A Global Education Approach to ELT Materials

抄録

Global education is a specialized field which aims to help students acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to survive and thrive in a global age. As an approach to language teaching, it involves integrating a global perspective into the design of teaching materials through a focus on global issues and international themes as well as concepts such as social responsibility, international understanding, and world citizenship. Global education emphasizes meaningful engagement with real-world topics and draws on ideas from content-based instruction. It encourages classroom teachers and textbook writers to experiment with global education materials and to explore resources from fields such as peace education, human rights education, and environmental education. It has also led to new thinking about the social responsibility of language teachers, textbooks, and curricula in a world of inequality, poverty, prejudice, and pollution. This paper gives a brief introduction to the field of global education, outlines its relevance to English language teaching, and describes key features of a global education approach to designing content-based EFL materials. It outlines global education criteria for analysing EFL textbooks, discusses problematic textbook content, and surveys the resources available to teachers who wish to add a global dimension to their classroom materials.