Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching

Oxford Applied Linguistics

by Suresh Canagarajah

This book explores how English is used in periphery communities, while subtly resisting the linguistic imperialism from the global ELT enterprise.

Genres: Education, Politics, Linguistics

Paperback

First published December 1, 1999

About the author

Suresh Canagarajah is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied linguistics, English, and Asian studies at Pennsylvania State University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2007. His research covers World Englishes and teaching English to speakers of other languages. He is known for work on translingualism, translanguaging, linguistic imperialism, and social and political issues in language education.

Reviews

[Anastasia Tuple · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very political and thought-provoking, the book challenges the linguistic and cultural hegemonism of English promoted in and spread by ELT education and ELT market/business to the English language classrooms of the world.
Canagarajah urges teachers/educators to employ their critical thinking skills and start practising critical foreign language pedagogy in order to resist the English hegemonism. To exemplify his thesis he uses as a practical example the Tamil community in his native Sri Lanka.

[Nelly Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a good book to learn a day to day resistance of English in the periphery/outer circle (Kachru, 1986).
This book is to challenge the Linguistic Imperialism by Phillipson (1992) who believes that English has linguistically colonized endangered/small languages in the colonized countries. Using a post-modernism and critical ethnography, Canagarajah challenged that idea by providing a comprehensive list of examples from Srilankan classrooms.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drawing on linguistics, postcolonialism, and critical pedagogy, Canagarajah presents an critical ethnography of English-language teaching (ELT) in a “peripheral” university community in Sri Lanka. Unlike descriptive ethnographers, Canagarajah conceives of language and language education as inherently ideological. He considers both “reproduction” and “resistance perspective[s]” toward language in order to “reconstitute [English] in more inclusive, ethical, and democratic terms, and so bring about the creative resolutions to ... linguistic conflicts sought by ... others in the periphery” (2). He claims the strict Marxism of reproductive orientations is overly deterministic, while post-structuralist resistance perspectives--though they open up opportunities for agency--can fall into “debilitating relativism” (34). He critiques ELT curriculum (“the what of language teaching” [79]), considering the oppositional and resistant attitudes represented by students’ textbook marginalia. He then turns to pedagogy (“the how”), analyzing teachers’ intentional and unintentional mixing of Tamil and English in their teaching. Contra those who believe L2s are best taught in complete isolation from L1s, Canagarajah argues that teacher and student code-switching are resources for enriching L2 instruction in peripheral contexts, and that “the metaphor we need to employ is one of ‘appropriating’ ... discourses” (168). He seeks a third way focused not on “whether English should be learned, but how.... [Students] will neither refuse to learn English nor acquire it unconditionally in the terms dictated by the center” (176). Such mediated forms of appropriation facilitate a plurality of hybridized Englishes with heterogeneous standards (185). Such approaches to ELT require teachers to cultivate “a critical awareness of the capabilities and limitations of their students, matched by their own balance between humility and confrontation” in order to acquire “‘earned authority’ in the classroom” (195)--a classroom that is “not a microcosm of society, but society itself” (197).

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Drawing heavily on Philipson's work on national interesting in linguistic domination and Holliday (state v commercial) & Kachru's distinctions between center and periphery educational priorities, Canagarajah is all about the reflective resistance paradigm. I bristle, of course, at the validity of interventionist models of research and there was a time when I growled at his complaints of an EFL textbook's hegemony, "Of course it doesn't reflect your specific culture--it wasn't written for a specific audience!" That, and the fact that language & culture are interwoven anyway, made me frustrated around halfway through (pg 100, say, with O'Neill's response). If communication is culturally dependent ought not culture be taught along with language? If I'm going to succeed speaking Russian to Russians, I need to know something about the manners, circumstances, and exigencies of the language I use. Then, through the last chapter of the book, I became more forgiving as I realized that what both Canagarajah & I were seeking was a rhetorical approach to teaching English. English, like grammar, and, in my humble, everything needs to be taught rhetorically. He recommends asking questions of the texts used for learning English such as, "Why did the authors of this textbook find this account humorous?"(189). I could add that such approach would not only highlight the tensions between local and center cultures, but it would also highlight the process of textbook making, the rhetorical situation of the English-language textbook and the attendant choices made. While Canagarajah has, I think, a more activist purpose to this criticism, I think the approach would be valid for many classes encountering many texts--then we would be aware of the conventions that some of his case study students (160-170-ish) missed. Not only would they know and use conventions, but they would see them as just that: conventions.

[Dora Rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

After re reading this book for the second time, I am glad one of my university professors assigned its first two chapters as a starting point for discussing education in different contexts.

What the author describes is clearly compared to different contexts around the world, and it is a nice source of food for thought on our teaching practices.