Power and Meaning Making in an EAP Classroom

Chun's fresh and engaging exploration of how an EAP teacher implemented functional grammar and critical literacy in her classes is an important contribution to the EAP literature. His discussion of the collaboration between himself and the EAP teacher offers an intimate portrait of the challenges of translating newly-learned theoretical constructs into everyday classroom activities. Sarah Benesch, College of Staten Island, City University of New York, USA This is an exemplary study of an EAP classroom. It is a critically reflexive and refreshing account of what it means to be an EAP teacher and what we do in our classrooms. The writing is both engaging and thoughtful and I highly recommend it. Brian Paltridge, University of Sydney, Australia Through a critical ethnographic study of one teacher's evolving practice, Christian Chun challenges us to interrogate the nexus between neoliberal social and economic forces and the daily classroom realities of an EAP teacher and her students striving to make and share meaning in what has become the higher education marketplace. Sue Starfield, The University of New South Wales, Australia

This book examines how critical literacy pedagogy has been implemented in a classroom through a collaboration between the author (a researcher) and an EAP teacher. It will interest researchers and practitioners for the ethnographic and pedagogical issues it raises as well as its accessible theoretical frameworks illustrated by interactional data.

This book examines how critical literacy pedagogy has been implemented in a classroom through a year-long collaboration between the author (a researcher) and an EAP teacher. It details the teacher's introduction to functional grammar and accompanying critical literacy approaches to EAP, and her growing critical language and discourse awareness of power and meaning making in the classroom. The book traces her evolving classroom practices and addresses how powerful discourses in social circulation found their way into the classroom via the curriculum materials the students encountered. The main themes of the book are threefold: narrowing the divide between critically-oriented researchers and practitioners; how critical literacy is actually implemented in a teacher's classroom; and how people (students and the teacher) engage in and with the representations and discourses of the everyday world that include neoliberal globalization, racial and cultural identities, and consumerism. It will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners for the ethnographic and pedagogical issues it raises as well as its accessible theoretical frameworks illustrated by relevant classroom interactional data, mediated, multimodal and critical discourse analysis.