Theory and Practice of Catherine Wallace’s Language Education

Critical Literacy in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classroom

Abstract

 This paper covers the theory and practice of language education by Catherine Wallace, who imagined classroom practices for culturally and linguistically diverse learners since 1990s.  Wallace criticized communicative language approaches that fix the social status of English second language learners.  She instead emphasized her educational objective “resistance”, which is to enable the learners to relativize themselves and rationally express their own position to others.  Furthermore, she criticized the practices that concentrated on individual experiences and empowering individual learners, and she aimed to enable “resistance” for everyone in the classroom in the future.  Wallace thus aimed to transform the classroom into an “interpretative community” which is open to multiple interpretations and to the possibility of dialogue.  For this stance she envisaged a practice in which everyone reads a common text and then dialogues with each other about the text.  Wallace proposed the use of “high-yield texts” that allow for multiple interpretations and the sharing of meta-linguistic terms in the reading process.  In the dialogue situations, students were required to share their interpretations based on meta-linguistic terms and analytical perspectives which they already learned in reading comprehension section, and at the same time students were able to deepen each other’s interpretations with “exploratory questions”.  In this way, Wallace’s theory and practice could be seen as an attempt to realize an “interpretive community” by allowing for diversity within the classroom on the one hand, while ensuring a commonality that links the classroom members together.