Los discursos políticos de estudiantes de inglés en clases de deliberación: Una alternativa contra la neutralidad del inglés

Abstract

The neutrality of English (Guerrero and Quintero, 2015) is a discursive phenomenon that portrays ELT as an apolitical field and activity. This in turn has social effects on the ways English teachers and students perceive ELT practices and how they should act, be, feel, and think within English classes. This can be seen from both a macro perspective (e.g., language policies such as standardization in Colombia’s Plan Nacional de Bilingüísmo) as well as a mezzo and micro perspectives (e.g., institutional practices, in-classroom teachers’ decisions and the use of textbooks). This thesis reports on the study of political discourses of English students in deliberation English classes to challenge the so-called neutrality of the English language within the frame of a pedagogical innovation that I created for the study. Political deliberation is based on a conceptualization of politics as a process (Leftwich, 2014) and political discourses as ideologically influenced and prone to exercise power. Under this lens, English students and teachers are political agents who use their voices to construct political realities. Through Critical Political Discourse Analysis (CPDA), the argumentative claims of students in the deliberation classes were studied to be described, interpreted, and explained (Fairclough, 2013a). Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2012) model of political discourse analysis was the basis for the reconstruction of the arguments of two of the deliberators. Findings reveal that, even though the Neutrality of English constrains relations, contents, and subjects, the political discourses of students in the deliberation classes exercise resistance through relationships, knowledge/beliefs, and identities. This suggests it is possible to think of English learning and teaching as a politically engaged activity and field that advocates for social change.