Decolonizing Foreign Language Education

The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages

Donaldo Macedo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138320680
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429841729
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Decolonizing Foreign Language Education interrogates current foreign language and second language education approaches that prioritize white, western thought. Edited by acclaimed critical theorist and linguist Donaldo Macedo, this volume includes cutting-edge work by a select group of critical language scholars working to rigorously challenge the marginalization of foreign language education and the displacement of indigenous and non-standard language varieties through the reification of colonial languages. Each chapter confronts the hold of colonialism and imperialism that inform and shape the relationship between foreign language education and literary studies by asserting that a critical approach to applied linguistics is just as important a tool for FL/ESL/EFL educators as literature or linguistic theory.

1
Rupturing the Yoke of Colonialism in Foreign Language Education

An Introduction

Donaldo Macedo

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON

“We should not hire any more critical pedagogues. We should hire ‘pure’ applied linguists”

I have been extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit, evaluate, and help in the development of many Bilingual Education (BE), English as Second Language (ESL), Dual Language (DL), and Foreign Language (FL) programs throughout the country from elementary to university graduate levels. As a result, I have been exposed to a multiplicity of (mis)interpretations and (mis)conceptions regarding what constitutes a good language teaching and learning curriculum, ranging from an elementary French/English program in Northern Vermont that I evaluated for six years to a graduate language teacher preparation program that I evaluated for three years in the Northwestern part of the country. In the former program the debate typically centered on to what variety of French the school system should adopt. Administrators tended to argue that the Parisian French would bring parents and their children greater pride in their ethnic background, whereas the “dialectal” variety spoken in the Québécois borderland with Canada would continue to pigeonhole its speakers as culturally and linguistically less sophisticated. The parents had a mixture of feelings regarding the language of instruction but they were united by a common denominator: They were unanimously happy that their children would have the opportunity to be fluent and literate in French, the language of their ancestors, even though the French variety spoken in Northern Vermont provides its speakers with the experience of subordination and sometimes shame vis à vis the Parisian accented speech which is generally used as “the yoke of Francophonie … to tendentiously index degrees of intelligence or humanity” (DeGraff, this volume). In other words, a Parisian accented speaker can be as dumb as a door nail and ethically challenged but, nevertheless, is generally viewed as scoring higher in the “index of intelligence or humanity” than a Québécois or Haitian accented French speaker (Lambert, 1969, 1972; Macedo, 1981; DeGraff & Stump, 2018; DeGraff, this volume).

As for the language teacher preparation in the Northwest, the argument consistently pointed to the underlying racism camouflaged in elitist educational posturing that wanted to ascertain that the Spanish-speaking teachers who were enrolled in the program and graduating from the university should demonstrate high and near native proficiency in English, whereas their native proficiency and literacy in Spanish was generally ignored. Thus the competence of Dual Language teachers (Spanish/English) graduating from this university was linked to his/her competency in English and other skill sets, while native fluency and high literacy in Spanish were generally minimized and, in some instances, routinely dismissed. The English-dominant teachers did not, however, have to show high fluency and literacy in Spanish. The end result of these on-going debates, centered on what criteria should be used to prepare language teachers, yielded little consensus in spite of excellent data available to guide policy decision-making and the existence of a multiplicity of models concerning language teacher preparation in many parts of the country and abroad. By never reaching a consensus, what continued to undergird policy decision-making in this language teacher preparation was the erroneous assumption that views English proficiency as education itself, while high proficiency in Spanish was summarily dismissed (many graduate students were literate native speakers of Spanish). Their cultural “funds of knowledge” and their organic relationship with the community were generally minimized and swept under the rug.

Given my more than three decades of observation, evaluation, and participation in language program development throughout the country, I have heard many absurd arguments to support language education programs that loosely fit under the denomination of applied linguistics, an area of linguistics studies that, in turn, is paralyzed by its own insecurities regarding its standing against linguistics departments in most research universities. Hence I was not at all surprised with the statement in the epigraph that begins this introductory chapter that falsely claims the existence of “pure applied linguists.” Not only is the statement an oxymoron, but it also reflects the deep-seated insecurity among applied linguists who are caught in a false elitist binarism that pervades most theoretically oriented linguistic departments. Given the paralyzing insecurities suffered by many applied linguists, their defense mechanism is to call for “scientific” methods of teaching, meaning technical in its orientation and, as Lilia Bartolomé so clearly pointed out, the “solutions to [the general failures of the field of language education] … are also expected to be technical in nature” (Bartolomé, 1994). The requirement that the applied linguist must be “pure” is very much ingrained in a positivistic method of inquiry where “theory and knowledge are subordinated to the imperatives of efficiency and technical mastery, and history is reduced to a minor footnote in the priorities of ‘empirical’ scientific inquiry’” (Giroux, 1983: 87)—a posture that, according to Paulo Freire, reduces science to scientism (Freire, 2018). In other words, the blind celebration of a “pure” and “technical” approach to language studies and teaching hides the limitations of empiricism that has created a culture in which pseudoscientists, particularly in schools of education and language teacher preparation programs, can engage in a form of “naïve empiricism,” believing “that facts are not human statements about the world but aspects of the world itself” (Schudson, 1978).

In this introductory chapter I discuss the conundrum of foreign language teaching that produces a high level of arrogant elitism which, in my view, constitutes a defense mechanism to hide the fact that, with all the preparation that language teachers receive and the billions of dollars spent on foreign language education in the United States, the field produces a mere “1% of American adults [my emphasis] who become proficient in the foreign language they study in a U.S. classroom” (Friedman, 2015, cited by Reagan & Osborn, this volume). I then propose that the general failure of foreign language education is, at least, partly due to a baseless elitism derived from what DeGraff calls “Neo-Darwinian linguists … [who measured the worth of a language in terms of ‘young vs. old’ [read classic], ‘simple’ vs. complex,’ etc.].” According to DeGraff, “these terms, although perhaps useful as atheoretical heuristics and socio-historical approximations, cannot serve as theoretically grounded linguistic-structural taxa” (DeGraff, 2001). The false assumption that “old” languages are more complex, thus less simple, still informs and shapes views that hold that Latin and old Greek are superior languages, which leads to the following question: “For the child who was born in the Homeric age, who became aware of the speech forms of his linguistic community by hearing them, and then reproduced them in order to make himself understood by his fellow man – for that child were these speech ancient?” (Osthoff & Brugman, 1878, cited in DeGraff, 2001).

Although the answer to the above question is so obvious as to make the “young vs. old” proposition silly, to say the least, the folk theory generated by this Western-centric linguistic postulation continues to shape, for instance, tense sequencing in foreign language textbooks (i.e., present tense is considered simple and thus taught first, while the subjunctive mood is deemed to be more complex and is usually taught last). The false elitist binarism of “young” vs. “old” has given rise also to an artificial hierarchy of foreign languages taught in schools and universities that are, in turn, intimately tied to the imposition of imperial and colonial languages. Other linguistic realizations such as translanguaging, pidgins, and creoles, and languages in contact that are considered “inferior” are summarily classified as mere simplifications of the “superstrate” language due to the absence of marked features—features that are often used as a kind of yardstick to substantiate, for example, the notion of simplification proposed by Coelho (1880), Hall (1966), Naro (1971), Bickerton (1977), among others, who claim that the new linguistic system that arises from languages in contact is always reduced to a “hybridized and unstable linguistic system” (Macedo & D’Introno, 1998; DeGraff, 2001).

I also make the case that this atheoretical posture that emphasizes a top-to-bottom mode of linguistic analysis, with colonial languages at the top (superstrate), removes, for instance, the native languages (substrate) from any meaningful participation in either the construction or the development of what has been characterized as a “hybridized and unstable linguistic system.” Hence the simplification model is very limited in nature since it fails to fully capture the (un)marked dynamics of languages in contact, dismissing almost entirely the role that the substrate may play in language formation (DeGraff, 2001). The simplification model that emerges from the “pre- and neo-Darwinian claims about language evolution” (DeGraff, 2001) is partly responsible for how foreign language syllabi are constructed and the hierarchy of foreign languages offered by educational institutions. That is, it dogmatizes the reductionist view of languages in contact by taking what is claimed to be the “upper-languages” (always colonial) as a point of reference and postulates that the omission of marked features of “upper-languages (i.e., verbal inflections) in the “hybridized and unstable linguistic system” proves the simplification claim. Given the a-theoretical nature that prevailed in the neo-Darwinian tradition of linguistic analysis (DeGraff, 2001), a tradition steeped in racial animus and which still informs and shapes a large sector of language study and language education, I propose that language educators as well as many linguists need to differentiate the factors that are purely socio-cultural in nature from those that are part of the language organism guided and shaped by principles of Universal Grammar.

My interest in this chapter is not to add fuel to the present debate concerning “simple” languages which, in my view, has given rise to conceptual gaps and obfuscates the true nature of the linguistic system that develops in language contact contexts, including the interlanguage in foreign languages classroom. Rather, my main interest is to invite language educators to embrace the “Neogrammarians’ stated goal to understand Language … [in which] … grammars live in speakers’ mind, not society; thus the study of individual grammars as manifestations of a ‘physical [i.e., psychological] organism’ should take epistemological priority over ‘Historical Grammar’ (i.e., ‘descriptive grammars of different periods […] tacked together’” (DeGraff, 2001).

By embracing the Neogrammarian goal of linguistic theory in their language teaching preparation, language educators are able to develop critical skills that keep them from confusing learning from acquisition, from being seduced by the imperial supremacy ethos that the “old” is more “complex,” thus superior, while also being able to expurgate the “folk” from theory. Simply put, I believe that language educators should be exposed to as much theory as necessary so that their practice reflects a deeper understanding that language acquisition (L1 and L2) within “generative linguistics is ‘internalist biolinguistic inquiry’” (Chomsky, 1995: 1–11, 2001: 4142, cited in DeGraff, 2001: 222).

In order to achieve this very important goal I will follow DeGraff’s suggestion that “[g]iven Universal Grammar and its Cartesian-Uniformitarian foundations (Chomsky, 1966, 1981, 1986, 1995, etc.) there cannot be any invariant and sui generis set of structures and processes that fall under labels” (DeGraff, 2001) that are socio-historically constructed without an iota of empirical evidence to support these labels. Thus I posit that the challenge for applied linguistics is to develop a language teacher preparation that is truly interdisciplinary in nature where neither theory nor practice is sacrificed at the altar of expediency.

The Arrogance of the Learned Ignoramus’ Elitism

The elite binarism is frequently and unwisely divided into what is considered “purely” theoretical linguistics versus applied linguistics, which is, generally speaking, the least valued branch of linguistics studies to the degree that it implicates teaching, which is also hugely devalued by the academic enterprise. The former involves linguists who specialize in linguistic theory and consider themselves “pure” linguists and have little appreciation or tolerance for issues of language pedagogy and the role of language in society, particularly along the lines of gender, class, race, culture, and ethnicity, including the linguistic hybridity that results from languages in contact that, invariably, gives rise to new language practices—language practices that must also be rule governed, no matter how messy that linguistic data may appear and how far removed they appear to be from the “ideal” speaker model used both in linguistic theory and in foreign language education. In fact, it is through these linguistic practices that speakers of non-Standard varieties make meaning so as to more effectively communicate with one another (García, Pennycook, Kramsch, MacSwan, and Hemphill & Blakely, in this volume). In addition, the tendency to reduce critical pedagogy to a method is reductionistic in that it disarticulates the essence of criticality from the overall academic endeavors. For instance, hard sciences would not survive and evolve without a robust dose of built-in self-criticism, skepticism, and contestation. Thus criticality should inform all fields of study.

Critical pedagogy as it was conceived by Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, Lilia Bartolomé, and Antónia Darder, among others, is a way of being critically in the world where common sense presuppositions are interrogated and not viewed as given and predetermined by the inevitability of history. Hence the academic challenge of applied linguistics programs is not to hire more or less critical applied linguists but to hire applied linguists who are committed to infusing criticality into the intellectual content of what is commonly identified as applied linguistics. That is, applied linguists should teach their courses in linguistics critically, particularly since the fields applied linguistics borders are so porous given its interdisciplinary nature.

Applied linguistics is a catch-all term that includes linguistics studies, language acquisition studies, foreign language teaching (FLT), heritage language education (HL), English as a foreign language (EFL), discourse analysis (DA), English as a second language (ESL), and bilingual education (BE), including the multiplicity of approaches that fall under the rubric of bilingual education, including dual language instruction. The panoply of terms under applied linguistics are not innocent and they are generated and pigeonholed along a power hierarchy where bilingual education programs are always the least valued by both the schools and the U.S. society within which these schools exist, even though empirical data demonstrate that bilingual education is an effective approach to creating balanced bilinguals who are also bi-literate. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of bilingual education proven from empirical data by researchers such as Virginia Collier (1992), David Ramirez (1986, 1989), Kelly Rolstad (1997), Cazabon, Lambert and Hall (1993), Greene (1997), and Cenoz (1996), among others, is either ignored or buried in the endless debate over research design, which serves a fundamental purpose: to hide the racist inequalities that inform and shape most bilingual programs in the United States. It is important to note that not all bilingual education programs are effective, but their lack of success can be attributed to socio-political and economic issues such as poverty, inequality of resource distribution, poorly prepared teachers, and overall abandonment of quality education from the school system within which the bilingual education program exists. In these schools, not only bilingual education fails to meet the expected benchmarks, but Math and English programs for mainstream students also fail to meet the state-mandated benchmarks.

It is the same racism that propelled the state of Massachusetts to abolish instruction in content areas in languages other than English. It is also the same racism that operates in some applied linguistics programs that creates a concentration hierarchy and falsely ranks the foreign language track as the most prestigious, while the bilingual education area of study is routinely viewed by faculty and administrators as an inferior, disciplineless area of study.

Although both foreign language programs and bilingual programs may be dealing with the same colonial language (i.e., Spanish), the foreign language programs usually reap prestige from the mere fact that they serve mostly white, middle-class students even when they produce colossal failures (Reagan & Osborn, this volume). Given that bilingual education programs in the United States serve mostly minoritized working class and working poor students, particularly in major urban centers, they do not escape the wrath of racist acts exacted against lower-class minoritized students, including their teachers. Even a white, middle-class teacher who works in a bilingual program (both K-12 and graduate teacher preparation) is not immune from racist disparate treatment. In other words, such teachers subsume their students’ subordinate and inferior status as well. It does not matter that, by and large, most effective bilingual programs produce impressive resul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Credits
• 1 Rupturing the Yoke of Colonialism in Foreign Language Education: An Introduction
• 2 Between Globalization and Decolonization: Foreign Languages in the Cross-Fire
• 3 Time for a Paradigm Shift in U.S. Foreign Language Education?: Revisiting Rationales, Evidence, and Outcomes
• 4 SLA for the 21st Century: Disciplinary Progress, Transdisciplinary Relevance, and the Bi/multilingual Turn
• 5 Towards Decolonizing Heritage Language Teacher Education
• 6 Decolonizing Foreign, Second, Heritage, and First Languages: Implications for Education
• 7 From Translanguaging to Translingual Activism
• 8 A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging
• 9 English Language Learning in Globalized Third Spaces: From Monocultural Standardization to Hybridized Translanguaging
• 10 Mapping the Web of Foreign Language Teaching and Teacher Education
• 11 Decolonizing World Language Education: Toward Multilingualism
• Index