139
Key Speech delivered by Ms. Sandra J. Brigg* at
the 13th International Conference of NELTA on February 16, 2008
Think Globally, Act Locally
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am very honored to be here bringing you greetings
from the TESOL Board of Directors and the TESOL
staff at the Central Office in Alexandria, Virginia.
I want to thank Richard Boyum, the South Asia
Regional English Language Officer based at the
U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India for making this
trip possible. I would also like to thank all of the
officers of NELTA, especially Laxman Gnawali and
Ganga Ram Gautam, both of whom gave me a great
deal of information about Nepal, NELTA, and this
conference. I am very pleased that you are all here.
The conference theme and my title
In an email to me, Laxman explained the theme of
this conference to me this way:
Here in Nepal we have been trying to promote
English by bringing about changes in content and
methodology. However, we have seen that, on the
one hand, methodology has been the central issue
in ELT discourse, on the other, the methodology
borrowed from the BANA settings has not always
been compatible in the local context.
By the way, for those who are not familiar with BANA
as an acronym, it stands for four English-speaking
areas that export a lot of ELT methodologies and
textbooks: Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and
North America. Mr. Gnawali had to remind me
what it meant.
I definitely understand the problem. I would add
that official methodologies and official textbooks
* Sandra J. Briggs was the TESOL President when she gave this talk..
Journal of NELTA Vol. 1 3 No. 1-2 December 2008
are often at odds with local realities even within the
BANA sphere. I think that it is one of the dilemmas
in ELT teaching. All of us, wherever we teach, have
to adapt and change what comes to us from the
outside.
This made me think of a saying from a few years
back. It came from people who believe that we have
one world and one people. They also believe that all
of us must help take care of our planet. They believe
in peace and peaceful ways. They want to work to
better the conditions of people all over the world.
These are lofty global goals. But how can we here
in Kathmandu achieve these goals? Well, we think
globally, but we act locally. Our first sphere is right
here in Kathmandu.
It is also a little like TESOL, the association of which
I am the president. TESOL is a global association.
We have local affiliates in about 100 countries. Each
one of the affiliates adopts the TESOL mission and
values. They are lofty, global ideals. The job of each
affiliate is to work toward this mission on the local
level.
TESOL’s mission is to ensure excellence in English
language teaching to speakers of other languages.
This mission statement is backed up by these
values:
• Professionalism in language education
• Individual language rights
• Accessible, high quality education
• Collaboration in a global community
140
• Interaction of research and reflective practice
for educational improvement
• Respect for diversity and multiculturalism
As I visit TESOL affiliates around the world, I have
seen how they adapt the mission to meet their local
needs. While I am here in Kathmandu, I am seeing
how you are acting locally. Kathmandu is the 5th
local reality that I have visited on this trip. I have
talked to and with many ELT educators in India
and now Nepal. I will go back to the 2008 TESOL
Convention in New York City in April enriched by
what I have seen and heard and learned in both
India and Nepal.
The questions we will explore in this talk
We will talk about these questions
• What do ELT educators need to know in order
to teach English?
• How can ELT educators use what they know in
their own local realities?
• What do authenticity and authentic materials
mean in local realities?
This talk is based on my own personal experience and
what I have learned from others. It is not a research
paper backed up with many, many references and
much data. This is the first time that I have given
this talk. I prepared it just for you. I know that there
are participants at this conference from a number of
different countries—a number of different realities.
It is my hope that you will take what I say and change
and use it for your own realities. I also want to be
sure that we have time for an exchange of ideas and
for questions at the end.
What do ELT educators need to know in
order to teach English?
ELT educators can never know enough. We are
always adding to what we know, revising what
we teach and how we teach it. Some people want
to divide ELT educators into “native speakers of
English” and “nonnative speakers of English.” They
say that the best teachers are those who are native
speakers.
This is not our topic for today, but I want you to
Journal of NELTA Vol. 1 3 No. 1-2 December 2008
know that TESOL has been working very hard to
spread the word: in the 21st century “the distinction
between native and nonnative speakers of English
presents an oversimplified, either/or classification
system that does not actually describe the range of
possibilities in a world where English has become
a global language.” This comes from the TESOL
Position Statement Against Discrimination of
Nonnative Speakers of English in the Field of
TESOL, March 2006.” You can find it on the TESOL
Web site www.tesol.org. Click on Education and
then Position Statements.
Why is this important to us today? Because in the
21st century we aren’t trying to train teachers to be
clones of the British, Australian, New Zealand, and
North American speakers in their culture. We are
trying to help English teachers be prepared to teach
in their own local realities.
If you are familiar with Kachru’s Three Concentric
Circles: The Inner Circle (the United States), the
Outer Circle (India), and the Expanding Circle
(China), you know that roughly ¾’s of the world’s
English speakers are outside the Inner Circle and
most of the English spoken in the world is spoken
between people who are not part of the Inner Circle.
In other words, more English is spoken between
people for whom it is not a first language and
between those who are.
Think about what that means for ELT educators and
for ELT students: We all need to teach in the local
realities in which we find ourselves. Being a native
speaker is not such a big advantage. We need to be
flexible enough to understand and teach the kind of
English that our students need, wherever they are.
Here are three good resources for reading about
Kachru’s Circles and the issue of native and
nonnative speaking educators and what all of this
means for us as educators:
• Teaching English From a Global Perspecitve.
2005. Edited by Anne Burns and published by
TESOL
• The alchemy of English: The spread, functions
and models of nonnative Englishes. 1986 By B.
B. Kachru and published by Pergamon Press

• Learning and Teaching from Experience.
2004. Edited by Lía Kamhi-Stein and published
by The University of Michigan Press
I’d be interested in knowing if any of you are familiar
with the concept of the teachable moment. Some
years ago when the emphasis in English language
teaching shifted form what and how teachers taught
to what learners needed and wanted to learn and
how they learned, we began to look at teachers in a
different light: we began to see them as facilitators
and we began to see that teachers and students are
both teachers and learners.
In this kind of teaching environment, teachers
need to know a lot about English and how to teach
it. They need to know more than they will teach to
their students so that when the moment arrives
in class—that teachable moment, when this piece
of knowledge is germane to what is going on—the
teachers can share the appropriate information with
their students.
For me the teachable moment is the time when
teachers and students learn together. When
questions come up that neither the teachers nor
students have the answer to, they can search for the
answers together. It is very important for the teacher
to be able to say to the students, “I don’t know the
answer, but we will find out.”
It would be impossible for us to list everything that
English teachers need to know and that is not the
point of my talk today. I want to leave an idea with
you that all teachers need to know: you become a
professional ELT educator the first day that you
walk into a classroom to teach. Everything that you
do after you have started teaching to move yourself
along in your career and to become a better educator,
what we call teacher development or professional
development, helps you maintain your professional
status.
In teaching change is constant and adapting to the
local realities will always be an important challenge
for ELT educators.
How can ELT educators use what they know in their
own local realities?
Journal of NELTA Vol. 1 3 No. 1-2 December 2008
141
I believe in guilt-free teaching. We all come to these
conferences and hear about the latest research and
how we are supposed to be teaching our students. We
learn a lot, but we usually go home with a feeling that
we don’t measure up to all of the wonderful people
we have listened to. We feel guilty that we aren’t
teaching according to new ideas we have listened
to. We look at our students and our classroom and
ask ourselves if we are doing what we should for our
students. We should not feel guilty. We need to act
locally. We need to adapt what we learn to our own
local realities.
Remember what Laxman Gnawali wrote to me: “. .
.the methodology borrowed from the BANA settings
has not always been compatible in the local context.”
Just as I explained to you a few minutes ago about
the teachable moment, we need to gather all of the
good ideas we can, but our central job is to meet the
needs of our students. We need to take what we have
learned and figure out what will and will not work in
our own local reality.
Let me give you an example from a young professor
I met at the MEXTESOL Conference in Veracruz,
Mexico in November 2007. His name is Peter Sayer.
He taught at the Universidad Autónima Benito
Juárez de Oaxaca in Mexico for a number of years.
He gave the most popular talk at the convention.
Everyone liked it so much that they arranged to have
him present it every day of the convention. His title
was “Environmental English: Using the street as a
pedagogic resource.” His abstract shows us how one
ELT educator made his English lessons very local:
During our everyday lives, we often take our
linguistic landscape for granted. Because of the
media- and advertising-intense world we live in,
it’s easy to overlook all the “texts” that surround us.
But if we take a careful look at what’s on the street,
it is surprising to find out how ubiquitous English
is. This is “ingles ambiental.” Or environmental
English, and can be a powerful learning tool for the
ELF classroom.
In his presentation he talked about sending his
students out on the streets of Oaxaca with cameras
so they could bring back examples of English in their
142
town. Then the class classified these uses of English;
they asked themselves why English was used in
these cases; and they found out a lot about English
was being used where they were. It was a wonderful
presentation.
After the convention, he sent me a draft of an article
he wrote that will appear in a book titled Authenticity
in the language classroom and beyond, which
will be published by TESOL Publications later this
year. The title of Sayer’s article is “Authenticity in
Marginalized EFL Contexts,” and in it he tells the
story of Hilario Santibañez, who teaches all of the
English classes in the small village of Matagallinas
in southern Mexico. Hilario is living out our theme
of local realities.
He teaches in a small private school run on donations.
But they need to follow the national curriculum set
by the Ministry of Education in Mexico City, which
includes a list of language functions, topics, and
grammatical structures to be taught, but no textbooks
to teach the curriculum. Sayer says, “. . .Hilario has
to improvise materials and activities as best he can
to meet the curriculum specifications. . .Hilario uses
an eclectic approach than combines elements of
traditional direct grammar instruction and teacher-
fronted lessons with activities associated with a
communicative approach, such as role-plays, pair
work, writing diaries, and games.”
What do authenticity and authentic materials
mean in local contexts?
Peter Sayer and Hilario Santibañez lead us to the
questions of authenticity and authentic materials.
Peter points out that Hilario has no examples
of authentic English outside the classroom in
Matagallinas to serve as a reference and Hilario
wasn’t using any authentic English texts, such as
magazine articles, video or audio recordings, or
Internet sources.
But Sayer points out an important truth to us:
And yet there was something about the lessons
that nevertheless struck me as very authentic: the
students’ drawings of their houses, the playing insults
tossed back and forth. . .all made me rethink the way
Journal of NELTA Vol. 1 3 No. 1-2 December 2008
I had understood the notion of authenticity.
In defining authenticity Sayer also references an
article by A. S. Canagarajah titled “Reconstructing
local knowledge: Reconfiguring language studies” to
back up his definition. Again quoting Sayer:
Canagarajah (2005) says that using local knowledge
in TESOL classrooms includes working in ways
that ‘are not acknowledged or recommended by the
authorities or experts,’ but which nonetheless refer
‘to the beliefs and orientations emerging from the
social practices of a community through its history’
(p. 3-4)
In his conclusion, Sayer says:
In TESOL we place value in “authentic” things:
materials, interactions, communicative situations.
They stimulate L2 English learning by making lessons
more meaningful, motivating, and connected to real-
world English use. In this chapter I have attempted
to show that there are other ways of thinking about
authenticity. In fact, I would suggest that looking
for authenticity in local knowledge and imagined
communities may be more feasible and useful for
teachers in marginalized EFL communities than
more common conceptions of authenticity based on
ESL settings.
I have given you a lot of quotes here, but I think
that they are very important as we think about
methodology, authenticity, and local realities.
Perhaps Sayer’s definition of authenticity can be
helpful here in South Asia and other parts of the
world when looking at how to use the methodologies
that have been developed far away from the your
own local realities. Local knowledge has a legitimate
place in the ELT curriculum here in Kathmandu and
in all other places where English is taught.
Conclusion
My own ELT teaching experience is very different
from Hiliaro’s. I have taught ESL in secondary
public schools in California in the United States. But
even though I teach in one of the BANA countries,
adapting ELT methodologies to my local reality and
deciding what authenticity is and how important it

is to my teaching is problematic. Like Hilario, I must
deal with state standards and there are examinations
that my students must pass. I have to find ways to
make what I am asked to teach fit with the needs of
my students.
Everywhere I go ELT educators are struggling with
how to keep up with all of the global changes and
how to teach in the most professional ways possible,
but I come back to the theme of this conference and
the title of my talk. We must think globally, but the
ELT methodologies that we adopt and adapt must
work in our own local realities. As Canagarajah
points out, local knowledge and local history are key
in providing the very best ELT instruction for our
students.
These are my observations. I certainly don’t have
all the solutions for the problems we are looking at
here, but I can say that you are on the right track by
continuing to use your knowledge and experience in
the ELT field along with your background knowledge
of the local reality to create good language teaching
for your students. to Speakers of Other Languages.
References
Burns. Anne (Ed.). 2005. Teaching English From a Global
Perspective. Alexandria, Virginia: Teachers of
English to Speakers of Other Languages.
Journal of NELTA Vol. 1 3 No. 1-2 December 2008
143
Canagarajah, A.S. 2005. “Reconstructing local knowledge:
Reconfiguring language studies.” In Norton, B. &
Tookey (Eds.). Critical Pedagogies and Language
Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Kachru, B. B. 1986. The alchemy of English: The spread,
functions and models of non-native Englishes.
Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Kamhi-Stein, Lía D. (Ed.). 2004. Learning and Teaching
from Experience: Perspectives on Nonnative
English-Speaking Professionals. Ann Arbor,
Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.
Sayer, Peter. November 2007. “Environmental English:
Using the street as a pedagogic resource.” Talk
presented at the 34th International Convention of
MEXTESOL in Boca del Río, México.
Sayer. Peter. “Authenticity in Marginalized EFL Contexts”
in Dantas-Whitney, M. and Rilling, S. (Eds.).
Under contract. In Authenticity in the language
classroom and beyond. Children and adolescent
learners. Alexandria, Virginia: Teachers of English
“TESOL Position Statement Against Discrimination of
Nonnative Speakers of English in the Field of
TESOL.” March 2006. TESOL Web site www.tesol.
org.