About

Museums exist to inspire and stimulate their visitors. Learning programmes within museums, both formal and informal, are seen today as an essential part of a museum learning strategy and central to the opening up of museums to non-traditional museum visitors. This research proposal will take as its starting point the ESOL programme at the British Museum. The British Museum (“a museum of the world for the world”) contains objects that track the history of humanity through material culture, art and technology. The British Museum offers programmes specifically aimed at ESOL learners studying the ESOL Core Curriculum through enrichment visits and project work.  ESOL learners visiting the British Museum attend English language classes in colleges and in community based learning settings, where they typically work towards accredited qualifications. At what point do these two learning environments – the museum and the classroom - meet? What are the similarities and differences between learning English inside the classroom and outside the classroom in a museum? How can museum objects and collections be used to support language learning for ESOL learners in the UK today?  What opportunities do museums provide for ESOL learners to support their language learning? How do ESOL learners make meanings from objects in their collections? What do ESOL learners takeaway from these encounters? What language emerges from a taking a dialogic approach to ESOL learning using objects as a stimulus?  The practice-based research project will take as a starting point object-based, constructivist learning theory (Paris, 2002; Hein 1995) and examine the points of convergence with Dogme ELT (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009) with particular emphasis on discourse, interactivity, learner voice and engagement. The research will be used as evidence of the benefits of embedding museum visits into ESOL teaching and in developing best practice in this area.