The English Language Colonial And Power

By Author: Mike Jones
Total Articles: 256
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Of course it is right to see English as playing an integral role in the and neo-colonial enterprise. In this sense, as Akbari says,'... it is not innocent', although it is difficult to see how else events could have turned out. When the European nations began to exercise territorial power rather than merely conduct trade overseas, it became necessary to communicate and establish concepts which often had no obvious equivalent in the languages of the local people, which too were Replica Tag Heuer often not written down. (This gulf can be illustrated by present-day bilingual loudspeaker announcements on railway stations in Wales: the English words 'gap' and 'platform' can be heard in both versions, presumably because no easy alternatives for these words exist in Welsh.)

The decision then to enforce use of the colonists' language was a natural step given nineteenth-century views on education. Compulsory elementary education became the norm in Europe in the latter part of the century (the Education Acts to this end in Britain were passed in 1870 and 1880), with ...
... the aim of creating a literate population able to deal with the challenges of the new industrial age. As any perusal of Victorian literature will reveal, the methods used in these new schools were often crude, and the policy itself was often resented by working-class communities, whom it was avowedly designed to benefit. They lost the valuable income of children who had previously worked and were now confined to the classroom, and found their own traditions of self-education usurped by intruders espousing different, ostensibly superior, values (Steinbach 2004:176-7). Many of those who would have felt these changes most severely were without a vote, since most unskilled working men and, of course, all women from that class, were excluded from the franchise until 1918. So it is important to Breitling Replica Watches recognize that colonial policies were not always peculiar products of their context but reflected more broadly based beliefs which operated in the home countries too, particularly in the field of education.

As far as English itself is concerned, it is inevitable that as new societies have emerged from the colonial structure by which they were shaped, and from those of the immediate post-colonial period, which often imitated what went before, so there has been a natural pressure on the language to reflect this change. Gradually different groups, either those who set local standards in education or those subject to them, are asserting ownership of the English on their own terms, moulding it in accordance with their own needs and in symbiosis with their own languages. As Canagarajah says, 'The negotiation of codes in periphery classrooms ... helps in the appropriation of alien languages by local communities. These are healthy developments that counteract the colonial and alien associations English holds in many periphery communities'. This process will probably result in the consolidation of different varieties of English, though their degree of divergence from what is referred to as Standard English will tend to depend on the priorities of the elites in the given societies, at all levels. Local native-speakers (strangely, in E LT literature this term is usually reserved for those from Anglo-Saxon countries; see, for example Holliday 2006: 385) will here play a key role in determining this path of linguistic development, and there is likely to be continuing debate regarding international standards and norms as different regions vie for influence or strive to establish their autonomy.

These developments, reflecting in part the natural processes of language change, will take place despite, not because of CP. With the politics of education being complex, having to take into account the needs of all sections of society, both the elites and the people at large, it is doubtful whether what happens in individual classrooms will make a great deal of difference at the level of language policy. Indeed, educators who adopt CP might well achieve different results from what they intend. Occupying a dominant part of the power structure themselves, they may in practice confirm rather than subvert stereotypes which reinforce unjust situations: in presenting 'themselves as "liberating" oppressed students through the transmission of power ... to their up-until-then disempowered students', they are in fact retaining not transferring initiative, a point which Starfield (2004:140) highlights but then maintains can be avoided. Furthermore, students' independence might be compromised not strengthened if subsumed within an 'analytic construct' (Widdowson 2000: 23) generated by a teacher who is not prepared to tolerate diversity, who is determined to 'challenge ... those aspects of the [students'] voice which negate [the teacher's] educational/political vision' (Simon 1987: 378), an approach which undervalues the capacity of learners to determine their own lives on their own terms without any such intervention.

As Ellsworth (1989: 309) recognizes, it is '... the student's own daily life experiences ... [that] chart her/his path toward self-definition and agency', not the directing hand of the teacher. Of course, educators and academics in the field of E LT are keen to maintain their authoritative status, especially at a time when there is a 'persistent and pervasive uncertainty' about the validity and role of applied linguistics as a separate discipline. Perhaps this is what explains the attraction of CP: whilst apparently striving to empower the marginalized, it actually enhances the authority of its proponents.