Decentring ELT

What is Decentring ELT

The Hornby Decentring ELT initiative aims to encourage and support the development and dissemination of ELT ideas and actions initiated and found to be appropriate by teachers and teacher communities especially from low-income countries. It also aims to support ideas and actions that try to counter any exclusive claims to ‘global best practice’, expertise and knowledge in ELT and the consequences of such claims.

Decentring ELT highlights teachers’ own development of contextually appropriate thinking and action in relation to the needs of their local contexts.

In 2018, the A.S. Hornby Educational Trust launched its ‘Decentring ELT’ initiative, with the aim of identifying, developing, publicizing, and supporting ways in which English language educators in low- and middle-income countries work locally and collaboratively to develop activities that enable capacity- and status-building among teachers of English which respond to their particular circumstances.

Decentring ELT aims

The initiative is evolving along two key strands – developing richer and deeper understandings of decentring, and documenting decentring in practice in different ELT contexts. For the former, detailed consultations were undertaken in 2018-20, leading to a provisional characterisation of the decentring notion (see a report on this process and the characterisation in this article. Regarding the latter, examples of and approaches to decentring in practice have been explored and documented in collaboration with numerous teacher associations (TAs) over the last three years.