Transcending borders in the ELE classroom: what the official documents for additional language teaching say
Abstract
This paper is based on the need to address a critical approach (promotion of the critical attitude) in the teaching of Spanish as an additional language, following the principles of renewed interculturality, which are based on Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and, in turn, are heirs to critical pedagogy. However, prior to the development of the critical attitude, we propose three linked research objectives: a) to describe the conceptualisation of critical in official documents on foreign language teaching, such as the CEFR (2002) and the Companion (2021); b) to analyse how a critical approach to teaching is included in these documents; c) to propose pedagogical lines, aligned as far as possible with the official documentation, to address a critical approach to foreign language teaching.
To this end, using Atlas.ti, we have carried out an analysis of concepts that could be related to the promotion of a critical attitude, such as awareness, intercultural, neutral, interpretation, critical, attitude, argumentation, etc., in the aforementioned documents. This analysis yielded the following results: (1) the concept of the critic is conceived differently in the two documents.
As opposed to a view of the critic associated fundamentally with scholarship (CEFR, 2002), one can perceive a conception of the critic associated with a critical attitude (Companion, 2021), as understood in the theoretical framework from which we start in this proposal. Furthermore, (2) the development of the critical attitude seems to be relegated to intermediate and high levels in the two documents.
Furthermore, (3) an interest in the development of the critical attitude can be glimpsed in Companion (2021) from nuances that appear diluted throughout the document. Other results shown by the data found are: (4) a conception of language as a non-neutral phenomenon is offered, although this idea is not developed; (5) the need to know how discourses are ideologically constructed is highlighted; and (6) the promotion of interculturality continues to be associated with the search for differences between cultures.
Based on the results obtained in this analysis, we outline a pedagogical proposal that seeks to promote a critical attitude and materialise what is contained in official documents, with the aim of making issues, actions, attributions and identities visible in the classroom, and becoming aware of the boundaries that are not normally crossed in the classroom.