The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language (Oxford Applied Linguistics) Review

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The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language (Oxford Applied Linguistics) ReviewIn an attempt to develop a debate which in the TESOL world has had Robert Phillipson and Alastair Pennycook as notable contributors and which in the broader field of education can be traced back to Paolo Freire and earlier, Holliday seeks to go beyond questions directly related to the ever more efficient learning of English and interrogate practices, ideologies and discourses which he believes to be both morally questionable and educationally dubious. Despite what might be expected from the title he has relatively little to say about Jennifer Jenkins proposal to define a phonological core for English as an International Language - an English seen primarily as a lingua franca - and focuses instead on the teaching of English in a variety of international settings. His main themes are discourses which Other the student and the micropolitics of the classroom as well as an underlying unease about the meaning of culture.
By way of both methodology and interpretive framework he wisely chooses to ignore both Phillipson's vulgar Marxism and, frequent reverential tips of the hat towards it notwithstanding, Pennycook's dinner-party postmodernism too. Instead he has produced an ethnographic study based around reflections on his own years as a TESOL practitioner interwoven with and addressing comments from a range of e-mail informants in a variety of different countries. An autobiographical "thick-description" then, with a choral element, that aims to make certain reified practices and systems of thought answer for their effects in the classroom and beyond.
Culturism in general and a particular form of it that he describes as native-speakerism are the main targets of his critique. The former he defines as "...any thought or act which reduces a person to something less than she is according to an essentialist view of culture.", (p18) and the latter as
"...an established belief that 'native-speaker` teachers represent a 'Western culture' from which spring both the ideals of the English language and of English language teaching methodology." (p.6).
There is an acutely paradoxical element in a rejection of cultural essentialism based on an appeal for something that we essentially are to be respected. And such is the difficulty in avoiding thinking of the "Other" as being different from "Us" that Holliday himself sometimes falls prey to it when for example, (p.135) he uncritically mentions the existence of something called "the Chinese worldview".
That said, his portrait of the continued vigour of colonialist stereotypes in TESOL , in the form of the vigorous, modern, democratic, open-minded native-speaker struggling to teach the indolent, undemocratic student who is good at memorising but not at thinking for him or herself, is stingingly accurate. His reading of Foucault in the context of the micropolitics of the classroom - the U-shaped classroom as panopticon, the attempt to eliminate private speech by constant monitoring and the emphasis on the corrective aspects of pedagogy - also rings true. Furthermore, the parallels he sees between the use of realia in the classroom and the offering of trinkets to "savages" as well as the raised, slow, speaking voice of the teacher and the District Officer addressing a group of "natives" are very suggestive.
Much of what he has to say about native-speakerism is also right on the mark. Who can deny that the view that English belongs to a certain sort of native-speaker from a particular handful of countries, and that such native-speakers are uniquely equipped with certain knowledges that make them ideally suited to teach English, though under increasing attack, still holds sway in many situations where English is taught? It is also seems to be the case that there is a close relationship between the exaltation of the native-speaker and the continued vigour of certain colonialist attitudes mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The assault on native-speakerism is one of the book's strengths. However a number of issues are either passed over too lightly or ignored altogether. The view that "... language learning is owned by the student..." (p.63) is promoted but little thought is given to what we might say to students who, no doubt wrongly, prefer and seek out native-speaker teachers in preference to their - in many cases - better trained local colleagues whose mother tongue is not English. Might not such students just be looking for foreigners to teach them and not wish to make themselves the objects of native-speakerism? An interest in the exotic is not unique to English-speakers from certain developed nations.
And no mention at all is made of the fact that the most enthusiastic proponents of native-speakerism are often not native- speakers themselves. I refer to professional gatekeepers such as teacher-training college staff who, having achieved a close approximation to certain forms of native-speaker oral production themselves, go on to form a comprador class within their local profession and seek to impose similar standards of oral production on others, develop relations with the US and UK academies and publishing industries and make energetic efforts to stifle any suggestion that sum of human wisdom on English and the learning of it might be located anywhere but London or a few North American cities.
In place of native-speakerism and cultural essentialism Holliday (p.89) wants TESOL practitioners to presume that
"...autonomy is a universal unless there is evidence otherwise - and that if not immediately evident in student behaviour, that it may be because there is something preventing us from seeing it - thus treating people equally as people."
The essential moral thrust and central paradox -some may prefer the word contradiction - of Holliday's enterprise are visible here. He rightly condemns our tendency to view our students as little more than mouthpieces for certain aspects of their culture, thus stripping them of something of their humanity and individuality, while at the same time seeing, when we see it at all, our own cultural baggage as unproblematic. However, the laudable desire to let the Other simply be is predicated on the notion that he or she is always already just like us; autonomous, critical and wanting to learn on his or her own terms, a veritable Modern subject, if only we had the wit to see it.
Try as we might in TESOL no amount of theoretical tossing and turning seems to lull us into the sleep of unreason and get us away from what Habermas calls the "unfinished project of Modernity" and the questioning subject that it implies. Perhaps we ought to stop trying. Adrian Holliday's valuable book is a notable contribution to the progress of the project.
The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language (Oxford Applied Linguistics) OverviewThis book addresses the issue of how to teach English in diverse locations. Central to the discussion is the balance of power in classroom and curriculum settings, the relationship between language, culture, and discourse, and the change in the ownership of English.

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