The Language Teacher

Alastair Pennycook's article, "English and Capital: Some Thoughts," in the October 1997 edition of The Language Teacher, presents a troubling view of language and language teaching. While the piece gives some indication of the author's agenda, a more complete picture is available in his description of Critical Applied Linguistics (CALx), a field he sees as useful in the study of language education. He writes:

As a developing focus within an interdisciplinary domain, therefore, its [CALx] antecedents are best understood in terms of the critical domains on which it draws. These include, first, traditional areas of critical thought, such as Marxian structuralist analyses of society, studies in political economy, or theories of imperialism (in press).

I take exception with the author on three points. First, I believe that language is more than a political act. Second, I think it is a travesty to use Marxism as a prism through which to view issues of language rights and imperialism. And, finally, I find the notion of an emergent, predominantly Western, world culture to be erroneous and ethnocentric.

There are better terms

One of the key sentences in Pennycook's TLT article reads, "What I want to suggest, then, is that we see English use as, for want of a better term, acts of desire for capital" (p. 56). I think there are better terms for language ranging from the sublime to the mundane.

Some feel the highest form of language is literature. "One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength, which is constituted primarily of an amalgam: mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction" (Bloom, 1994, p. 29). While it is trendy to decry literature as elitist and out of touch, much of it remains liberating and vital.

More commonly, language is what people use to share our love--parents nurturing their children, endearments murmured between lovers, believers praying to their gods. It is something we use to offer and receive solace in our moments of grief. Language is how we connect with those separated from us by time or space--an avenue to the wisdom of generations past, our gift to great-grandchildren we may never see, our attempt to communicate with people from other cultures and lands. Language is humanity's way of reaching out.

Strictly speaking, the author is correct that language is used in "acts of desire for capital." Language is used to help the user get what the user wants, but this seems true only in the most banal and limited sense. Viewed more generously, language is a means of expressing the inarticulate speech of the heart. In the end, perhaps one's view of language is simply a Rorschach test revealing more about the observer than the observed.

Marxian structuralist analyses

When a method of analysis is put forward, one should look for cases in which it has been used. While we cannot tell the future solely by past performance, we can gain useful insights. One place to start with Pennycook's method would be in those societies which organize themselves along Marxist principles. With China and Vietnam moving rapidly toward market economies, the last three rigidly Marxist societies are Cuba, North Korea, and Yemen, excellent places to be from though not actually in.

If we find no reason for confidence in existing Marxist societies, perhaps there is something to be learned by looking at Marxist regimes past. On the issue of language rights the former Soviet Union is a case study in failure. Marx regarded nations as "an irrational complication--a residue of the past," leaving little doubt how he viewed national languages (Meyer, 1981, as cited in Kreindler, 1985, p. 348). The early Bolsheviks argued that national identities and languages should be subsumed by the formation of a common culture and common language for all people (Kreindler, p. 348). Lenin, in formulating the Second Party Program in 1919, defeated these Marxist purists and put forth a strong case for language minority rights including education in mother tongues. In 1938, however, Lenin's policies were reversed, Russian was adopted as the official language of the USSR, and national languages came under severe pressure. To mention but two examples, before World War II, Tartar and Kalmyk enjoyed the status of autonomous-republic languages. This ended in 1944 when both groups were deported to the Soviet Far East (Kreindler, p. 4).

Professor Pennycook is not alone in giving prominence to Marxist analyses of society, many in academia take the view that Marx is just misunderstood. However, Marx and his modern academic acolytes failed to recognize nationalism as the driving force of the 20th Century--not imperialism, socialism, or internationalist movements (Pfaff, 1993, p. 238). They missed the fact that people will work longer, harder, and better for themselves than for some abstract collective or common good. They did not grasp that workers, through their associations and behavior, are a dynamic market force moderating capitalism. Given that the socio-economic pseudo-science of Marxism performed so dismally in its chosen field, I see few reasons for applying Marx to the language classroom.

The West vs. the Rest

Mr. Pennycook's introduction to his TLT article reads in part,"...we need to understand English language teaching as one arm of global linguistic imperialism, as interlinked with the dominance of Western ideology, culture, and capitalism, and a crucial element in the denial of linguistic human rights" (p. 55). Many Westerners find it comforting to believe their culture is becoming the world's culture. This ethnocentric mirage has two facets. One has been called the Coca-colonization thesis, the other has to do with modernization. According to professor Samuel Huntington, chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, both theses "project an image of an emerging homogeneous, universally Western world--and both are to varying degrees misguided, arrogant, false, and dangerous" (1996, p. 28).

Because certain elements of Western pop culture and consumer products are so widely accepted, it is tempting for some to conclude that the world is becoming Westernized. The ubiquitousness of Western music, fashions, fast food, technology, and CNN News seems evidence of fundamental sameness. However, as Milton Bennett wrote about the first stage of ethnocentrism, "the essence of denial is the inability to see things as different" (1996, p. 15). The fact is that, beneath superficial similarities, profound differences in religion, language, customs, and traditions exist among the cultures of the world. These are not eliminated by anything so facile as sharing the same soft drinks, gadgets, or buzzwords. Driving Hondas does not make Australians think like Japanese any more than eating Big Macs turns Chinese into incipient Americans.

In terms of modernization, some Westerners assume that industrialization will occur more or less along the same lines everywhere as it did in Europe. This seems wishful thinking at best and flies in the face of the expressed wishes of the peoples of China, India, Japan, and every other country in Asia. Within the triangle stretching from Istanbul in the west, to Indonesia in the southeast and Japan in the northeast, lie some forty nations inhabited by two-thirds of the world's population. This region has experienced the greatest economic growth and modernization in the past twenty years. Yet, with the arguable exception of Turkey, this area contains not one Western society. Heads of European governments gathered at the Asia-Europe Summit in Bangkok in March, 1996, seemed surprised when Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia told them, "European values are European values; Asian values are universal values," but similar sentiments have been voiced by senior officials throughout the region (Heilbrunn, 1996, p. 1). To Asians, the notion that adopting Western values and cultural norms is a natural and inevitable consequence of industrial development is not only ethnocentric but profoundly racist as well.

The self-congratulatory chimera of Western hegemony becomes especially acute when extended to English usage. While it is true that English serves as the lingua franca for much of today's multinational business, diplomacy, and entertainment, it does not follow that this is a permanent condition. Dutch, Spanish, Russian, and French all enjoyed periods of ascendancy which proved to be ephemeral. English is, to be sure, one tool Asian peoples may use, but that is all it is. Nowhere in Asia is English the predominant language, and the suggestion that some of the world's oldest civilizations are seriously threatened by language encroachment is patronizing and false. They are made of sterner stuff.

A final note on the use of English and power distribution is necessary. It is true that power and resources are not evenly allocated in the world. But the use of English, indeed the use of language, does not cause injustice. The problems about which the author is concerned arise from human nature, not linguistic choices.

Conclusion

Clearly, language does not occur in a vacuum and it is important to examine how it relates to the lives of people. However, casting the language classroom as an extension of international and cross-cultural power struggles politicizes language learning in ways which detract from the already daunting task of second language acquisition. If one introduces explicitly political agendas into class, on what principled basis can one object when others do the same?

There is something beautiful and transcendent about language which cannot be seen as simply political. It would be a shame to reduce such an elegant instrument to just another rusted cog in the failed machinery of Marxism. This is not to say that we should not take a critical approach to language and linguistics. We should, and the place to start is with a critical look at Critical Applied Linguistics.

References

Bennett, M. (1996). Beyond tolerance: Intercultural communication in a multicultural society. TESOL Matters, 6 (2), pp. 1, 15.

Bloom, H. (1994) The Western Canon: The books and school of the ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Heilbrunn, J. (1996, December 29). U.S. vs. Asia: Culture as diplomacy. Los Angeles Times, Opinion, p. 1.

Huntington, S. (1996). The West: Unique, not universal. Foreign Affairs, 75 (6), pp. 28-46.

Kreindler, I. (1985) The non-Russian languages and the challenge of Russian: The Eastern versus the Western tradition. In I. Kreindler (ed.) Sociolinguistic perspectives on Soviet national languages: Their past, present and future. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.

Meyer, A. (1981). Book review, Slavic Review, No. 3, p. 482. Cited in I. Kreindler (ed.), (1985) Sociolinguistic perspectives on Soviet national languages: Their past, present and future.

Pennycook, A. (in press) Critical applied linguistics and education. In R. Wodak (ed.) Language Policy and Political Issues in Education, Volume 1 of D. Corson (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Pennycook, A. (1997). English and capital: Some thoughts. The Language Teacher, 21 (10), pp. 55-57.

Pfaff, W. (1993). The wrath of nations: Civilization and the furies of nationalism. New York: Simon & Schuster.

The author would like to thank Mr. Pennycook for kindly providing the correct citation of his in-press work.

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