Response to “TESOL at Forty: What are the issues?” by S. Canagarajah.

Viewing the snappy progression of TESOL history from the lens of postmodern metanarratives, innumerable perspectives converge and conflict while marking and shaping the line of its linearity. Keeping this in mind, Canagarajah has endeavored to historicize the complicated odyssey TESOL made in its short span of history. His concern to contemplate on the issues of understanding the current state of profession in the light of TESOL history is noteworthy. Sundry changes and challenges emerged with the introduction of TESOL program as its history marched by dissecting all the traditional attitudes of second language teaching and learning praxis or policies. However, we are still engaged in other dire challenges to face and actualize in postmodern situation, a situation in which all the hierarchies are convincingly ruptured and erased, the native/non-native dichotomy has been divorced. Whether it is the concept of postmethod as expounded by Canagarajah, or the position of prioritizing readers’ authorship while negotiating with textual voices as examined by Barthes, narrating history of TESOL in our critical pedagogy from postcolonial setting remarkably provides new avenues to observe how it is progressing. Making a graceful entrée into TESOL program, I have been meaningfully managing myself now to reexamine and review my old pedagogic tradition in which I was brought up.

In Canagarajah views, TESOL teachers are now compelled to orient themselves to thier learners in more specific ways, taking into account their diverse perspectives, attitudes, views, and their learning contexts. Clearly, learner is invariably compelled to construct his/her identity through constant motivation. I do believe that the sole factor that assists to achieve the course goals is motivation. In constructing the new sense of self through motivation is quintessentially the modern phenomenon. Our TESOL history has evinced the fact that we have miraculously moving from authoritarian structures to egalitarian ones and we are shifting toward process-world rather than a product-world.  Canagarajah’s insightful observation on learner, subject matter, method, and sociopolitical and geographical dimension embodies his current survey of TESOL historical progression. What I believe is that we need to work more valiantly not merely to join our leaning community but to “shuttle between communities” (26). We need to remember that “our quest for objective, absolute, and universal knowledge has been shaken by the questioning of Enlightenment thinking and modernist science” (28). The obvious factor is that we are not discovering or devising any new or novel ideological methods for implementation in academic sector. What we are doing is the observation and constantly reexamination of our assumption to enrich our knowledge with/in the TESOL successful historical progression.