Values and the Politics of English Language Teaching

Possibly the most significant development in the field of English language teaching (ELT) in the 1990s was the acceptance of the idea that ELT is and always has been a profoundly and unavoidably political undertaking. Since the beginnings of empirical research and theory building in second language learning and teaching in the 1940s and 1950s, there had been an emphasis on language learning as an individual psychological phenomenon. Though proponents of communicative language teaching, the dominant force from the 1970s, acknowledged the importance of communication in the classroom, they still viewed that classroom as an isolated group of individuals whose broader social and political context was irrelevant to the processes of language learning. It was not until the 1980s that researchers, beginning to feel frustrated with the limited understandings of language learning that experimental approaches were yielding, began to turn to ethnographic and other qualitative research methods in an attempt to grasp the fuller realities of language classrooms. The ethnographic approach, in turn, opened our eyes to the myriad ways in which social and political context crucially influences what goes on in classrooms. At the same time, developments in other disciplines were also leading researchers in language teaching and learning to the “discovery” of the political dimension of language teaching. In philosophy, Michel Foucault’s exposes of the socially situated nature of knowledge and of the ways in which knowledge is bound up with the play of power in societal settings, summed up in his concept of “power/knowledge” (Foucault, 1972, 1979, 1980), became a major influence on many social scientific disciplines, including education (e.g., S.J.Ball, 1990; Middleton, 1998; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998). Elsewhere in education, the work of Paulo Freire (1972) led to the development of critical pedagogy (Giroux, 1988; McLaren, 1989), an approach which I will deal with at greater length later in this chapter. Scholars in the fields of anthropology and sociology
began to re-evaluate the apolitical nature of their respective traditions. In linguistics, meanwhile—another doggedly apolitical domain—there was a growing realization of the need for linguists to engage politically, if only to save the object of their inquiries: indigenous and other minority languages, which were disappearing at an alarming rate (Fishman, 1991; Krauss, 1992; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). Although in the 1980s a few individuals did work in critical pedagogy and the politics of language teaching (e.g., Auerbach & Wallerstein, 1987), a much wider awareness of the politics of the field of ELT began with Alastair Pennycook’s (1989) article in TESOL Quarterly in which he wrote of the “interested”—that is, politically engaged—nature of knowledge and critiqued the distribution of power in the field. This article was ahead of its time; it was not until a few years later that writings on the politics of ELT established themselves as a significant presence in the field. These included Auerbach’s (1993) persuasive argument against an English-only policy in the classroom, Benesch’s (1993) critique of the “politics of pragmatism” in English as a Second Language (ESL), Canagarajah’s (1994) “critical ethnography” of resistance to English in a Sri Lankan classroom, and Willett and Jeannot’s (1993) description and analysis of resistance to a critical approach in a teacher education course. Work such as that of Auerbach and Canagarajah also pointed up the links between broader sociopolitical forces and what happens inside the classroom, a theme that has subsequently been taken up more extensively by Coleman (1996), Hall and Eggington (2000), Morgan (1998), Wink (2000), and others. Of central importance in this line of work are books by Penny cook (1994) and Phillipson (1992) that explored in great detail the ways in which English teaching worldwide is saturated with political meaning. More recently, a special issue of TESOL Quarterly in the fall of 1999 devoted to “critical approaches to TESOL” placed the politics of ELT center stage in the professional dialogue of the field. The introduction of the political dimension into our discussions about language teaching has also meant the introduction of a language of values to the field: Where before there was only really the question of what, psycholinguistically speaking, was the most efficient way of acquiring a language, now there are matters of ideology, that is, beliefs about values and about what is good and bad, right and wrong, in relation to politics and power relations. At the same time, the values involved, the relations among them, and especially the attitudes toward them of the individuals writing, are rarely made explicit (though see Edge’s, 1996a, Paradox 2, referred to in chap. 1). The purpose of this chapter, then, is to uncover and explore the moral issues that are raised by the realization that language teaching is a political business and by our attempts to address this realization in our work as teachers. First, I outline the specific ways in which teaching is inherently political and examine some of the values at play in this reading of the field. Next, I look in detail at what is probably the single most influential and important response to this reading: critical pedagogy, particularly in its incarnation in ELT. My examination begins with an analysis of the moral issues raised by a particularly interesting case study of critical pedagogy in action: that of Brian Morgan’s (1997) article on the politics of pronunciation teaching in an ESL context. After considering the ESL context, I look at the moral questions brought up by the introduction of critical pedagogy in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings—in other words, in countries where English is not a first language. I then offer a critique of critical pedagogy from the perspective of values. Finally, I attempt to sum up the discussion in this chapter by isolating the central moral issue that has been raised and by considering what can be said about the responses of individual teachers to this central dilemma.