Week 12.

After having read about the issues in the Expanding Circle, I identified the same problems in my own teaching experience. When I taught English to students whose major was Economics and Law, I remember that I had to struggle with their disinterest to the subject as they did not see much use of English in their professions. Russia does not provide a social context for such students in order to engender instrumental motivation.  It does not mean, however, that other social factors such as social prestige, cultural capital, and access to an imagined community of English speakers, motivate students in Russia to study English. I think it is important for TESOL educators to be sensitive to the social factors that motivate their learners and use those incentives for English learning. It was present in my teaching experience as well and it considerably enlivens the atmosphere in the classroom.
Another issue is teacher competence. I think it is due to the lack of interaction with native speakers on a daily basis,  a lot of English language teachers feel that their knowledge is bookish and far fron native-like pronunciation. In addition, top-down ministry directives by Ministries of Education consider an English-only classroom as an ideal classroom. However, I think it is a big plus to be able to conduct a class bilingually. Another issue is the promotion of CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) in the Expanding Circle. I concur with the author that it relates to modernization theory. However, I noticed that there was a discrepancy between the study books that my director wanted us to use in teaching English and students' attitude and expectations towatds the teaching material. I had to additionally but a grammar book as my students were very confident in the idea that grammar comes first and everything is based on grammar. They were not satisfied with the prevailing communicative tasks in the study books. I felt the same way and practical experience proved that those study books with the communicative approach were good as an additional material to the language acquisition.
As for multilingual societies such as India and South Africa, it is certainly due to globalization of English that the latter is used in H domains as socio-politically and socio-economically English is far more hegemonic. The negative side is that it creates a stratifying effect between those who can afford English-medium education and those who can not and, thus, cannot participate in the domains where English is the dominant language, like education and business. In a way, we have a similar situation in Russia. It creates an economic divide in English language learning in Russia as well.