As I mentioned earlier, the discussion here by no means exhausts the moral dimensions of classroom interaction. That has not been my intention. Rather, by showing the layers of moral meanings that can be discerned in even apparently unremarkable instances of classroom talk, I am suggesting that all aspects of classroom discourse are infused with moral significance. Furthermore, as I hope is clear from these examples, moral meanings cannot be simplistically mapped onto things that teachers and students say and do using some kind of rudimentary coding, but are crucially dependent on details of the specific teacher-student relations involved. Put another way, the same expression or action by different teachers with different students will carry very different moral meanings. Furthermore, whereas some words and actions are more morally desirable than others, it is also the case that all classroom discourse carries complex and conflicting values, and that much of what teachers are doing as they make decisions in the language classroom involves weighing up, usually rapidly and unconsciously, the values at play in particular circumstances in order to make their decisions. My message in this section has been that bringing this process to consciousness enhances the options we have as teachers in determining the good and right courses of action to follow in our teaching.
VALUES AND CURRICULUM IN ELT
Moral values are not only found in classroom interaction and in various aspects of the teacher-student relation; they also inhere in, and can be read from, the things that are studied in ELT classrooms across the world—what I refer to loosely as curriculum. In 1 The proverb appears in poem XXIX of a cycle entitled Proverbios y cantares (Proverbs and Songs) by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado y Ruiz (1875–1939). The poem contains the lines: Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. (“Traveler, there is no road; The road is made by walking”; Machado, 1941, p. 212) this section I examine three aspects of values in the ELT curriculum. First, I look at the moral meanings that can be found in a typical ELT textbook. Second, I consider the moral issues at play in determining which variety of English pronunciation is to be endorsed in the classroom. Last, I consider the moral dilemma that underlies the teaching of second language writing.
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