Stereotyping in Foreign Language Education

I was discouraged in my return to the foreign language classroom as an adult, and even more so when I began to teach English as a foreign language. The same type of materials and teaching methods were routine procedure, and in my determination to improve the situation I undertook classroom-based research using as the ‘medium’ a teaching process I had developed. Many interesting themes arose in the data collected, an outstanding one being the stereotyping resulting from globalized materials and methods. In this paper I discuss my own and others’ research into this problem and how it might be improved.