Divine Perspectives in Designing English Language Teaching Materials: The Case of Teaching Body Organs to Young English Language Learners

Upon the continuing spread of English as the global language, there have been dissenting voices, albeit not resounding ones, from Muslim scholars lamenting the hegemony of Western patterns of thoughts and the relegation or denigration of Islamic ideology, values, and culture in education in general and English Language Teaching (ELT) curricular and pedagogic thinking in particular. Nonetheless, despite the current qualms, the practice of reviving language teachings based on Islamic sources and the socioreligious concerns of Muslim communities is still infrequent.Feeling the necessity of designing educational materials, I narrate an experience of composing nursery rhymes targeted at introducing body organs and their divine rights to young English learners through deriving inspiration from Islamic references like the Sublime Qur’an and Imam Sajjad’s Treaties on Rights (Risalat al-Huquq). I hope the modest experience would be inspirational for other language teachers and materials developers interested in carving out identity and ownership in foreign language teaching.