Chapter 6: Critical Foreign Language Pedagogy:Peace Education and Confronting and Negotiating Aggressive Situations

English-language teacher training in Mexico is more often than not considered to be an objective, apolitical, and value-free process where the aim is to help aspiring teachers identify and respond to pre-identified language needs, build up a structural and functional pedagogic knowledge of the target language, develop appropriate teaching methodologies and techniques, and implement testing and evaluation procedures. However, I argue that such teacher training schemes largely fail to respond to the Mexican students’ real-life language needs and communicative challenges as they enter the target-language environment and where they may encounter difficult and hostile situations.

In this chapter, I contend that teacher trainees of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) need to be prepared to help learners not only actively participate in pleasant, agreeable, and routine target-language encounters but also to equip them to negotiate a darker side of foreign language interaction—that of difficult, aggressive, and conflictual situations. To pursue this line of argument, I adopt an emic approach which examines real-life antagonistic situations that Mexican EFL users have actually faced. Focusing on EFL peace education—the promotion of cross-cultural harmonious relationships, attitudes, and values—and English language teaching (ELT), I collected data from Mexican EFL users regarding conflict that they had experienced, especially in terms of xenophobia and aggression. Using EFL users’ data, I developed a critical pedagogical framework for helping students negotiate and overcome such adverse situations by working with 32 students pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Teaching English as Foreign Language (TEFL). The trainee teachers examined how they can help their language learners to negotiate antagonistic and hostile transactional and interpersonal situations, specifically those that involve rejection, racial insults, linguistic discrimination, and intimidation. Whilst it may be impossible to predict the communicative difficulties that their students might face in the target-language context, foreign language teachers can provide learners with a range of pragmatic and discursive resources and choices that allow them to actively choose a communicative stance and select an appropriate response as opposed to purely reacting, often passively, to circumstances.