Global citizenship education in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms: views of the Algerian university oral expression teachers and their students

Our world is suffering from serious ills including poverty, climate change, and infectious diseases. Global citizenship education (GCE) has emerged to empower students with knowledge, skills, values and attitude to take actions against global issues. Researchers strongly advocated the potential place of GCE in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom, but very few studies have been conducted to examine EFL teachers’ and students’ perspectives on incorporating GCE in their classes. Besides, previous research on GCE in EFL contexts paid little attention to theorizing learning and differentiating between soft and critical notions of GCE. Accordingly, this study contributed to the research literature by applying experiential-existential theory and soft versus critical conceptions of GCE to explore Algerian EFL university teachers’ and students’ views on integrating GCE in their oral expression sessions (OES), which seemed to have opportunities for tackling GCE. The findings generated from unstructured observations, eight teachers’ semistructured interviews and fourteen students’ group-interviews demonstrated their positive views on GCE. Influenced by their biographies including faith, the participants (the teachers and the students) understood GCE as knowledge, skills, values and attitudes, and only the minority of the students mentioned benevolent acts. They saw themselves to have potential roles in addressing global issues, developing communication skills, nurturing values and attitudes, as well as encouraging actions. The teachers believed GCE should be taught in OES through communicative and intercultural approaches. The participants suggested various strategies and materials for including GCE in OES. Interestingly, they reported their classes were already addressing some aspects of GCE. However, their responses aligned with experiencing disjuncture (a gap between learner’s biographies and the real-world) of soft GCE (simplifying complex issues) which might tend to reinforce the status quo by producing personally responsible citizens and/or participatory citizens rather than critical GCE (dialoguing the root causes of problems) which aims to transform the prevailing world conditions by generating justice-oriented citizens. It was therefore suggested for the Algerian ministry of higher education and scientific research to include critical GCE in teacher education programmes for enabling its integration in EFL classrooms.