Lifting the veil of silence: An inquiry into race as a feature of the pedagogical and social dimensions of the English as a second language classroom

The study reported here centers around two key questions. First, to what extent do issues of race serve as a source of the goals, values, and beliefs teachers hold relative to the teaching of English as a Second Language (ESL)? Second, to what extent do ESL students tend to prefer one category of ESL instructors to another? These two questions comprise respectively the pedagogical and the social dimension of the ESL classroom. The investigation into the social dimension involved two sets of semi-structured interviews conducted with six ESL instructors at San Christobal State University (SCSU), a four-year college located in a metropolis in the US Midwest (to protect the privacy of the research participants, the names of the institutions where the study was conducted have been altered). The research into the social dimension involved a survey conducted among students enrolled in the ESL programs at San Christobal State University and San Christobal Community College. The latter is a two-year college located in the same metropolis as SCSU.;The investigation into the social dimension revealed that issues of race seem to have little or no impact on their teacher thinking processes for some of the instructors who participated in the study. On the other hand, socio-political issues, race included, do to some extent guide the teaching philosophy of other instructors involved in the study. With respect to the social dimension of the ESL classroom, the study showed that the students participating in this study favored white ESL instructors to those of color. The study provides a number of speculations to explain this particular phenomenon. The report concludes with a number of implications arising from the study and recommendations for further research.