Abstract
The present study identifies and maps the reflexive praxis of two experienced English as a foreign language (EFL) instructors as they reconstruct and negotiate textbook material in situ. An abundance of critical studies underscoring social injustices in the contents of globally published EFL textbooks do not sufficiently address the negotiation of their multimodal discourses during class time. Although reflexive teaching practice in language learning classrooms has a robust pool of research, limited scholarly attention has been given to the active negotiation of a textbook’s multimodal discourse in Korean university classrooms. The present study asks: (1) How do two instructors at different Korean universities negotiate the contents of an EFL textbook with their students during class? (2) How do the students react to the multimodal discourse negotiated in their textbooks? (3) What pedagogical implications do the findings lend to EFL textbook instruction in Korean university contexts? Using Norris’ (2004) framework for video transcription of multimodal interaction in two Korean university English communication classes, the findings reveal that reflexive negotiation between students and instructors is a kind of rhetorical accomplishment that lessens the potential for cultural marginalization in the multimodal discourse of EFL textbooks. Implications suggest that textbook reflexivity in situ raises the value of student EFL learning investments.
Keywords
I Introduction
This study underscores how two Korean university EFL instructors reconstruct the multimodal discourse of their textbook lessons in situ. Textbooks are artefacts of Korean post-secondary education because they often double as the course curriculum and material reference for students and instructors (Chang, 2009; Fitzgibbon, 2013; Richards, 2001). Numerous studies have identified the multimodal discourse in globally published EFL textbooks as unchecked vehicles for social injustices (i.e. Ahn, 2014; Fitzgibbon, 2013; Song, 2013). A culture of blind trust in textbook content among the consumers is evident in expanding-circle cultures (Curdt-Christiansen & Weninger, 2015), but few studies have questioned the visual discourse that textbooks present or how it is negotiated and perceived by consumers in live classrooms. While the English language lessons are highly decontextualized (Curdt-Christiansen & Weninger, 2015), the visual discourse is highly contextualized (Bateman, 2014). To examine the misalignment of meaning-making (Kress, 2010) between visual representation and linguistic challenges in textbook lessons, this study uses a multimodal interactional analysis of recorded classroom activities with textbooks to address the perceived gaps in research.
Considering the extraordinary profit margins that global EFL textbook publications enjoy (Gray, 2010; Harwood, 2014), the content may not change anytime soon, so instructors must control the content to serve their needs and the needs of their students (Richards, 2001). The quality of that reflexive alteration is rooted in an instructor’s beliefs (Banes, Martínez, Athanases, & Wong, 2016; Meschede, Fiebranz, Möller & Steffensky, 2017), assumptions, and knowledge (BAK) (Woods, 1996) about language learning. Textbook reflexivity in situ is identified in the present study as a potential model for negotiating multimodal discourses in EFL textbooks because it serves as a heuristic for reasoning (Pinker, 1979) how an instructor’s BAK (Woods, 1996) can help neutralize or mitigate culturally marginalizing lesson content (Cortez, 2008) for students of expanding circle communities (Kachru, 1992). Attention is drawn to how instructors negotiate and reconstruct the contents of their textbooks with students during class and what pedagogical affordances, if any, that gives to EFL learning in Korean university classrooms.
1 Textbooks in Korean EFL education
As Cortazzi and Jin (1996) argue, there is a culture of learning in specific EFL communities and that is certainly connected with (in varying degrees) their textbooks (Macgilchrist, 2017). This study problematizes the unquestioned use of generic, globally published EFL learning textbooks (i.e. Harwood, 2014, 2017), addresses the need to look critically at their multimodal discourse, and how classroom negotiations of textbook lessons can raise or diminish student investments in EFL learning (i.e. Chun et al., 2017; Paik, 2018). In the context of EFL education in Korea, curricular policies favoring globally published English language learning material over domestic publications (Chang, 2009) pressure most Korean universities to adhere to a test-driven (or numbers-driven) culture of language learning (Haggerty & Fox, 2016; Ryu & Boggs, 2016). The present study proposes that textbook reflexivity in situ is what the featured instructors appear to be doing in class – modifying content in situ; using their understanding of Korean curricular commonplaces to remedially interrupt some of the social injustices that they perceive in the textbook content (i.e. Song, 2013). In other words, as a potential model for classroom textbook delivery, discussed in the next section, it could encourage instructors interrupt old practices (i.e. Benson, 2017; Ellis, 2017), while fostering self-efficacy to align textbook lessons with their curricular vision (Banes et al., 2016; Cheng & Fox, 2017) to achieve the rhetorical accomplishment of a curriculum (Fox, 2004).
Korea is an ethnocentric culture where ‘individuals are acutely aware of their obligations and responsibilities to those who have come before’ (Scollon, Scollon & Jones, 2012, p. 60). In such a culture, those who are granted power and status within the collective are often revered and their actions rarely questioned (Adams & Gottlieb, 2017; Kohls, 2001). Bearing this cultural tendency in mind, an instructor’s influence on their students is one of infectious commitment to learning (Dörnyei, 2001). In most university EFL programs, whether in Korea or another expanding circle culture (Kachru, 1992), textbooks have an instructor’s implied endorsement (Canagarajah, 2016; Curdt-Christiansen & Weninger, 2015) pressuring students to follow the instructions therein and have faith that the linguistic and cultural models align with proven EFL learning practices (Cortez, 2008).
Even the term global textbook, a much-used adage (Gray, 2010; Harwood, 2014; Tomlinson, 2011) for the kind of English language teaching textbooks used in Korean university EFL programs (Song, 2013), foreshadows the insidious potential such artefacts might have for Korean students eager to achieve higher, socio-economic mobility(Chang, 2009). The term ‘global’ bears significant gravitas in the context of the present study because English language textbook publishing is a ‘major driver of global economies’ (Harwood, 2014, p. 5) with yearly sales exceeding billions of USD (Tryhorn, 2011). Those economic interests often supersede social or pedagogical concerns (Littlejohn, 2012) and manifest in the multimodal contents of globally published EFL textbooks (Cortez, 2008; Fitzgibbon, 2013) as corporatization (content and curriculum emulating practices of service or manufacturing industries), massification (a strong push towards higher education), and the destruction of culture, where local contexts in a curriculum are de-emphasized, while emphasizing international perspectives (Harwood, 2014). Considering the desire for achieving participation on the world stage carries with it an implication that English communication skills are a global requisite, the term global textbook attracts students in EFL education because it bears a misleading implication that the contents will help students achieve such worldly positioning. Despite steadily increasing sales in globally published EFL textbooks (Tryhorn, 2011), that attraction is misleading because textbook content makes a ‘significant contribution to the failure of many learners of English’ (Tomlinson, 2008, p. 3) due to the insufficient training or preparation of English instructors who do not know how to use them properly (Gray, 2010; Harwood, 2014; Littlejohn, 2012; Richards, 2011). The present study underscores Richards’ (2001) argument and proposes a model for classroom delivery.
It is important to clarify that the present study crosses several areas of research and may appear too cursory in exploration and discovery. However, as reminder of context, the key goal of most university classes in Korea is about functional practice more that learning/acquiring declarative knowledge of the language (Richard, 2001), which is why the present study draws more attention to the negotiation of content in the textbooks, rather than detailing the content on its own. In further context, Korean English professors teach IELTS-test-driven English lessons (for example), while foreign, English native speakers teach functional and communicative competence with the skills that the students have already learned (Paik, 2018). It is also important to note that the positionality of the researcher resonates with those of the instructors who participated in this study. Having used textbooks over several years of classroom instruction, much like the one featured in the classroom observations of this study, the researcher and the instructors are deeply familiar with the curricular commonplaces (i.e. Null, 2016) of Korean post-secondary EFL learning and perceive globally published EFL textbooks, commonly used in their university programs, to be deeply consequential artifacts in Korea’s post-secondary educational culture. For these reasons, this study problematizes the unquestioned use of EFL textbooks and their multimodal discourse in compulsory EFL courses, on which many instructors and students learn for linguistic and curricular guidance (Richards, 2001) in Korean university EFL programs.
2 Classroom delivery
The literature examined thus far suggests the necessity for well-trained EFL teachers in Korea to mitigate perceived insufficiencies or social injustices that may be present in textbook content by engaging in a practicum of self-reflexive classroom delivery (Banes et al., 2016). In an extension of Doyle and Carter’s (2003) conceptualization that curriculum is an interpretation of content, Fox (2004) argued that a curriculum is a rhetorical accomplishment that is partially negotiated among stakeholders, such as students and their teachers (Apple & Apple, 2018).
By further conceptual extension, this study suggests that textbook reflexivity in situ is an essential undercurrent of the rhetorical accomplishment to which Fox (2004) refers because it encourages the manipulation of textbook content, rooted in curriculum theory in language learning. Textbook reflexivity in situ may appear misleadingly simple, but it is theoretically rooted in research of hegemony and hidden curriculums in language learning (Apple and Apple, 2018), an awareness of dominant language ideologies in language learning and the potential opportunities for discursive transformation of lessons during instruction (Banes et al., 2016), an awareness of the curricular commonplaces of the EFL program (Null, 2016), an awareness of the limits of language learning in confined environments, such as classrooms (Benson, 2017), an understanding of ‘alignment principles’ (Wiggins & McTighe, 2007), so that textbook lessons are reflective of the rhetorical accomplishments of a curriculum (Fox, 2004) and lead to fair assessments for language learners (Cheng and Fox (2017). On these foundations, textbook reflexivity in situ is further inspired by the professional beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge of instructors (Meschede et al., 2017; Woods, 1996), but tempered with Rogan’s (2007) parameter’s for feasible innovation in classrooms. Textbooks play the role as artifacts of language education (Apple & Apple, 2018), afforded the power to alter or influence the social values and knowledge of their consumers (Fuchs & Bock, 2018; MacGilchrist, 2017) because they are collectively part of the investment students make in language learning (Paik, 2018). The present study assumes Korean institutional endorsement validates the social realities presented in the multimodal discourse of textbook content (Curdt-Christiansen & Weninger, 2015; Thoma, 2017), so they play a substantial role in Korean, post-secondary EFL learning. These points support arguments by Harwood (2014) and Tomlinson (2011) regarding globally published EFL textbooks, and support Richards’ (2011) insistence for measures of reflexive praxis during instruction. Reflexivity, a term used in this study in the context of language learning, is an instructor’s recognition and challenge of conventional teaching practices in dialogical and relational situations such as a classroom environment (Benson, 2017; Cunliffe & Easterby-Smith, 2004; Pennycook, 2008). In situ implies the improvised or anticipated changes, neutralization, or augmentation (i.e. Cortez, 2008) of multimodal discourse in textbook content that the instructor must be ready to perform to align with the needs of their students and their curricular vision.
For some foreign teachers of EFL in Korea, a prescribed curriculum should not diminish or interfere with improvised classroom successes (Park, 2010; Sawyer, 2011). In this way, a curriculum becomes a reflexive framework not only for mediating support in classroom learning (Fox, 2014) but acting as a continuous needs-analysis (Bocanegra-Valle, 2016), informing the teacher what tweaks may be required in future or ongoing lessons. Textbook reflexivity in situ encourages Korean university EFL instructors to continuously shape a syllabus and classroom delivery by giving due attention and consideration to relevant curricular commonplaces (Null, 2016), such as the subject, the milieu, the teacher, the learner and, in the context of this study, the textbook. Understanding details of the curricular commonplaces helps the instructor form a bedrock on which to build live improvisations of lesson contents. In this way, the instructor finds more fluency with the rhetorical accomplishment of a course curriculum (Fox, 2004).
3 Multimodal discourse and interactional analysis
A mode is a means for making meaning, such as speech, writing, image, sound, color, or gesture, so multimodality refers to people using multiple means of meaning making (Jewitt, Bezemer, & O’Halloran, 2016; Kress, 2010; Norris, 2019). To be considered a mode, a semiotic system of meaning-making requires a community to recognize it as such (Jewitt et al., 2016), like a handshake, or a bow. Modes are semiotic systems of representation that can take the form of gesture, gaze, spoken discourse, layout, print, music, just to name a few. More and more, these semiotic systems, driven by parallel directions of research, formed by accretion into a single category to unify all manner of meaning-making (Kress, 2010). Methodological frameworks such as Norris’ (2004, 2016) Analysing Multimodal Interaction, specifically, the Method of Video Analysis (Norris, 2004, 2016) inform the present study for looking at how student interact with each other, their instructors, and their textbook content during class.
Many investigations of multimodal discourse in EFL textbooks are inspired by critical discourse studies. Those studies underpin ‘othering’ of immigrant voices in Canada (Gulliver, 2010), racism and ‘whiteness’ in character representations (Harper, 2012), nationalism (Vinall & Shin, 2019), imbalanced gender representation where male social actors possess most or all forms of agency (i.e. Ahour & Zaferani, 2016; Giaschi, 2000; Lee, 2014; Marefat & Marzban, 2014; Mustedanagic, 2010; Sherman, 2010; Tajeddin & Janebi, 2010; Thomson & Otsuji; 2003). For Van Dijk (2011), ‘othering’ is the process in discourse that creates the conditions where certain communities become ‘them’. In most of studies of EFL textbooks noted here, ‘othering’ L2 speakers of English or omitting sufficient connection with their cultures was a common and abundant narrative in the multimodal critical discourse analyses, where certain communities were marginalized in the content or presented with lesser agency (Chu, 2015; Lee, 2011; Maposa, 2015; Song, 2013; Thompson, 2013; Xiong, 2012).
In the context of this study, textbook reflexivity in situ is examined through the lens of how the content is negotiated in class. Multimodal interactional analysis helps us understand ‘how actions are made meaningful and social in situ rather than in representation’ (Wohlwend, 2011, p. 3). Additionally, while modes of meaning-making (Jewitt et al., 2016) are useful heuristics, they are inextricably multimodal and thus ‘messy data’ that analytical frameworks can only approximate (Norris, 2004; Wohlwend, 2011).
Norris’ (2004) Method of Video Analysis captures ‘the tangle of interrelated modal relationships within a segment of lived experience’ (Wohlwend, 2011, p. 4). The present study presumes that the multimodal discourse in EFL textbooks is as consequential to EFL learning as they ways in which it is delivered and/or negotiated in the classroom. The present study asks: (1) How do two EFL instructors at different Korean universities negotiate the contents of an EFL textbook with their students during class? (2) How do the students react to the multimodal discourse negotiated in their textbooks? (3) What pedagogical implications do the findings lend to EFL textbook instruction in Korean university contexts?
II Methods
Norris’ (2004, 2016) Method of Video Analysis and Transcription (p. 61) of two video recordings of two classrooms was deemed a sufficient analytical tool to address the research questions in the present study.
1 Data collection and participants
The data for this study are two video recordings of EFL classes, taken at two departments in Chung-Buk National University, Korea. Each video is approximately 55 minutes in length and, for the purposes of comparing classroom praxis, each instructor agreed to teach the same lesson. The lesson was Unit 6: Eating well (see Figure 6 below) from Top notch 2: Student book (Saslow & Ascher, 2006, pp. 62–67). Fifty-two 1st and 2nd year Korean university students and two native-English speaking instructors agreed to participate in classroom recordings. Instructors A and B have graduate training in TESOL education and (collectively) 40 years of English language teaching experience in Korean post-secondary institutions.
Data collection used a proctoring examination camera, positioned in the front corner of the classroom, left of the instructor’s podium, facing the students. The mp4 recording output was saved to a server at the university, then uploaded to a private, password protected Apple iPad Pro (2017) for analysis. The recording served to capture key instances of interaction among the students and with the instructor during the class. Those captures are featured in the findings and discussion as markers of the method of analysis, illustrated in the following section.
2 Data analysis
An investigation of classroom negotiations of textbook content is achieved in this study by using Norris’ (2004) Method of Video Analysis and Transcription (p. 60). For Van Praag, Stevens and Van Houtte (2017), seeing the multimodal interactions between instructors and students interact in the classroom can be extremely informative, especially when instructors’ perspectives and their respective roles are integrated in qualitative analyses (Wohlwend, 2011; Zappa-Hollman & Duff, 2019). Norris’ (2004) framework facilitates the analysis of complex interactions that take place in a classroom and affords a measure of cartography to such complexity, highlighting actions that bear meaning in classroom learning contexts, reflective of the complexity of power relations in education in Korean contexts (Adams & Gottlieb, 2017; Thompson & Lee, 2018; Wohlwend, 2011).
Norris’ (2004, 2016) Method of Video Analysis and Transcription, looks at an array of communicative modes, such as:
proxemics (the distance individuals have with objects or others), which gives insight into the motives of social interaction (Norris, 2004, p. 18);
posture (the positioning of a participant’s body during interaction), which gives insight into measures of involvement (p. 23);
head movement, specifically lateral (tilting the head), sagittal (nodding), and rotation (shaking one’s head) (p. 32);
gesture, specifically iconic (to mimic spoken language), metaphoric (to illustrate pictorial elements in spoken language), and deictic (pointing to object or people) (p. 27);
gaze (the direction and intensity of looking) (p. 36);
spoken language (singular or simultaneous utterances) (p. 14);
layout (the structure of interaction employed by the participants) (p. 48); and
print (the use of printed media concurrent with interaction) as systems of representation for interaction between social actors. (Norris, 2004)
While the findings highlight these modes of communication, it is important to remember they are often co-constructed modes of meaning-making that are interdependent or concurrent with other modes (Jewitt et al., 2016; Kress, 2010; Norris, 2004). For example, gesture is often ‘concurrent with spoken language’ (Norris, 2004, p. 28), towards the invocation of some imagery. Therefore, in the interests of clarity, to show multiple overlays of interaction, the discussion section illustrates the construction of the findings featured in Table 1, so that the reader can see their collective manifestation in each classroom.
Sample of general trends from each classroom video.
Note. These general observations are given more detailed attention in the Discussion section.
3 Findings
Considering that the textbook is one of the central elements in this study, it is important to note that the social actors using them are the instructors and the students. The goals/circumstances are the negotiation of the printed material. In Norris’ (2004) framework, printed materials are disembodied modes that could be regarded as environmental or visual (Wohlwend, 2011; Norris, 2004). As a reminder to details given in the Data section, the lesson that is being taught is drawn from Top Notch 2, Unit 6: Eating well (Saslow & Ascher, 2006, p. 62) (see Figure 6 below) Each of the classes featured in the present study followed the same lesson.
After mapping the observed reflexivity of instructor and student reactions to content in class, the findings of the video analysis and transcription (Norris, 2004, 2016) address two different EFL instructor’s efforts to negotiate and reconstruct the same contents of an EFL textbook with their students, their approaches to textbook reflexivity in situ, and what pedagogical affordances those efforts and reactions lend to understanding EFL learning in Korean university contexts. In the interests of brevity, the following illustrations present instances of proxemics, posture, head movement, gesture, gaze, spoken language, layout and print as italicized markers that illustrate, when noted, a Gestaltian field of meaning that support answers the research questions. However, in the interests of clarity, to distinguish the findings from the discussions that follow, Table 1 serves to delineate major trends in the reactions of the students and the instructors about the specific components of Norris’ (2004) framework, as they are experienced during class. Although all of the findings were unable to fit in Table 1, the samples are meant to support the salience of their appearances in the discussion as major trends of interaction.
4 Discussion
In this section, we include some findings presented in tandem with discussion to increase clarity and explicitness of the ‘messy multimodal data’ to which Norris (2004) and Wohlwend (2011) refer, so that there is an explicit connection between what was found and what we may infer from that when ‘mapping modes of meaning-making’ (Wohlwend, 2011, p. 3).
When first engaging the textbook material with his students, Instructor A appears to have prepared supplemental printed material (see Appendix 1). As the lesson begins, Instructor A walks around the classroom (proxemics) and carefully observes the student engagement (see Figure 1) and to make himself available for questions.
Montage of instructor/student proxemics in classroom layout.
The layout of the classroom, where many students are evenly spread around several round tables, considers instructor/student proxemics because it allows the instructor to wander during the lecture or introducing new material (see Figure 2).
Instructor A classroom layout.
There is a noticeably unimpeded flow of classroom activity and spoken discourse. Only English was spoken in class except during times of confusion with the linguistic material, where students whispered to each other in Korean before asking the instructor for assistance. During the lesson, whenever Instructor A or B deviated from the textbook material (printed media; see Figure 6 below) it was to draw attention to linguistic variation of a textbook feature. While Instructor B does not walk around the room as much due to the restricted space in the layout of the classroom, he stands at different points nearby student groups to ease interaction if necessary (see Figure 3).
Instructor A worked closely with students as he walked around the classroom.
Using comical metaphor and allegory (e.g. ‘I have 1 glass of wine for health, not 100 glasses of wine!’) amplified by iconic gesture (see Figure 4) to engage the content of the printed material (textbook) appears to be one of Instructor A’s frequently used strategies while negotiating the content. Student response was fully attentive and amenable to these strategies, noticed in upright posture facing the instructor, focused gaze at the printed material, affirmation (sagittal head movement) and outbursts of laughter (spoken language) whenever an instance of personal reflection added to the classroom commentary. For instructor B, giving much attention to describing the food pyramid (see Figure 6 below) suggests that he was aware of student confusion and guessed many Korean students had not seen it before or knew what it was meant to illustrate.
Instructor A’s iconic gesture drinking wine.
Instructor A facilitated activities that appeared to tailor or augment the textbook’s content for his students, rather than follow it word for word without consideration. For example, by focusing on habits at the beginning of the lesson, he is setting the stage for speaking about patterns of behavior and what English lexical items might be commonly associated with food and health (see Figure 6 below). Instructor B, on the other hand, makes a choice to skip over some grammar sections in the lesson and holds the textbook up in an iconic gesture (see Figure 5) as if it were a piece of garbage. The students respond with laughter (spoken word) at the gesture and nod appreciatively (sagittal head movement).
Instructor holding up the textbook material as if it were garbage.
Unit 6 featuring a food pyramid.
By holding up the book instead of presenting, for example, a PowerPoint presentation of the lesson, each instructor appeared to present a co-engagement with the printed material. Furthermore, Instructor A worked together with his students in the layout of the classroom (see Figure 3 above; proxemics) and used student textbooks, rather than his own, to refer to the linguistic material, thereby co-consuming the lesson content. The students appeared to enjoy sharing the experience with Instructor A, evident in their posture and gaze directed at the printed material or the instructor. In Instructor B’s class, some students picked up their own books and engaged in deictic gesture (see Figure 7) with the textbook content.
Student deictic gesture and gaze.
This occurred at several times during the lesson. Instructor B, in a similar fashion, held up the textbook and pointed to the visual discourse of the unit’s lessons as he spoke about them during the class. Instructor B’s classroom strategy suggests he did not feel the visual components (see Figure 6) were necessary. The students appeared to thoroughly enjoy Instructor B’s efforts to filter the content by only concentrating on the general topics of discussion or dialogues to practice English speaking. In this way, many of the students enthusiastically engaged in the activities at every opportunity (sagittal head movement) as evident in their posture and enthusiastic speaking practice (spoken word) (see Figure 8).
Student posture and enthusiastic practice.
Instructor A and B’s efforts to avoid the visual discourses (e.g. the food pyramid; see Figure 6 above) and recontextualizing the linguistic challenges (e.g. talk about food relative to Korean society) may have been inspired by the narrow or one-sided representation of the cultural and linguistic relevance of the lessons (printed material). For example, while Koreans have a food pyramid of a sort (see Figure 6 above), called a food pagoda, as noted by Instructor A during class (see Appendix 1), most of the students exercised proximal distancing, lateral head movement (indicating reluctance or confusion) or aversion to gaze (see Figure 9).
Montage of some students expressing disinterest in the textbook content except under the specific direction of Instructor A.
Regarding the printed materials or textbook lessons, as per Norris (2004), the unit goals are: ‘1. Make an excuse to decline food. 2. Talk about food passions. 3. Discuss lifestyle changes. 4. Describe unique foods’ (Saslow & Ascher, 2006, p. 62). However, the food pyramid is not only emphasized in size, composition and detail, but comes with an endorsement from a published physician (see Figure 6). That superior agency diminishes others (i.e. Machin & Mayr, 2012) and presents a Western or American diet as the standard against which all other cultures are measured. Denying student connection to what kind of food these unit goals refer, also impedes their projected accomplishment. Hence, by transforming the printed material (food pyramid into a food pagoda), Instructor A has given some measure of Korean agency to that visual device, to which student response appeared universally positive (sagittal head movement; posture; spoken words; deictic gesturing) (see Figures 7, 8 and 10). For Instructor B, many of the students were quietly trying to understand the lesson and not speaking at several points, especially examining the buffet featured in Figure 11, where food items do not appear to include vegetable choices, such as a typical Korean dish might have (see Figure 12).
Students fully engaged with printed material.
A buffet featuring food that appears to have mostly meat or dessert choices.
A typical Korean meal.
While a disparity exists between the visual discourse and Korean culture, Instructor A presents the content from student perspectives. As the students negotiated the lesson contents, in many cases, their responses (spoken word) and participation (posture; gaze) were increased or more attentive whenever Instructor A initiated Korean perspectives, such as talking about soju (a traditional Korean vodka) or sam-gyeop-sal (Korean sliced pork belly), suggesting that the multimodal content required reflexive adjustment in situ.
By making the visual content relevant to his students, Instructor A made the lessons were effectively enhanced to include a Korean perspective. The students, in all cases, appeared to be very attentive and receptive to those transformations by establishing continuous gaze with the material or the instructor and posturing affirmatively when engaging the content. Likewise, by using elements of Korean culture in his exchanges with the students, Instructor B provides a contextually cultured relief-platform on which the students might stand to face the linguistic challenges in the lesson. Students were often initially confused (lateral head movement; silence) (see Figure 13) about some of the content (see Figure 14) prior to the instructor’s efforts to recontextualize the lessons.
Student lateral head movement and confused silence before the instructor recontextualizes content.
Dialogue between Terry and Iris about dieting (Saslow & Ascher, 2006, p. 63).
The present study asked how two EFL instructors at different Korean universities negotiated the contents of their EFL textbooks with their students during class, how the students reacted to those efforts and what pedagogical implications the findings lend to EFL textbook instruction in Korean university contexts. In each of the classrooms, it is obvious that each professor had a profound knowledge of Korean contexts and the curricular commonplaces of Korean university EFL. This is evident in their respective transformations of the multimodal content to suit the needs of their students. By following the content page by page, they are adhering to the restrictive curriculum most universities follow but doing so in a way that exercises reflexivity in the negotiation of the textbook content, while fostering a functional knowledge of the linguistic challenges (Stoller, 2015). By transforming some of the content in situ, such as using comical allegory or specific Korean cultural translation of content, textbook reflexivity in situ becomes an obvious strategy or, perhaps, a discourse genre of the rhetorical accomplishment in a curriculum to which Fox (2004) refers.
A common theme that emerges from the findings, regarding what pedagogical affordances arise from the textbook reflexivity, suggests that students enjoy active transformation to contexts relative to their culture. However, to more specifically reflect what Cortez (2008) asks, regarding how each party resists, transforms, appropriates, or neutralizes any of the content in classroom negotiation, it appears that for both classes, elements of Norris’ (2004, 2016) Method of Video Analysis and Transcription, such as posture (measures of involvement (p. 23), head movement (tilting the head; nodding; shaking) (p. 32), gesture (mimicry; metaphoric expression; deictics) (p. 27), gaze (the direction and intensity of looking) (p. 36), spoken language (singular or simultaneous utterances) (p. 14), layout (the structure of interactions) (p. 48), and print media (the textbook), played a role generating a field of meaning. Whenever the instructors in each of the classes included an ‘aside’ that addressed a Korean perspective, such as a food pagoda or used a Korean food item, such as gam-ja-tang (a common Korean stew), or even challenged inner-circle norms projected by the multimodal content (see Figure 14), the students reacted by sitting more perceptively upright posture, their spoken language was louder and happier, and practicing dialogues with more enthusiasm metaphorically gestural enthusiasm than before. We do not claim this is proof that reflexivity has some positive effect on learning but based on these findings we can infer that textbook reflexivity in situ inspires a positive learning experience in the delivery of textbook content and may facilitate more functional knowledge of English in Korean university EFL courses. The implication suggests that textbook reflexivity, as it is practiced by the instructors featured in the present study, can be used by other instructors as a reflexive praxis to hone their delivery of multimodal discourses in their EFL textbooks. For any university students in expanding circle EFL programs, the implication of this study suggests that the value of their learning investment can be increased with textbook reflexivity because it encourages active participation with the instructor to achieve that praxis.
III Conclusions
This study attempted to analyse how the multimodal discourse from an EFL textbook, presumed to harbor certain social injustices, was negotiated in Korean university classrooms. For EFL students in any expanding-circle (i.e. Kachru, 1992) culture, fears of identity loss, feelings of awkward social positioning, or senses of outsiderness are very real challenges (Curdt- Christiansen & Weninger, 2015). Therefore, using ones BAK (Banes et al., 2016; Woods, 1996) to ask questions about the curricular commonplaces (Null, 2016) of a particular course, simultaneously informs and necessitates textbook reflexivity in situ to address those challenges and prepares students to meet their respective assessments. In this sense, Cortazzi and Jin (1996) referred to a ‘cultural synergy’, wherein students and instructors interacted systematically and cooperated ‘for the common purpose of students’ language development with an attitude of being willing to learn, understand and appreciate the other’s culture without loss of their own cultural status, role or identity’ (p. 52). Textbook reflexivity in situ appears to echo that achievement in intercultural communication in the classroom because it inspires co-operative acculturation (Cortazzi & Jin, 1996), initiated by the instructor’s reflexive teaching practice for the benefit of each group.
After monitoring two 55-minute classes, each with a different instructor and set of students, certain repetitions in interactional behavior were noticed as common between them. The findings suggest that, depending on whether or not it is recontextualized, the multimodal discourse in Top notch 2 (see Figure 6 above) (Saslow & Ascher, 2006), containing visual imagery alongside lexical, pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic linguistic challenges in the lesson contents, can impede or support that which Fox (2004) implies as the rhetorical accomplishment of a language learning curriculum. In a restrictive curriculum that requires a large percentage of classroom activity to be based on textbook material (Chang, 2009), classroom reflexivity and constant re-visioning of the syllabus, as it evolves throughout the semester, may yield more informed assessment (Cheng & Fox, 2017) and more pedagogically fulfilling classroom activities. Sourced in an instructor’s fluency with the rhetorical accomplishment to which Fox (2004) refers, textbook reflexivity in situ requires an understanding of the curricular commonplaces in the EFL program where the textbook is used, and an anticipation of what content may diminish student agency in language learning process. The approach appears to have successful application because it encourages instructors to negotiate textbooks in situ, where student response to discursive recontextualization is physically and emotionally perceptible in their robust discussions with neighbors, happy and affirmative gestures, active participation to engage the lesson content, and the overall atmospheric sense of accomplishment at the end of each class.
Caveats for the present study may be that the exploration requires more fine-grained analysis to connect the specific details of the textbook with the reactions of the students. Also, future research can delve deeper and ask a) what are the genres of EFL textbook multimodal discourses? b) which functions are most challenging for students in particular EFL programs, with different curricular commonplaces, and do they have different findings from those presented here? Future research should consider these questions and look at how students perform in classes where the instructor practices textbook reflexivity in situ and how they feel about those classes over time. To that end, more quantitative or mixed methods research might yield significant insights that inform how instructors approach curriculum design based on the mandatory use of EFL textbooks in certain expanding circle institutional programs and how their contexts are treated in classrooms.
