Post-colonial Curriculum Practices in South Asia

Post-colonial Curriculum Practices in South Asia gives a conceptual framework for curriculum design for English Language Teaching, taking into account context specific features in the teaching?learning settings of post-colonial South Asia. It reveals how the attitudes prevalent in post-colonial South Asian societies towards English negatively influence English language learning. The book provides a comprehensive analysis to design a course for English language teaching that aims at building learner confidence to speak English.

Based on original research, the study covers Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The book focuses on the context-specific nature of learners and considers a curriculum design that binds teaching materials and teaching methods together with an aligned assessment. Chapters discuss language attitudes, learner characteristics and English in the context of native languages, and introduce a special type of anxiety that stems from existing language attitudes in a society, referred to as Language Attitude Anxiety.

The book will appeal to doctoral and post-doctoral scholars in English language education, students and researchers of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics as well as curriculum designers of ELT and language policy makers.

This book documenting the effects of societal attitudes on the learning of English in four post-colonial South Asian countries represents an important and insightful addition to the research literature on language learning.The findings have informed the design of a university course that shows considerable promise in helping learners overcome their anxiety and build confidence to speak English.

James Cummins, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto.

"Scholars in postcolonial communities have observed that people are uncomfortable speaking English with each other. This is partly because English is associated with colonization and creates inequalities between local people. Though scholars in linguistics have observed this phenomenon in passing, this is the first book length treatment of this issue, leading to constructive pedagogical recommendations."

Suresh Canagarajah, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor, Departments of Applied Linguistics and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA.