Rethinking Languages Education

Directions, Challenges and Innovations

Ruth Arber, Michiko Weinmann, Jill Blackmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351608671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Rethinking Languages Education assembles innovative research from experts in the fields of sociocultural theory, applied linguistics and education. The contributors interrogate innovative and recent thinking and broach controversies about the theoretical and practical considerations that underpin the implementation of effective Languages pedagogy in twenty-first-century classrooms. Crucially, Rethinking Languages Education explores established understandings about language, culture and education to provide a more comprehensive and flexible understanding of Languages education that responds to local classrooms impacted by global and transnational change, and the politics of language, culture and identity.

Rethinking Languages Education focuses on questions about ways that we can develop farsighted and successful Languages education for diverse students in globalised contexts. The response to these questions is multi-layered, and takes into account the complex interactions between policy, curriculum and practice, as well as their contention and implementation. In doing so, this book addresses and integrates innovative perspectives of contemporary theory and pedagogy for Languages, TESOL and EAL/D education. It includes diverse discussions around practice, and addresses issues of the dominance of prestige Languages programs for 'minority' and 'heritage' languages, as well as discussing controversies about the current provision of English and Languages programs around the world.

Part 1

Directions

1“Curses in TESOL”

Postcolonial desires for colonial English

Angel MY Lin and Suhanthie Motha

Introduction: imperialism, colonialism, and the formation of desire for colonial English

About a year ago, a Radio Hong Kong early morning infotainment programme began to air a 10-minute section on English idioms. At the beginning, the male host who in the authors' opinion speaks good English demonstrated the reading of the idioms. However, a few days later, a native speaker model was provided and the male host reiterated that this was the standard model and urged the public to follow the native speaker model. It is interesting to note that the native speaker model presented actually carried noticeable regional accents, but the host still presented it as the ‘norm’ that all other co-hosts and the public should follow.

(Luk & Lin 2006, p. 9)

How do desires around English make themselves salient in this narrative? In the above narrative, how did the radio host come to understand particular varieties as standard? What role does the English teaching industry play in constructing models as normative and standard? How are emotions and desires implicated in the formation of standards? It is difficult to understand how and why the terrain of English language teaching remains heavily and persistently colonising and colonised without an understanding of the role played by desire in its shaping.

The association of English with development, enlightenment, modernity, power, progress, wealth, whiteness, and civilisation results largely from the role played for many centuries by English within colonial projects. For instance, the founder of the University of Hong Kong, the then Hong Kong governor, Fredrick Lugard, highlighted the “Western civilising” mission of the University of Hong Kong in a letter to the Governor General of Canton in 1909:

… Soon after I came to Hong Kong the idea occurred to me, that in no way could we show our sympathy with the desire of China to educate her students in western sciences, than by establishing here a University where students might be able to obtain degrees in no way inferior to those granted in Europe and America, and equally recognized by all nations. This would enable Chinese scholars to acquire degrees without being put to the great expense entailed by going to foreign countries.

(Lugard 1910, quoted in Sweeting 1990, p. 281)

To realise this Western civilising mission of the University of Hong Kong, Lugard stressed the need to maintain English as its medium of instruction and to import a wholly British staff. Bernard Luk, a historian of education in China, points out that behind the cultural civilising rhetoric of Lugard in 1910 were the British empire's anxieties over rising competition from American and Japanese cultural influences and business interests in China at that time (Lin 2009).

Over a century later, similar discourses that posit English as part and parcel of the development and modernity project have grown even stronger, as the project is now transformed into the globalisation project and English is seen as the indispensable language for globalisation. For instance, the intense longing for English referred to as akogare (in Japanese script: 憧れ; literal meaning: “yearn for”) in the Japanese context is the spawn of historical colonial discourse in Japan (Ching 1998) and neo-imperialist discourses of the US in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea (Chen 2010). Park (2009, 2013) analyses the discourses of English in South Korea, outlining the superiority–inferiority complexes relating to the Korean self and the Western other embedded in these discourses. Song (2011) further analyses how the “English as an official language” discourses in South Korea serve to legitimise the internal domination of the socio-economic elite classes via their attempt to set up English as an official language and thus gatekeeping cultural capital in key areas of social mobility in South Korea.

In this chapter, we are continuing our project in theorising desire in TESOL, which we started in our first paper in 2014 (Motha & Lin 2014). To deconstruct the discourses that naturalise and normalise this desire, we shall first trace the historical origins of the gradual inscription of such a desire in the subjectivities and cultural imaginaries of the colonised by analysing the historical processes of imperialism, colonialism and Cold War structures, and the cultural and psychological aftermath of such processes. Then we outline what is needed to interrupt the effects of these processes at the level of subjectivity and cultural imaginary. Desire is central to understanding these processes, which work at the unconscious level of emotionality, imaginaries, fantasies, and fear. We will explore possible ways of initiating alternative discourses, experiences and imaginaries and thus the possibility of allowing space for reconstituting the desire for linguistic varieties. In doing this theorising we draw on Michel Foucault's theoretical insights on power, discourse and knowledge, and Edward Said's work on deconstructing Orientalism. We also draw on critical cultural theorist Chen Kuan-Hsing's work on understanding the contemporary structure of subjectivity and also the structure of knowledge production as an aftermath of historical forces of imperialism, colonialism, and the Cold War. We examine Chen's proposed strategy of critical syncretism as a possible intervention strategy at the level of subjectivity and cultural imaginary.

The formation of the colonial language as cultural capital and the object of desire in the colonised space

Historically, the language was usually one of the first forms of cultural capital that served as a complicated instrument of colonisation, passed from the coloniser to the selected collaborating few in the colonised communities. This has been consistently true of colonial strategies. In Hong Kong, for instance, Law's (2008) review of early colonial history illustrates a distinct socio–cultural formation whose characteristics are captured in Law's notion of “collaborative colonialism.” Law argues that collaborative colonialism is not just a model that describes Hong Kong in its past but a key concept that enables researchers to understand Hong Kong's political unconscious, past or current:

…ever since the early twentieth century, the basic political structure of Hong Kong has never been substantially changed; …. The parties that have been sharing the power of this collaborative-colonial formation are always the government, which occupies a ‘colonial’ position, and a group of collaborative ‘Higher Chinese’, which the government nurtures.

(Law 2008, p. 527)

A century has gone by and the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China has not diminished the political and economic clout of this class of bilingual elites. In fact, all of the chief-executives after 1997 have come from the bilingual elite business sectors or the former British colonial senior civil service sector.

Language is one of the first tools used to shape the colonised in the coloniser's image. The legacy of desire in ex-colonial societies and beyond includes a veneration of and yearning for that double-edged sword: the language of colonisation. English promises access and status (as cultural capital in the fields of exchange set up in the historical institutions during colonisation), but in many contexts, it has brought an extinguishing of heritage languages and related epistemologies and local knowledge and further a devaluing of the self. Dubois' notion of double-consciousness captures the sense of viewing oneself through the eyes of the dominant group, the poignancy of the struggle to reconcile a desire for authenticity on one hand and for emulation of the coloniser on the other (Dubois 1903).

The symbolic violence that was part of colonisation continues in (and out of) English language classrooms in postcolonial contexts (Bunyi 2005), non-colonial settings (Riazi 2005; Reagan & Schreffler 2005), and empires themselves (Motha 2006a, 2006b, 2014). Although many former colonies have gained independence in political and military terms since the end of World War II, much of the decolonisation work at the deeper level of subjectivity and cultural imaginary remains to be done (Chen 2010; Motha, Jain & Tecle 2012). Mignolo (2012) uses the term coloniality to describe the psychological—as opposed to governmental—effects of colonisation, and it is only through a theorisation of desire that we can account for the widespread nature of coloniality.

The colonial origin of much of this deep psychic and cultural belief and yearning, however, remains at the unconscious level. Desire and consciousness have a complicated relationship with each other. For Sartre, the human condition is characterised by a desire to achieve unity of self, which is not a given, but is rather a task or an ongoing fundamental project. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre (1956) discussed how desire becomes an impediment to consciousness in the case of subjects under mauvaise foi (“bad faith”). Individuals experiencing mauvaise foi feel social pressure to accept inauthentic values, leading to self-deception and the relinquishing of their freedom. For instance, when a postcolonial Hong Kong subject chooses to emulate the former colonial master's way of speaking, using British “received pronunciation” (RP), they are seeking to appropriate the identity of “British English speaker.” In Sartre's terms, the postcolonial has chosen to act in the mode of “being-in-itself” rather than “being-for-itself.” In this way, the burden of the post-colonial's freedom, the requirement to decide for themselves what kind of speaker identity to take up is lifted from their shoulders as their behaviour is essentially set in stone because of the definition of speaker identity they adopted. We thus frequently hear myths that substitute as “natural” reasons for such desires—such as, “the native speaker accent is more beautiful” or “non-native accents create unintelligibility”—without conscious reflection on the social constructedness of beauty and intelligibility, nor the fact that listeners tend to hear what they expect to hear, which is influenced by factors including the speaker's race (Lindemann 2003; Rubin 1992).

In what follows, we shall unpack the processes that instil such desires that linger on in the subjectivity of the “post-colonials.” We argue, after Chen (2010), that much of this desire for English is linked to the broader desire for what has been constructed as Western cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2007)—an aftermath of historical forces of imperialism, colonialism and Cold War politics.

Desire for English and Western cosmopolitanism: cultural and psychic aftermath of imperialism, colonialism and cold war structures

The “English fever” discourses that have been diversely constructed, experienced and explained in both media and academic discourses in South Korea (J-K Park 2009; JS-Y Park 2009, 2013; Song 2011) serve as a good starting point to discuss what we would call a postcolonial desire for colonial English (e.g. in former colonial societies like Hong Kong), or a desire for Western cosmopolitan English that is part of a deep-rooted striving for Western cosmopolitanism (Park & Abelmann 2004). Both can be more completely analysed if they are understood as manifestations of the cultural and psychic aftermath of Cold War politics, which have constructed a great cultural divide between the West and the East, the good and the bad, the advanced and the backward, the civilised and the uncivilised, the developed world and the developing world, etc. To illustrate the impact of the Cold War sociopolitical structures on people at the level of subjectivity (psychic structure) and cultural imaginary, cultural theorist Chen Kuan-Hsing (2010) prefaces his chapter with a quote from Chen Ying-zhen, a critical writer in Taiwan, to illustrate vividly how Cold War politics in Taiwan (and in East Asia) have prevented any opportunity for the ex-colonised to critically reflect on both historical imperialism and neo-imperialism:

For a long time, in Taiwan, anyone who criticized the U.S. would be labeled a ‘communist spy,’ which would destroy one's life and family. Unlike other progressive intellectuals in the Third World, those in Taiwan lost the knowledge, ideas, and ability to criticize the hegemony of U.S. neo-colonialism. Under the Cold War structure in East Asia, the anti-communist security regime deeply penetrated the social body and educational institutions. In the minds of young intellectuals, the image of America as a powerful, civilized, developed, and wealthy country was solidly established. Until today, ‘the best will study in the U.S.’ has become the highest value for young students in Taiwan.

(Chen Ying-zhen 1998, quoted in Chen 2010, p. 115)

One of the authors (Angel Lin) grew up in British colonial Hong Kong in the 1960s and 70s and can readily echo the above observation (but only to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: rethinking Languages education: dismantling instrumentalist agendas
• PART 1 Directions
• PART 2 Challenges
• PART 3 Innovations
• Index