ABSTRACT

The community center seemed an ideal site to investigate and apply the theoretical notion of language as a social practice. The community-based model I conceptualized viewed second/additional language teaching as integral to individual and collective identity negotiation. Following poststructural theory, I considered the notion of community as both the condition and outcome of classroom pedagogy (Morgan, 2002), a perspective I tried to encourage through thematic, content-based units (i.e., current events, family life, citizenship issues, employment, housing) around which specifi c language instruction was integrated and often recycled, given the mixed streaming and continuous intake of students. Again, drawing from my OISE studies, my orientation to this content was always critical, looking for ways to raise students’ awareness of the role language plays in shaping personal and social worlds, imagined and real. In what I inelegantly described as a community-based ESL pedagogy, critical practice had two interdependent dimensions, one refl exive the other transformative, the former-inward looking at the epistemologies, discourses, and ideologies that defi ne and limit critical practice in ELT, the latter-outward looking and oriented towards change, specifi cally through the development of language skills that potentially challenge social power relations and inequalities beyond the classroom.