Trauma and language learning: ELT classroom practices in Sri Lanka

Scholarship in the Global North has traditionally treated trauma as an individual pathological condition that needs medical intervention. However, Global South communities such as Sri Lanka approach trauma differently. Since the whole community has lived through centuries of colonization and decades of civil war, trauma is collective. For this reason, the community has developed everyday practices for a supportive environment. Such community-sponsored cultural and relational practices do not pathologize trauma. Survivors are treated as exhibiting forms of neurodiversity that come with their own strengths such as resilience, patience, and dependency. Their communication is not treated as fragmented and incoherent, but as meaningful when others co-construct meanings with them, adopting diversified semiotic resources, and going beyond normative assumptions. English language teachers have adopted pedagogical strategies influenced by such relational orientations. This article will discuss the intuitive strategies Northern Sri Lankan educators and students have adopted since the civil war.