The conversation then moves on to the role of the language teachers in these environments, as they are put in a position where they have to represent a government’s agenda whether they agree with it or not – e.g. having to teach about ‘British values’. Dr Cooke has studied the range of responses that teachers enact in the classroom, all the way from compliance to refusal, through ‘strategic compliance’ (which is when teachers comply – or seem to comply – with a policy they do not necessarily agree with).
Teachers are also required to teach ‘standard English’, which has its own set of debates and tensions, in particular in relation to British colonial history. To support language teachers through these discussions, Dr Cooke co-founded the Hub for Education & Language Diversity with Dr Ben Rampton and other colleagues. With academic and third sector partners, they regularly organise “development workshops for teachers about sociolinguistic issues like non-standard usages, language mixing, linguistic repertoires – these things that reflect and represent real usage among real people, rather than an idealised version of a language that we’re supposed to teach.”
In fact, Dr Cooke has become more optimistic as she is seeing changes slowly happening. Policy-making actors, including the Common European Framework of Reference for language levels, are recognising the need for more flexibility in the teaching of English and rethinking the role of multilingualism in language teaching and learning. Meanwhile, teachers are realising the power they have to open up important conversations in their language classrooms, taking a more participatory approach and starting from the students’ concerns and needs instead of from a rigid curriculum.
Dr Cooke concludes: