Student-teachers’ conceptualisations of culture and attitudes towards transcultural pedagogies and materials in ELT

Abstract

With ever-increasing globalisation, intercultural communication has become a familiar everyday occurrence for many individuals, requiring a move beyond pedagogical approaches to culture which eschew static conflations of culture, language, and nationality that may lead to essentialism and stereotyping. The Global Englishes paradigm problematises the ownership of English by framing it as a global language without predetermined reference cultures or speech communities, noting that the implementation of nuanced intercultural approaches remains limited, a fact evident in, and partly the result of, the way commercially available coursebooks portray intercultural communication. Using Baker's framework for transcultural awareness (Baker, 2015a, 2022; Baker and Ishikawa, 2021), this study explores the cultural conceptualisations of student-teachers of English and their attitudes regarding the portrayal of culture and intercultural communication in a widely used, commercially available English language coursebook and materials adapted to represent a transcultural pedagogical approach. Descriptive statistics and both deductive and inductive procedures of qualitative analysis have been used to interpret questionnaire and focus group data collected from student-teachers enrolled in a UK-based MSc TESOL programme. Findings reveal that despite some attachment to nation-bound and static cultural conceptualisations, participants could appreciate more nuanced approaches to intercultural communication. Nevertheless, various barriers to the implementation of such approaches were identified, showing that teachers' attitudes may be overruled by contextual constraints and the complexity of transcultural awareness. By exploring the compatibility of scholarly proposals for transcultural pedagogies with the attitudes of future practitioners, the study provides important implications for teacher education and suggests directions for future research.