ELT and Politics of Teaching

ELT and Politics

How, then, is ELT political, exactly? There are many ways in which teaching can be thought of as political in nature. In this section I briefly outline five clearly political aspects of ELT: the part played by language education in the processes of colonization and decolonization, the effect of the spread of English on indigenous languages, the political dimension of teaching immigrant and refugee learners in ESL contexts, the dominance of English in the media and in computer-based technologies, and the role of English in globalization. The spread of English has been intimately associated with the processes of colonization and decolonization and the vast machineries of economic, political, and cultural hegemony that have attended it. Phillipson (1992) and Penny cook (1994) both have offered detailed accounts of the ways in which the teaching of English in African contexts and in southeast Asia, respectively, were a vital part of the mechanism of colonialism. Other writers have explored similar relations in various colonial and postcolonial contexts. Furthermore, English has also been a constant feature in the subsequent processes of decolonization in countries from South Africa (Eastman, 1990) to Sri Lanka (Canagarajah, 1993): The English-speaking powers that be have been anxious to maintain the ascendancy of the English language as colonial paternalism is replaced by more subtly hegemonic relations. Thus, while present-day teachers are not living in the “bad old days” of untrammeled colonialism, it is still very much the case that the teaching of English is one important mechanism whereby the old subservient relations are de facto maintained and perpetuated. The predatory action of English is nowhere more evident than in the effect of the spread of English on indigenous languages. As a direct result of the imposition of English, literally dozens of languages are dying in the United States alone as I write this paragraph. The shift from the hard power of boarding schools and banned languages to the soft power of neglect and what Michael Krauss called the “cultural nerve gas” (1992, p. 8) of television and other media has done little to halt, let alone reverse, this process. The figures are appalling: Krauss estimated that in the next 200 years up to 90% of the world’s languages could be irretrievably lost (see also Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). From everything I have personally seen and read, I cannot regard this estimate as an exaggeration. Although at an intellectual level the loss of whole languages and cultures is a terrible thing, from a moral perspective one of the most appalling aspects of this situation is the devastating effect of the process of language shift on actual individuals and their familial and social relations. Another domain in which politics blatantly enters the language classroom is that of teaching English to adult and child immigrants in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. Here there is little danger that the Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching 44 Spanish or Vietnamese or Polish languages will disappear wholesale. Yet, as with the case of indigenous languages, a moral standpoint reminds us that it is actual people who matter, not languages as abstract things; and individual people suffer greatly at the jerking shift from their first language to English, the language of the new country (Igoa, 1995). When children are educated exclusively in their second language or in a bilingual system of the subtractive or replacement kind in which the first language is gradually faded out, they literally lose contact with older generations of their family and community. The parents and grandparents, on the other hand, also find themselves not merely culturally but also linguistically at odds with their children. The rapidly growing importance of computer-based technologies, and especially of the Internet and the World Wide Web, has constituted another area in which the spread of English has considerable political significance. An inordinate percentage of websites and electronic communications are in English. There are people, of course, who argue that the Web represents a democratization of communication and that it is capable of actually reversing the spread of English (Wallraff, 2000). This may be a theoretical possibility, but the present reality is that the Web is contributing to the same forces of social, economic, and cultural inequality as those of colonialism and postcolonialism mentioned earlier. The very use of, and access to, computers serves to separate rich and poor ever more; those who have access to them are in the vast majority of cases speakers of English or another dominant world language (Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Arabic). These processes affect ELT in several ways, at least two of which are worth mentioning here: the increasingly widespread use of computers for tests such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the consuming obsession many teachers, teacher trainers, and materials writers have developed with using computers to teach English. The use of English on the Internet is one example of a much broader process that is usually referred to as globalization (Giddens, 2000; Mittelman, 2000); this process is also profoundly political in nature, and ELT is also profoundly implicated in it (Phillipson, 1992; Spring, 1998). This is true if only because globalization is forever being appealed to as a motivation for learners in EFL contexts to learn English. At the same time, for good or for bad, globalization is possibly the most significant political force of the present age. Within all of this, the business of ELT goes on in increasingly globalized ways. First, there is more physical mobility: More and more native speakers are traveling to teach abroad, while increasing numbers of non-native speaker teachers are able both to travel to Eng-lish-speaking countries and to get training there. Second, there is what might be called economic mobility: With the gradual erasure of national boundaries in economic terms, a process aggressively supported by the financial powers that be (e.g., GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades), Western companies are increasingly able to exploit foreign markets (the reverse, of course, much less frequently being the case); this allows American and British textbook companies to market their wares much more extensively and intensively than ever before, in a rapidly growing number of countries (witness, for example, the invasion of former Eastern bloc countries by companies such as Longman, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, or Heinemann in the years immediately following 1989). Third, there is virtual mobility: the increasing ease of communication by various hi-tech means. The overall result of this is that computer users have to use English to access and connect with the rest of the 45 Values in English Language Teaching world (often meaning the United States), while television viewers in pretty much any country in the world can watch CNN and MTV in English (whereas in the United States, with a few regionalized exceptions, it is, virtually, impossible to watch television in other languages). In all these areas, then, English, the spread of English, and the teaching of English can be seen to have profound political significance. In each case I have either hinted at, or indicated outright, some of the moral underpinnings of this political significance. In the rest of this section I suggest the complexity and depth of the politics of language teaching by exploring one of the areas in detail I look at two stories regarding the teaching of indigenous languages: one experience of my own and another recounted to me by a former student.