Worldwide English Language Education Today

Ideologies, Policies and Practices

Ali Al-Issa, Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini, Ali Al-Issa, Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032086828
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429941276
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores the ideologies, policies, and practices of English language education around the world today. It shows the ways in which ideology is a constituent part of the social realities of English language teaching (ELT) and how ELT policies and practices are shaped by ideological positions that privilege some participants and marginalize others.

Each chapter considers the multiple ideologies underlying the thinking and actions of different members of society about ELT and how these inform overt and covert policies at the national level and beyond. They examine the implications of investigating ELT ideologies and policies for advancing socio-political understandings of practical aspects such as instruction, materials, assessment, and teacher education in the field.

Introducing new persepctives on the theory and practice of language teaching today, this book is ideal reading for researchers and postgraduate students interested in applied linguistics and language education, faculty members of higher education institutions, English language teachers, and policy makers and planners.

1 Whose English(es)?

Naming and boundary-drawing as language-ideological practices in the global English debate

Andrew Sewell

Introduction

The field of language education, though often compartmentalized, forms part of the complex relationship between language and society. One would therefore expect it to make some use of the concept of language ideology, described by Park (2009) as a “crucial window through which we can investigate the intersection of language and society” (p. 15). What is taught and tested depends on a number of fundamental beliefs and assumptions about, among other things, the boundaries of the language being taught, the needs of learners and their societies, and the nature of effective communication. If ideology is defined as “the most fundamental belief systems in any social practice” (Mirhosseini, 2018, p. 20), then the study of language ideology aims to reveal and explicate the functioning of these belief systems as they pertain to language practices. They may be implicitly held or dependent upon particular readings of past events and present conditions, and by virtue of being accepted as “common sense” they create a particular view of the enterprise and inhibit change and innovation.

Although an awareness of language ideology would therefore appear to be essential for researchers and practitioners in English language education, the concept is still met with considerable scepticism. The call for them to practise “reflexivity”, for example, by exploring their own beliefs and assumptions, brings unexpected challenges. Wee (2018) observes that “expert” attempts to “problematize taken-for-granted assumptions run the risk…of being treated as too esoteric and therefore as having questionable relevance” (p. 50). It is therefore unsurprising that many researchers and practitioners are sceptical towards the concept of language ideology, preferring to leave stable ground beneath their feet and avoid undermining their professional authority.

In this chapter I apply the concept of language ideology to a study of how English language education is being debated by researchers in the era of global English. My concern is thus mainly with professional language ideologies (see Kroskrity, 2000; Gal, 2002), and how these intersect with more widely held beliefs about language and communication. I argue that proposed “new” approaches to language education often reflect similar beliefs and assumptions as the approaches they claim to challenge or supersede, and are based on the same language-ideological practices, in particular boundary-drawing and naming. By considering some of the discourses of language education from a language-ideological perspective, the chapter is thus concerned with both the nature of the ideologies that influence English language education and with the discursive mechanisms by which these ideologies are turned into prescriptions for policy and practice. It also aims to highlight the relevance of language ideology by identifying the ways in which researchers and practitioners can benefit from an awareness of the concept. In asking the question “Whose Englishes?” I am drawing attention to the way in which the territorial claims of the global English debate are based on particular ideologies of language.

The chapter begins with an outline of what are argued to be the language-ideological foundations of current approaches to English language education in many parts of the world. It then provides a brief introduction to some recent debates in English language education, focusing on the contributions of research from the English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) paradigm. These contributions are assessed from a language-ideological perspective that compares their assumptions about language and communication with that of the dominant model. The chapter concludes by identifying the main insights of this perspective and discussing the implications for English language education policies and practices.

Debates in language education

In this section I will sketch the backdrop to recent debates by describing the changing conditions of language use, summarizing the development of ELF research, and characterizing ELF as one of the poles in a language-ideological debate.

Challenge and response: the ELF research paradigm

It is something of a banal truism to state that English plays a major role in international communication, but it is still worth stating. Among the more surprising manifestations of this are the “English-only” internal language policies of multinational corporations such as Sodexo, Nissan, and Siemens (see Borzykowski, 2017). The important point is that English has become a truly international language, used by an increasing range of people in increasingly unexpected places.

Research into what actually goes on in these nominally English-speaking situations is still in its infancy, however (see e.g. Ehrenreich, 2010). There is a consensus that one of the key skills is being able to accommodate the needs of different listeners. Idiomatic language and complex sentence structures are usually contra-indicated. But it is fair to say that much English language education in today’s world is still based on a native speaker or monolingual model, in which the knowledge, skills, behaviour, and experiences of an idealized native speaker serve as implicit or explicit benchmarks. The disjunct can be briefly illustrated by aviation communication, in which English (or a specialized form thereof) serves as the international lingua franca. In line with the widely noted observation that native speakers are not necessarily the most effective communicators in these situations, Kim and Elder (2009, p. 13) noted “verbosity” and “inappropriate word choice” as being among the causes of the communication problems attributed to native-speaker pilots. It is therefore remarkable (and worrying) that such pilots can gain certification without formal language testing (see Alderson, 2011).

Faced with the challenges presented by changing conditions of language use, researchers have responded in a variety of ways. Here I will summarize the development of the research paradigm known as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), while also using it to trace the outlines of more general research trends. ELF research has been described as influential, while also being “a subject of heated debate” (Park and Wee, 2011, p. 361). From its origins in the late 1990s, ELF research took account of the changing demographic by emphasizing “lingua franca” language use among non-native speakers of English.¹ According to Jenkins (2015), ELF research has passed through three phases. The first phase (ELF 1) was characterized by the search for the “common” or “shared” features that were assumed to make lingua franca communication possible. A key text was Jenkins’ own work on pronunciation, culminating in a “Lingua Franca Core” of essential phonological features (Jenkins, 2000). Corpus linguistic work was carried out (see e.g. Seidlhofer, 2001) and the overall intention of this phase of ELF research was to “describe and possibly even codify ELF varieties” (Jenkins, 2015, p. 54).

In this there was a clear parallel with the World Englishes research paradigm, one of the intentions of which was also to describe and codify regional varieties of English. However, the second phase of ELF research (ELF 2) began to acknowledge that variation itself, rather than the existence of a discrete variety, was the defining feature of lingua franca communication. Attention thus shifted towards “the processes underlying and determining the choice of features used in any given ELF interaction” (Jenkins et al., 2011, p. 287; note the continuing structuralist emphasis on “underlying” processes). Researchers such as Seidlhofer (2009, p. 241) referred to this as the “processual turn” of ELF research, aligning it with a general “trans” turn towards seeing communication as a dynamic process (see e.g. García and Li Wei (2014) on “translanguaging”). The trans turn moves the focus away from language as a noun – implying that communication is merely the performance of a pre-existing linguistic system – and towards “languaging” as a verb, implying that communication is a dynamic and indeterminate process.

The move away from fixed varieties also reflects increasing scepticism towards linguistic borders and boundaries. Named languages such as English and French have been characterized as ideological constructions that played an important historical role in forming modern nation states, rather than simply reflecting pre-existing language use (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007; Blommaert and Rampton, 2012). Code-switching and related phenomena are seen less as switching between discrete “codes” and more as the flexible use of linguistic repertoires which blurs the “the taken-for-granted distinctiveness of the languages used in code-switching” (Bailey, 2007, p. 265).

Just as ELF research appeared to have aligned itself with these broader trends, a third phase of ELF research (ELF 3) has been identified, or at least proposed, by Jenkins (2015). This version of ELF involves an increased awareness of multilingualism, and is defined (in its new guise of “English as a Multilingua Franca”) as “[m]ultilingual communication in which English is available as a contact language of choice, but is not necessarily chosen” (Jenkins, 2015, p. 73). So ELF has extended its purview to a much wider range of communicative practices, including those that do not even involve English (in fact it appears to cover all communication, as it is impossible to determine whether English is “available” to the interlocutors in any given interaction). This is a rather puzzling development, for a number of reasons: for one, it appears to downgrade the “E” of ELF in such a way that it becomes a general theory of multilingualism, undermining its distinctiveness and potentially leaving it subservient to other disciplines – most obviously sociolinguistics – that have been researching multilingualism for decades. But to understand the phases of ELF research it is necessary to take a language-ideological perspective on its origin and development, as I explain further in the following sub-section.

Hegemony and counter-hegemony: ELF and language-ideological debates

I have referred to ELF research as forming part of a debate about language education in the era of global English. This debate is therefore also, of necessity, a language-ideological debate, one where language is central as a topic and in which “language ideologies are being articulated, formed, amended, enforced” (Blommaert, 1999, p. 1). There have of course been some dissenting voices regarding ELF research (see e.g. O’Regan, 2014; Park and Wee, 2011). But beyond these criticisms the main opposing force is all but invisible, despite giving ELF research much of its traction and identity. It is created by the hegemonic order that supports and maintains “monolingual” or “native-speaker” norms in language use and acquisition. Before examining ELF research in more detail in the following section, it is worth briefly reviewing the origins and nature of this aspect of language ideology.

The native speaker concept involves an idealized view of linguistic homogeneity, which is metonymically linked to an idealized view of “society” at large – it is better to live with those who are “the same”, so it is better that we all speak “the same” language. The perception of linguistic similarity may have been achieved more or less naturally in small societies, but it is with the development of the modern nation state that the violence of homogenization and symbolic equivalence becomes apparent. As historians such as Hobsbawm (2012) have noted, the idea of a common language is one of the primary unifying forces of the nation state. The establishment of a “common” language often requires the assimilation or marginalization of speakers of “different” languages or dialects, regardless of their numerical status. The formation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1871 provides a case in point. Estimates for the proportion of the population who spoke something resembling “standard” Italian range between 2.5 and 12 per cent (Ives, 2009, p. 265). The quote attributed to the Italian politician Massimo d’Azeglio at that time is revealing: “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.”

The point – already made above but reiterated here – is that despite the changes that have transformed English from being the language of particular nation states to a deterritorialized lingua franca, language education policies and practices still largely involve what Ives (2009) identifies as the “top-down imposition of a ‘static’, predetermined language” (p. 667), and are carried out in a manner “that privileges the ‘standard’ English of so-called native speakers” (p. 676). It makes little difference whether we see this as the consequence of Anglo-American manipulations on the world stage (as Phillipson (1992) contends) or as the result of “free choice” by language users. Regardless of its origins, the hegemonic order is founded upon what has been called “standard language ideology” (see e.g. Milroy, 2001), along with the “native speaker concept”, which is in turn a cluster of related beliefs. According to Doerr (2009, pp. 20–33), the three premises of the native-speaker concept are (1) that native speakers and nation states are linked in ways that are natural and stable (i.e. the “mother tongue” idea); (2) that these speaker–community links involve an essential homogeneity (the “same-language” idea); and (3) that native speakers possess complete competence in all domains and genres of this idealized common language.

The native-speaker concept is not merely a concept, however, and it has consequences for, among other things, language education policy, pedagogical orientations, and hiring practices. In the face of these hegemonic discourses of language and language education, ELF research is engaged in a process of contestation that aims to undermine their foundations. I will focus on this in the following section by taking a language-ideological perspective on ELF and the surrounding debate.

A language-ideological perspective: boundary-drawing and naming as key practices

It is first necessary to explain the conceptual framework being applied here. In the section above I used the terms “ideology”, “discourse”, and “hegemonic order”, and these need to be disambiguated.

Conceptual framework

By “ideology”, in its particular form of “language ideology”, I am referring to “the structured and consequential ways in which we think about language” (Seargeant, 2009, p. 26). Ideologies are structured in that they tend to form patterns with a certain “conceptual stability” (p. 26), and they are consequential in that they are seen to influence social practices and policies, including language education (Mirhosseini, 2018, p. 21). However, they are not, as Searg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Whose English(es)? Naming and boundary-drawing as language-ideological practices in the global English debate
• 2 Policies of English language teaching as part of the global “war of ideas”
• 3 The English literature classroom as a site of ideological contestation
• 4 Equal chances for all Namibians through English? Language ideology and its consequences in the multilingual classroom
• 5 “Make yourself look as White as possible!” Navigating privilege in English language teaching in South Korea; an autoethnography
• 6 Identity as/in language policy: negotiating the bounds of equipping “global human resources” in Japanese university-level (language) education
• 7 Ideology and culture in EFL textbooks in the era of globalization in Turkey
• 8 The glotopolítica of English teaching to Latinx students in the US
• Ideology in language policy and educational practice: an afterword
• Index