A story of texts, culture(s), cultural tool normalization, and adult ESL learning and teaching

This study explores engagements with texts as tools for cultural topic activities in two adult ESL classrooms as well as engagements with culture(s) in and outside the two classrooms. It introduces the notion of cultural tool normalization to conceptualize processes of cultural reproduction within engagements with culture(s). The study draws on classroom observations and interviews with 2 teachers and 41 students and employs sociocultural, poststructural, psychoanalytical and critical discourse analysis perspectives in analyses of the data. The study examined whether monologic or dialogic text features made a difference in possibilities for students' negotiation of the texts' cultural meanings. The analyses point to a complicated picture of the interaction between texts and their users, to occasions when students' knowledge and views could be ignored as well as powerfully evoked when both monologic and dialogic classroom texts were interacted with. The analyses suggest that the acculturation model of cultural instruction, which entails learning about dominant forms of culture, seemed to dominate the research sites. Further, in enquiring into the students' (dis)identifications with the cultural discourses thrown in their paths, the analyses point out that the adult immigrants' engagements with Canadian culture(s) are affected by the variety of their social positions within these discourses. The study contends that CTN may be linked to discursively constructed desires. Further, CTN may entail the desire to continue to perform particular identity positions constructed differently in the new discourses surrounding adult immigrants or may involve the embracing of a particular new discourse and associated with it identity positions. The study concludes with implications for classroom curriculum, practices and teacher education. It points to possibilities for inviting students' negotiations of the cultural discourses embedded in classroom texts, to the need for teachers and students to explore the discursive character of culture(s) through the employment of a model of critical multiculturalism in classroom settings, and to the need for teacher education practices to link issues of social change with work on teacher identities.