A British Council-funded project won by WA and Lancaster University

It’s our pleasure to inform you that members of the WA LaGeS group in cooperation with Jane Sunderland (Lancaster University) will be working on a British Council-funded (ELTRP scheme) project entitled:

Abstract:

Poland, as a young conservative democracy, is witnessing an unprecedented amount of public debate where both ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ figure prominently. Yet, they are widely perceived as foreign imports and thus fiercely contested. Consequently, the role of English as a Second Language (ESL) materials as well as teachers as potential mediators of markedly different Anglophone socio-politics is unquestionable. While it is true that ‘gender’ has been researched in the context of the ESL classroom, this strand of academic enquiry seems to have been abandoned. ‘Sexuality’ in this context, in turn, is a novel idea only initially probed. Regrettably, neither of these categories is regarded as important in the context of Polish education in general.

The overall aim of the project is to detail how ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’, as two salient social variables, are managed in the context of the ESL classroom in Poland, i.e. ESL materials, the process of reviewing learning materials by the Ministry of Education, and the situated practice of ESL learning (both students’ and teachers’ perspectives). Therefore, the project will investigate how ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ are portrayed in the ESL coursebook texts and images, negotiated in the teacher-student interactions and addressed by educational policy makers. To this end an interdisciplinary methodological framework drawing on the state-of-the-art approaches to linguistic analysis will be used (including Focus Groups for data collection, and Critical Discourse Analysis with Corpus Linguistics, and Multimodal Discourse Analysis).

Project members:

Jane Sunderland (Principal Investigator)
Joanna Pawelczyk (Project Leader)
Łukasz Pakuła (Project Leader)
Bartłomiej Kruk (Research Assistant)
Aleksandra Sokalska-Bennett (Research Assistant)

We’ll be launching a web site informing the general public about the aims and the progress of our study shortly.

With our best wishes,

Joanna Pawelczyk and Łukasz Pakuła

More on the LaGeS Research Group: http://wa.amu.edu.pl/wa/lages