Matter, Literacy, and English Language Teaching in an Underprivileged School in Spain

Abstract

This article analyzes the processes and findings of a collaborative action research (CAR) project that aimed to analyze the potential of materiality to radically transform the way English was taught and learned in an underprivileged public school in Spain. The CAR drew on new materialisms and new literacy studies to explore the relationship between matter and English language teaching from socioeconomic, sociocultural, and technological perspectives. The main pedagogical strategy consisted of widening the quantity and quality of the material resources in the English classroom, precisely to draw a material link between the English classroom and the students’ homes, communities, and the informal literacies they enacted in them. Through two cycles of inquiry, the CAR team put into practice two multimodal and artifactual workshops with a group of nine children from underprivileged, minority backgrounds. A variety of qualitative strategies were used (including classroom recordings, student interviews, and photographs) to confirm that the insights from new materialisms and new literacy studies had generated opportunities for meaningful English learning within a culturally sustaining pedagogy.

'What If It's Been Space All this Time?': Understanding the Spatiality of Language Teacher Education

“…Space is therefore connected to practices in the dynamic architecture of language education as additional languages ca be found across overlapping sites. Recent studies have interrogated the where of language education, such as out-of-class/informal settings (e.g., Cabrera Arias, 2022), online language teaching and collaborative tasks (e.g., González-Lloret, 2020), or the relationship between material resources and (non-)linguistic behaviours in language learning (Villacañas de Castro et al, 2021). These studies concur that space exerts a powerful influence on the multiple and overlapping settings in which language learning occurs.…”

Museum education, cultural sustainability, and English language teaching in Spain

“…Figure 2 illustrates this model, which relies on the interconnected natures of culture, modality, literacy, and language. In accordance with the insights of NLS, the model claims that, for education to be multicultural, it first has to welcome the multiple literacies through which learners' cultures are originally built and conveyed; this, in turn, demands that the educational context be multimodal and artifactual (because home or community literacies clearly support themselves on multiple modalities and artefacts), which, likewise, requires that the languages through which each of these literacies were originally built be accepted and assimilated into the educative context, be it a museum or a language classroom (Villacañas de Castro et al 2020).…”

“…Although there are exceptions (García-Sampedro 2019), the field has not often asked itself what English language teachers can learn from museums to design appealing curricula for their subject. Nevertheless, recent developments in ELT connected to multimodality (Burke and Hardware 2015;Early, Kendrick, and Potts 2015) and to a more profound interpretation of the material dimensions of literacy (Pahl and Rowsell 2010;Thiel 2015;Villacañas de Castro et al 2020) have set the conditions for the intersection of museum education and ELT to sound both reasonable and timely. This is precisely what this article sustains.…”

A Statistical Study of English Teaching Methods Incorporating Children’s Memory Characteristics

“…The importance of learning English is obvious due to the globalization of the economy and the increasing frequency of international communication [1][2]. Many parents hope that their children can seize the critical period of language learning and come into contact with English as early as possible, which has led to the general phenomenon of the low age of English learning in China, with bilingual kindergartens and children's English training institutions opening one after another [3][4][5]. At the same time, the challenges of teaching English to young children are endless.…”