Understanding students' construction of local knowledge through their intercultural relations with english

Abstract

The focus on Interculturality in English Language Teaching (ELT) has tended to concentrate on superficial aspects of culture from the target language while local knowledge appears to be secondary or disregarded in the English classroom. Therefore, this research aimed at describing and interpreting the ways in which the learners’ intercultural perceptions contribute to the constructions of aspects on their local culture. This research was carried out at a national bilingual school with an international curriculum. Within this view, the present study was framed in the qualitative research paradigm and contemplated a socio-constructivist ontology and a post- colonial epistemological vision, which considered interculturality from a critical perspective. Being coherent with this view, a pedagogical experience was carried out to foster critical thinking considering critical intercultural tasks. Data was collected through video productions and written exercises produced by the students as well as interviews. The analysis of these artifacts and the interviews was approached by using discourse analysis following a combined perspective of Wetherell and Potter (1993) and Bourdieu’s theory of capitals (1991). These perspectives were useful to analyze spoken data while interpreting social issues using discourse to understand it from diverse contexts (historical, cultural, economic, etc.). The findings suggested that students’ appropriate dominant discourses of superficial views of culture and produce and reproduce discourses on the relevance of English due to the involvement of their intercultural contexts. These discourses reveal idealistic ideas on English that neglect the presence of local realities and reinforce essentialized views of culture.