage cultures, would have indicated a call for a top-down
approach, full board presentations, deductive teaching and passive learning in teacher-centred classes. However,
based on the considerations above, there was a need to help the students explore other ways of learning that
could give them a voice. The pedagogical model of Multiliteracies developed by the New London Group (1996;
2000) was then adopted to work with this group.

The model deals simultaneously with two aspects of English language and literacy teaching which are related to
the present discussion. It takes into account that meanings are no longer expressed by linguistic representations
alone but rather by integrating and interrelating elements of other modes of representation of meaning, in
particular, visual, audio, gestural, spatial and multimodal representations. It also considers that this
multimodality of texts is shaped and determined by cultural and contextual factors, acknowledging in this way,
communal varieties of English arising from both geographical and specific discourse communities. Thus, the
notion of text is extended to include other available designs of meaning in a manner that can be responsive to the
individuals’ cultural and linguistic diversity allowing for personalisation and giving choices to the students and
the teacher.

The students were taken through the four stages of a multiliteracies pedagogy through the realisation of a project
in teams. These stages, as described by Kalantzis and Cope (2000) are outlined below.
Situated practice: “immersion in experience and the utilisation of Available Designs of meaning” (p.244).
Overt instruction: “systematic, analytic and conscious understanding” (p.246).
Critical framing: “interpreting the social and cultural contexts of particular Designs of meaning” (p.247).
Transformed practice: “Applying the Design in a different context” (p.248).

Counting with only 11 students with very erratic attendance, only two teams were formed to start with and after
the mid semester break, with new students joining the group, a third team was formed.

The project brief

The project encompassed an ample brief. It consisted of the research of study options in Australia for
international and/or local students, either with a focus on a particular institution or several, and the subsequent
communication of the findings to the rest of the class and the teacher. The study options could as well relate to
English courses or courses in particular vocational or professional areas of interest to the students.

The written part of the project was to include facts but could be ‘spiced up’ by the addition of persuasive
material and language, such as overstatements on benefits and advantages of particular institutions or courses,
testimonies of current or past fictional students, a suggestive logo, pictures or drawings, different colours and
font sizes, among other variations. In other words, the students were given a choice of whether to produce a pure
objective report, a heavily biased advertising pamphlet, or anything in between. For the oral component students
could make use of a variety of design elements and aids, such as PowerPoint, visual representations, audio or
video clips, as well as episodes or role-plays in English or other languages.

A further element was the change of class environment. The last of the six hours would now be spent at the
flexible learning centre of the institute.
A pedagogy of multiliteracies in the ESL class

Situated practice

Students were asked to gather material about the topic with no restrictions placed on mode (print, visual, audio,
etc) or language (English, Cantonese, etc). They were encouraged to look for information booklets, promotional
material, Internet pages, videos, television and radio advertisements, local, national and international
newspapers, among others.

Due to time limitations, no excursions or visits to other institutions could be scheduled and research drew on the
students’ personal experience and the resources available at the institute, local libraries and Internet. The last
hour at the flexible learning centre proved extremely useful for this research because of the availability of
resources and the more informal, unstructured classroom setting, which facilitated small group and one-to-one
discussions. It was also a welcomed relief from the previous five hours of class.

Overt instruction

This stage was by far the lengthiest in time. It commenced with the students’ exploration of the different texts
they had gathered and a discussion of those texts’ design elements, especially, the extra linguistic ones, such as
the use of colour, image, people featured, font size and colour, finishing of promotional materials and
accessibility of the material. On Internet pages in particular, voice, musical elements, text effects such as size or
colour changes and text blinking were also considered.

The stage then focused on the linguistic features by first modelling, analysing and deconstructing a short factual
report especially written by the teacher and then, proceeding to the comparison and contrast of the sample report
with the authentic texts the students had collected. A metalanguage to talk about language was introduced and
used for this discussion; however, the discussion not only concentrated on the linguistic characteristics of
persuasive texts but also on the persuasive effect of those other design elements the students had previously
identified.

To let students experience the multimodal language of persuasion, a teacher-led ‘sentence auction’ game (About
Inc., 2005) was held in which the good characteristics of each particular sentence were exaggerated and the tone
of voice and body language changed accordingly to entice the teams to place a bid for it.

Critical framing

This important stage in the model was not temporally separated from the others; on the contrary, it was totally
integrated in the development of the project where the opportunity to critically frame students’ comments and
thoughts was never spared. For example, while studying the sample texts, students were constantly encouraged
to think about ways and persuasive events they would use to promote an educational institution to international
students. The ideas proposed included: bilingual or multilingual advertisements, staging of education fairs, open
days and conferences in different countries, letters to high school students and special offers - such as, one free
for every ten students who sign up.

Some students talked about the way Australian institutions recruit their students in foreign countries as compared
with home institutions which are not seen to go ‘shopping’ for clients. Amidst jokes and silly comments, two
students expressed concern about the way education seemed to have been commercialised in Australia. The
discussion then focused on the reasons why this might be so and the roles or contributions that educational
institutions, international students and their parents, their teachers and their potential employers, might have in
international education. This was linked to the way English is perceived in the students’ home countries and the
increase of job opportunities that the experience of living in an English-speaking country might entail. At this
stage, the students had the opportunity to speak about their family pressures to remain in Australia and some,
about their dislike of that situation. Others did not speak but perhaps considered these issues in private.

As time went by, students had to narrow their focus and concentrate on one institution of their choice or one field
of study in order to start the actual production stage. In the following week a first version of their team reports
was finalised in class and the process of editing and proofreading began before the final version was presented.
Transformed practice

Towards the end of the course, three teams were in place. All three presented their chosen institutions orally, as
requested, but in different ways. One of the groups role-played and satirised an imaginary information
conference held at an undefined Asian country where the promoter spoke in English to an audience who did not
particularly understand English and were present there precisely to obtain information on options to study
English in Australia. Another group, who had chosen for their project the institute where they were currently
studying, showed an amateur video of different sights of the institute, including unpleasant or unfriendly ones.
The third group, mainly constituted by those students who had joined the class later in the semester, adopted a
more conservative approach and in a fairly objective manner presented an institution using PowerPoint, without
expressing any major critical comments.

Regarding the written component, the teams produced word-processed texts which satisfied the brief. They all
included facts, pictures downloaded from Internet pages, a variety of font sizes and types and diverse formatting
features. In terms of linguistic features, the basic structure responded to that of an information report with an
initial general statement followed by descriptions or explanations of the relevant courses (Feez, 1998). The
information was organised in paragraphs, and clause structure and expression were up to the standard of a stage
3 benchmark performance. In all cases, there was inclusion of sentences to prompt readers to act, for example:
Come and be one of our happy graduates ! We are waiting for you !

Discussion

Notwithstanding the inherent benefits for ESL students of genre-based approaches in the modelling, analysis and
subsequent scaffolding of student learning, the genre-based curriculum, as was initially being interpreted in this
class, deals with literacy in binary terms placing all emphasis on the correct reproduction of text-types. By
identifying knowledge with learning outcomes only two possibilities are left to the students: either they perform
to the expected benchmark standard, or they do not and become outcast to the role of non-performers (Cope &
Kalantzis, 1993). Such an approach only placed myself, the teacher, further away from my students, in a secure
position aligned with power and control. Meanwhile, the students were at risk of yet another failure in their lives
and yet another struggle.

From a pedagogical point of view, the call for a more inclusive approach was clear, one that would focus on the
genres to be taught but that would value the individual for what they had to offer, for their own way of making
meaning and interpreting the world. Overall, the project did this. It greatly transformed the dynamics of the
class. It took into consideration the students’ interests and integrated them with their talents, their cultures and
languages and brought some hope to a course which otherwise was in danger of becoming a negative experience
for everybody involved.

From the perspective of language skills development, the class tasks generated multiple discussions that helped
students enhance their speaking fluency, their listening skills and their ability to negotiate meanings in English.
Likewise, reading for meaning, scanning and skimming of written texts were intensely practised throughout the
length of the project.

The weakest aspect of this project, as it was implemented, lies in the development and assessment of student
writing within the curriculum framework. The production of a team pamphlet or report does not assure of the
individual construction of a whole unified text by each student nor does it constitute a single defined text-type as
conceptualised in the CSWE curriculum. As the students were enrolled in a CSWE course, their language and
literacy skills had to be appraised according to moderated assessments tasks. Therefore, competency tests had to
be taken in the following weeks as needed, basically, in regard to students’ competence in reading a persuasive
text and writing individually a 200-word factual report to a set benchmark standard.

Notwithstanding the apparent mismatch between the project and the curriculum, this assessment instance
represented in itself a transformed practice stage in terms of the multiliteracies model, a stage where the students
had to transfer their knowledge and skills to a different context. Therefore, the effectiveness of the pedagogy
employed depended, to a point, on the students’ success at the assessment tasks, which most of the students
achieved though not at their first attempt.

However, there are other reasons why the pedagogy employed can be considered effective. Firstly, the
experience promoted the development of a range of learning strategies alongside the content areas of the course -
language skills - as well as the development of transferable skills through the allocation and management of
group and individual responsibilities. In addition, the change of class dynamics, in this case materialised in the
realisation of the project, constituted in itself a strategy for conflict-resolution which the students experienced
and which will inadvertedly add to their resource acumen for the future.

Secondly, at all stages, the focus was placed on critically framing the material offered by the students. At the
same time, they were given choices both in the selection of that material and the degree of engagement or
disclosure of issues of personal, social, religious, political and cultural significance which were raised in the
discussions. It can be claimed that it was this respect for their personal space that in itself made the project a
successful proposition.

Last, but certainly not least, is that by working with authentic multimodal texts from the recognition to the
production stages, the students experienced English and Englishness in natural contexts of language use. In this
manner, they learned about the way in which discourses operate in the target culture, in other words, they started
to develop a meta-knowledge of discourses (Gee, 1990, p.153). Second and foreign language learners are
intrinsically at a disadvantage in the target culture for they lack mastery and control of dominant discourses.
Becoming aware of these discourses gives learners the opportunity to separate themselves from their primary
discourse and critique it from the viewpoint of the discourses they are trying to learn, and vice versa. It is this
contestation of discourses what results in literacy (Gee, 1990). In this sense, the activities performed within the
context of this project have been beneficial to the students’ learning and literacy development. This is the core of
a critical literacy materialised not just in the critical analysis of texts but in the students’ understanding of the
discourses that led them to that classroom in the first place.

The ESL competency-based curriculum naturally leads to instances of modelling, deconstruction and explicit
instruction of features and discourses in texts. However, it fails to recognise, on one hand, that authentic texts
are not pure, unimodal and simplified text-types; on the other hand, that language and literacy education involves
not just the recognition of discourses but their use as elements of critique of students’ primary discourses, and
reciprocally.

The application of the Multiliteracies model was attempted here as the last resort after other avenues had been
attempted but there is no doubt that it should be applied much earlier in a course to be fully effective and allow
the class to work through the stages with less prompting. Indeed, on evaluating the course, some students
reported they had felt rushed at times and expressed their unfulfilled wishes to have produced a more persuasive
written component with more art work rather than a straightforward report-like word-processed piece. A
suggestion forwarded by the students was to focus on a sequence of mini-projects as opposed to a longer, more
comprehensive project as the one implemented. Clearly, such a proposition would have better accommodated
the severe time constraints of the course. Likewise, a full implementation of the model would require the
coordinated effort of all co-teachers of the class in order to integrate all the competencies being taught, not just
three. All in all, the model seems to be perfectly adaptable to working within the CSWE or other ESL genre-
based curricula as it involves text-types, albeit in a multimodal way and in an integrated manner.

Conclusion

The case study reported here is an example of the application of the pedagogical model of multiliteracies (New
London Group, 1996, 2000) to the teaching of English as a second language. The model was implemented
through the realisation of a student project in teams, which fostered the development of abilities by bringing
language skills together with a range of learning strategies. The emphasis of the project was on successful
conveyance of meaning, both verbal and non-verbal and the acknowledgment and integration of different
languages and varieties of English as well as different modes of making meanings.

The implementation of the model departed from the skills-focused competency-based approach, yet, it allowed
for competencies to be developed. It enabled students to make genuine connections with life outside the
classroom in terms of topics, genres and discourses. An in-depth look at the students’ processes indicates that a
socially critical competence started to develop in them, one that went beyond the ability to produce, reproduce,
interpret, negotiate or even, critically analyse different texts and text-types. It was the sort of competence that
allows the individuals to communicate with their inner selves as they become assertive, rather than submissive,
in relation to acquired discourses as well as new discourses they aim to learn.
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Pauline Jones from Charles Sturt University, Australia, for a critical reading of an
earlier version of this paper.

Address for correspondence:

Dr Adela Abu-Arab
Language and Learning, Monash University, P. O. Box 527, Frankston, VIC 3199, Australia
E-mail: adela.abu-arab@celts.monash.edu.au

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Appendix Table 1: Student profiles at Weeks 1 and 15 - Class title: CSWE III - Further Study Strand

Week 1 Week 15
Total: 11 students Total: 16 students
Number % Number %
Language background
Cantonese 6 54 6 37
Mandarin 8 72 8 50
Korean 1 9 3 19
Thai 1 9 2 13
Japanese 0 0 1 6
Indonesian 0 0 1 6
Didn’t respond 0 0 0 0
Country of origin
Hong Kong 4 36 6 37
China 5 46 3 19
Korea 1 9 3 19
Thailand 0 0 2 13
Japan 0 0 1 6
Indonesia 0 0 1 6
Didn't respond 0 0 0 0
Education in own country
Completed primary 11 100 16 100
Completed secondary 2 18 4 25
Studied at univ/tech. college for 1 yr or more 1 9 0 0
Completed a tertiary diploma 0 0 0 0
Completed a tertiary degree or higher 0 0 0 0
Didn’t respond 0 0 0 0
Previous English study
In home country 5 46 6 37
In Australia 9 54 13 81
Didn't respond 3 27 3 18
Course aims
University study 2 18 1 6
Technical or further ed. 4 36 9 56
Complete secondary school in Australia 4 36 2 25
Further English 1 9 0 13
Employment 0 0 0 0
Didn’t respond 0 0 0 0
Preferred topics
Australia: history, places, customs, people 11 1 12 75
News & current affairs 9 81 12 75
Education in Australia 9 81 13 81
Employment in Australia 7 63 7 44
Politics 2 18 4 25
Sport 8 72 10 62
Crime 1 9 1 6
Theatre, art, music, stories 10 9 11 68
Health 2 18 3 19
Other 0 0 4 25
Didn't respond 0 0 0 0
Preferred learning medium
From course text books 2 18 4 25
From the teacher's explanation to the class 11 100 15 94
From worksheets 2 18 3 19
From computers 5 46 3 19
From videos 8 72 3 19
By working individually 1 9 2 23
By working in small groups 5 46 14 88
Didn't respond 0 0 0 0