Preservice teachers in the United States today seem to be immediately indoctrinated into the CLT framework and convinced of its underlying principles and resulting methodologies. This is, after all, where research and progress has brought us, and thus anything that does not fit within this framework is rejected and denounced as "backward" (Bax 279). The reality is that regardless of methodology or approaches to teaching a language, there will always be students who learn to be proficient and those that don't. CLT isn't some miraculous method that guarantees language learning, although the way it is promoted makes it seem that way. Stephen Bax's article attempts to downplay the importance of CLT and instead give emphasis to context--"understanding of individual students and their learning needs, wants, styles, and strategies... as well as the coursebook, local conditions, the classroom culture, school culture, [and] national culture" (285).
It's hard to argue with his claims, yet I am left dissatisfied with the article as a whole. How, exactly, do we modify CLT in order to take into account all these individual variables? He states, "context will be the very first thing to be taken into account before any methodological or language system decisions are taken" (284). This statement would be a lot more powerful and convincing if he actually followed it by giving explicit examples of ways to do this. It's easy to philosophize and theorize, but in the end, it's all talk. I think teachers can get trapped into thinking they are being sensitive to context when in reality they are still adhering to the tenets of CLT. The Context Approach is never fully developed in this article, and it left me wondering what I could take from its content that would be of practical benefit to me.
Context, however we choose to define it, largely impacts the way we teach and how we are received in the classroom. Hu's article raises the question of whether CLT can be transferred to any context and provides convincing arguments to the contrary. He uses the example of China to demonstrate the contrasting views--or assumptions--of learning, teaching, and student-teacher interaction compared to those of CLT. I particularly like the use of word 'assumption' because it brings to the forefront the issue of language and power relations. When we make assumptions about teaching and learning, without considering the context in which they occur (or don't occur), we are at a severe disadvantage.
Hu is attempting to challenge our (i.e. the Western) way of thinking about education by examining a cultural context different from what we are accustomed to. CLT, according to Hu, is unlikely to be adopted by China because it is in direct conflict with their educational assumptions. I see the paradox in this argumentation, namely that it asks us to rethink our own assumptions about CLT but never asks Chinese pedagogues or theorists evaluate their own. This automatically leads me to question whether or not we should challenge our assumptions, and to me the answer is obvious. Without critically viewing ourselves as byproducts of the system we live in, we become complacent and content with these underlying assumptions, if we even recognize them as culturally-biased assumptions. It is this type of thinking that led to Bax's article in the first place. So how can we say that the Chinese educational system should not also analyze its own system of education? I'm not advocating they ignore student and teacher preferences with the goal of implementing CLT. Rather, I am arguing that a critical perspective be adopted, as it should by all educators. After all, if we only ever did what was within our comfort zone, what numerous educational opportunities would be lost?
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