ABSTRACT
This chapter describes in more detail the third aspect of ILT work: language teaching and learning. We have already described the other two major aspects of ILT: the work in cross-cultural training (Chapter 3) and the surveys and analysis of workplace communications and perceptions (Chapter 4). In Chapter 1, we briefly outlined the general framework for language education which has emerged from our work. We would emphasise that our approach to language teaching was continuously modified and redesigned as a result of the ethnographic work and other forms of data collection and linguistic analysis which we have already described. For many years, direct language teaching was the largest volume of work carried out within the ILT scheme. It was necessarily immensely varied in type and methodology. It ranged from very elementary language teaching for students without any literacy skills in their own languages to very advanced work with mixed groups of first-and second-language speakers. The variety and scale of language training would in itself be difficult to generalise about, but, in addition, our language-teaching work was inevitably rooted in the wider pedagogies of English-language teaching and was influenced by the radical rethinking about language and communication-skills teaching generally which was taking place during this period. This chapter, therefore, starts with a section outlining in general terms the wider context which influenced the development of our language pedagogy. The bulk of the chapter then provides a description and analysis of four examples of language training. These four examples represent some of the more significant and specific characteristics of ILT language teaching, particularly in terms of the underlying analysis of language and interaction which informed curriculum design, the roles given to students’ own language and experience and the endeavours to relate language teaching to the wider aspirations of students and to their socioeconomic needs.
