A Case Study on Educational Inequality in a Secondary ELT Context

A Case Study on Educational Inequality in a Secondary ELT Context

  This study examines how language and socio-economic conditions intersect in a secondary EFL context. The data collected through reflective journals written by the three students from low socio-economic families and the teacher and student interviews were analyzed using both open-coding and content analysis. In doing so, the participants’ discursive formations related to roles and goals of English learning and professed difficulties in current instructional contexts were carefully categorized and juxtaposed with recurring issues and phenomena manifest in secondary English education in Korea. The results showed that both the students and teachers subscribed to the dominant view of EGL or EIL and considered English indispensible for communication, national power, and social promotion. However, despite such a view and difficulties observed and experienced due to sociocultural, economic, and instructional constraints, both the teachers and students still engaged in the traditional and limited practices of grammar-translation and test-oriented learning and teaching. Accordingly, this paper calls for English teachers to problematize such limited practices nested in the transmission model of teaching so as to engage in more responsible pedagogy in which they become more conscious of individual differences and make best efforts to ensure more equitable English education for the underprivileged.