Prof. Robert Phillipson talks about linguistic imperialism and ELT

I'd like to start by thanking tsol academic and Hugh Jarvis in particular for the opportunity to talk to you and I'm wondering whether you're thinking oh

is this uh yet another gray-haired native speaker telling people elsewhere in the world what they ought to be doing I very sincerely hope not because I think that we live in extremely exciting

times for English worldwide and English teaching worldwide but I do on the other hand think that there are serious

problems in applied linguistic and E elt Orthodoxy so what what my talk would do is to present a number of the formative influences that have been on my teaching

lecturing and writings and attempt to sum up what I stand for in tsol and elt which I regard as more or less

simultaneous uh so sorry uh synonymous and simultaneous yes okay but I'm going to try to answer three questions which uh link theory and practice which is a

fundamental aim for Tel academic and which also link the micro level with the macro level in other words issues of practicalities with overall Global

Trends or national Trends so my three questions then are firstly is English expanding in balance with other languages or in unethical ways

indefensible ways is it expanding at the expense of cultural and linguistic diversity secondly can one analyze

educational language policy in practice so that evidence at the micro local level classroom activities curriculum and so on dovetails with broader macro

level developments with International Trends with Fashions with powerful forces for instance the forces behind the current expansion of English

worldwide and then thirdly is academic freedom being restricted subjected to a purely economic rationale with major limitations on language policy and the

Ecology of languages and ultimately on freedom of speech and I'd like to begin by showing you the learning English supplement of

of the Guardian weekly in fact the latest number 13th of January 20 2 and you may even be able to see that the that the heading on the on the lead

story is language policy poisoning children and it's about what has happened in Namibia in the 20 years since Namibia became independent since English has become the

main medium of education and an NGO has done a serious study now which clarifies that the teachers are not competent enough they're not qualified enough and that

this is in fact preventing them from having good education and my worry then is that this is in fact very much a result of the British

council's policies and the way advice was given to the namibian government despite the fact that many of us who were involved in planning what would

happen after aparte left Namibia would be making the right decisions about choice of medium of Education in fact in my book uh linguistic imperialism which some of you may have heard of I have

about 12 Pages analyzing the work of a lot of people in relation to how one could plan for education for independent Namibia and what the principles were

that should guide what would happen in the country and unfortunately this has not happened at all and then the second story in the same number of learning

English and it's an excellent supplement it's a very good publication is language myth cripples Pakistan schools okay what is the language myth

well it's the idea that English is the only everything you need for success in the modern world and concentrating on English in in Pakistan in this case is having a hideous effect on the vast

majority of people who are prevented from having a a healthy education and from access to the modern economy and relative social success so

basically it's saying that there is a crisis in Pakistan it's local people pointing this out and then the whole question is who's responsible for things having gone wrong why have they not been

more effective why haven't why hasn't it been multilingual education which would build on people's mother tongues and in fact the British Council has commissioned a very good study which you

can actually download from the council's website on what ought to happen in multilingual Pakistan it's written edited by high will Coleman and has

several very interesting articles analyzing successes but mainly failures in English language teaching policy in a range of context text mostly postcolonial

contexts so clearly they're very disturbing things coming out and I'm interested in why this is the case uh the third headline in the same number of

the supplement is with a picture of the American Secretary of State and the famous bur Burmese Freedom Fighter The Heading is US launches Global push to

share elt skills and there again uh why is this happening does the US in fact have the knowhow in the tesol

organization which as you may know three or four months ago decided to change its name to tsol International so it does have an an aim of expanding its

influence worldwide and I think the serious question then is whether the expertise the knowhow in the United States is really relevant to for

instance a subst Saran African state or an nation state which wants to strengthen its language policy and I would imagine that this is very unlikely

to be the case even with lots of people with the best of Good Intentions and in fact the save the children fund the NGO has recent done a report for a

Consortium involved in the export of teachers of English to uh education systems worldwide mainly in postc colonial countries which is called The Missing Link

and the missing link is that this massive focus on English has been at the expense of other languages it's been depriving people of The Prestige

associated with languages other than English and depriving them of an appropriate form of education so just in this one issue of

the supplement there are massive questions being asked about the relevance of Western expertise worldwide how have I reached my own position when

it comes to the role of English internationally well if I were to sum up my fundamental beliefs very briefly I would say that in principle one should

only be in tesol if one loves languages in the plural and has personal experience of successful foreign or second language learning and preferably

experience of living bilingually or multilingually which is what our Learners are doing this kind of experience leads to understanding of how languages are

learned and used in the real world as well as within educational constraints my second fundamental belief

English like any language is not intrinsically good or bad Noble or evil far from it it is used for masses of

good purposes as well as less good ones however in the colonial and postcolonial worlds it has often served evil purposes and not contributed to

social justice basically serving corporate Western interests more than the mass of the population in such countries my writings should not be understood as me being against the

learning of English or English per se far from it it would be stupid in the modern world for everyone to acquire as competent function in English as

possible what I am against is the misuses to which English English is put not least in education and then thirdly another

fundamental belief about tsaw I have actually taught English since 1964 continuously and this colors my understanding of language pedagogy the

forms and functions of English and makes me very suspicious of influential tsaw figures who pontificate about the learning of English and who are full-time experts on some dimension have

Applied Linguistics second language acquisition or forms of English but who stopped actually teaching the language in facilitating language learning many

years ago there's a tendency for elt to operate within a narrow pragmatic overly specialized Paradigm as a result of which too much professional input and

output is neither inspiring nor valid there's a lot of hype about global English the global V

and clearly one needs to deconstruct one needs to analyze such Concepts Global in this sense applies to perhaps 1/4 of the world's population so the idea that

English for instance because of its Prestige and and the fact that people can see it opens doors should necessarily be given pride of place in all context is fundamentally false

English does of course open doors but it closes them for a large proportion of the world's population there are many false arguments being waved around for

instance that English should be the sole lingual franka for Europe or that English should be the sole medium of education for elite schools in West Africa or East Africa or

Pakistan or that English should be started ever earlier in Education Without all of the other prerequisites for success in education being attended to all of these arguments are in fact

false and we therefore need to be extremely critical about for instance naive politicians jumping at the latest fashion in English teaching as though this is a Panacea for general

education it's not so I'll then move on briefly to influential formative influences on my professional identity I work very

closely with my wife TOA scap Kangas of Finnish origin who has researched for over 40 years in the areas of bilingualism minority education

linguistic human rights and who in fact invented coined the term linguicism in parallel with racism and sexism and classism which I have used

extensively in my work on theorizing linguistic imperialism working very closely with with another scholar is is is tough work I tend to say that the first five years

were hell that after that it was plain sailing is more complex than that of course but at the same time uh I think the many Scholars are too isolated and it's a fantastic advantage to be working

very closely with other people the whole time I I do believe in in teamwork in research as much as in education second Factor I've lived

outside the UK almost all my working life uh I'm an immigrant uh in in in in Continental Europe and this means that I also see English differently from people

who are in a so-called English-speaking country I live in Denmark which is Mass ly exposed to Hollywood to mcdonaldization to englishization but at the same time it

has a very strong tradition of foreign language learning just like many other Continental European countries and this is a tradition which has not been built

on much in elt Orthodoxy I'm personally multilingual meaning I spent a lot of my time at school and at University learning French

and German I now use five languages in my everyday personal and professional lives with Swedish uh French and German uh English and

danish and then finally I would say another massively formative influence has been very strong links with researchers with Scholars worldwide and certainly my own position has been very

strongly influenced by uh writers from East Africa West Africa India Pakistan and so on in other words I think that the interaction between Scholars should be on a symmetric iCal basis and

unfortunately it's not so after that uh I I started work for the British Council where I was for 9 years I was straight from University I

had very brief training in monolingual orolingual behaviorist mimm techniques for language learning and I had three and a half very interesting years in

aeria followed by three years in Yugoslavia where I learned soat of course when I was responsible for service training of English teachers in

collaboration with the Americans and mainly with the local advisers for English teaching and in the middle I did an Ma and in linguistics and El but in

the 60s those were very tentative degree programs there was very little uh solid foundation for them at all so I would say that after my well no sorry I had

one more year I had one year in London before I immigrated to Denmark in the English teaching information center but in in conclusion I would say that I was completely underqualified for the work

that I was actually doing in the British Council in English language pedagogy and I wanted to get back into real teaching uh firsthand teaching I would on the other hand say

that I was probably extremely well qualified in cultural diplomacy which is what the British Council specializes in and of course this provided me with a foundation for the analysis of

linguistic imperialism very much from the Insiders point of view but then I arrived in Denmark in 73 I was very lucky to get a job at the

University of Rosa a post in English language and language pedagogy in a department for Danish German French as well as English and with a 2-year

introductory cycle a basic Humanities program which was multidisciplinary and strikingly it was pedagogically extremely Innovative the

main system of learning was student projects topics that were negotiated in dialogue with supervisors and where uh it was very much uh the the drive of the students

which meant that they were extremely committed to what they were doing learning academic competence as well as content and when we shifted to using English as the main medium of instruction in part of the University

because of European Union funds being made available for the exchange of students internationally uh then in addition to learning the content they were also

doing a vast amount of use of written English and and spoken English in in a pedagogically extremely stimulating form so basically I've been teaching an

integrated approach to language proficiency and content throughout on a very wide range of topics and uh this means

that I'm uh very keen that uh pedagogy should be be learner driven and I did in fact at the same time as my uh teaching at roscota a good deal of research with

colleagues at Copenhagen University and in particular produced a book after several years of empirical studies with Claus F and Kon hostrup called learner language and language learning which is

a coursebook for English teacher training excuse me it's strong on many dimensions of language learning and it's very uh solid on the various Dimensions

that there are in communicative competence and the syllabus but is actually very weak on cultural dimensions and on the forces behind English

worldwide but then why did I get involved in the whole business of linguistic imperialism as as a serious topic for study well the first triggering effect for that was being

involved with Danish and Norwegian Aid bodies NGS attempting to assist the freedom The Liberation movements of of of namibians at a time

when South Africa occupied the country and there were very well-intentioned people contributing lots of money and in fact the money was going to provide learning materials for

refugees in camps in Angola and Zambia and I discovered that what was being sent to these kids who were escaping from oppression was pretty

middle class readers ladybird books the sort of ideology of Peter helping uh daddy washed the car while Mary's helping mommy do the washing up and this

was absolutely horrific it was a perfect example of good intentions on the part of Scandinavian donors with totally irrelevant material from the pedagogical

cultural and linguistic points of view and then I started looking very seriously at the history of postcolonial education and tried to see uh what one could do about it and we had some very

good planning session s for pre-independence Namibia in Zambia and I'm afraid I was shocked by the way the British Council people were not really

interested in or didn't understand multilingualism at all and therefore uh were I I think uh influencing things in the wrong

direction so I think one needed at that point to theorize linguistic imperialism to analyze British and American policy from the 1930s onwards and especially the origins and roles

of English language teaching factors leading to its Genesis and the forms that it has taken and as many of you will know my five tenants or the five

fases are a very micr level analysis of monolingualism native speakers the ideal teacher the earlier the better and all of which are in fact fallacies the book has of course been

unpopular with some whereas it's still fortunately regarded as very important by many others the Grandes of el thought that I got the book I got the whole topic quite wrong and that the book would simply go away which he

fortunately hasn't done but I must admit I'm slightly irritated when uh fellow academics tend to consider that that's about the last thing that I actually wrote even though it was written uh 25

years ago more or less and in fact I have published books in 11 countries uh and in several languages and my latest book uh linguistic imperialism continued

is a followup but it actually presents uh the the sort of thinking that I've had about English as it has changed in the last 20

years but let me be more concrete and and come back to the three questions I put there initially is English expanding in balance with other languages or is it

expanding in unethical indefensible ways at the expense of cultural and linguistic diversity these issues have been a central concern to the Scandinavian governments and the Finnish

government for at least a decade and there is now a very firm policy with signatures by ministers to ensure that the expansion expansion of English is

not at the expense of Norwegian Danish Swedish Finnish Icelandic so there's an awareness that English has to be learned

in an additive way and not subtractively secondly uh it's important therefore if one thinks that English is being overemphasized to work with multilingual

education and to see in what ways this has been uh functioning well which it has in many contexts worldwide and we summarize many of these things in the

book social justice through multilingual education which I have edited with two Indian researchers from whom I learned a great deal and uh my wife

TOA and there's a great deal of very practical evidence about how multilingual education can in succeed and of course the irony of it is that if people learn a local language well that

they have a starting point in they will learn English more effectively later this is this is uh hard facts my third point about the expansion

of English I can't help referring to David grall's work which I think has been extremely constructive in his two earlier reports but I think that his English next

India uh which was written uh about a year a little more than a year ago basically assumes that the British have the solution to India's language learning problems the English learning

problems and I think this is fundamentally false I think it's a misunderstanding there are many talented Indians who know what's happening in the country and many of the arguments used

are in fact Comm Pro promoting British commercial interests and I've written about this and you can see on my website you can download an article called McAuley alive in kicking where I present

a comparison of the arguments used to consolidate British English 180 years ago and the way the British Council is attempting to promote English

specifically in India but of course worldwide and when I tried to get a a long article which is the one on my website accepted in a in a shorter

version for the elt journal which I thought was the ideal forum for it to be presented to a British or International leadership I met a wall of of censorship

effectively I think it was a spurious reason for refusing to publish it which reflects the fact that simply criticism of el Orthodoxy is is

unwelcome I won't talk now otherwise about the way English is expanding in Europe I've written a book on uh English only Europe which ties in many of the issues that I've been talking about

specifically in the context of the European institutions the policies that the EU is promoting at the school level and in research uh but I don't really have time to go into all of that there

but what I am pleading for is that there should be more focus on explicit language policy in all member states because otherwise the market forces behind English are likely to expand in

harmful ways my second question then can one analyze educational language policy and practice so that evidence at the microl local level meaning classroom activities

curriculum and so on dovetail with broader macro level developments I'm sure that there are many articles in in the book that I've already mentioned uh linguistic

imperialism continued show how discourse analysis of text can be connected to historical and present day Trends and challenges at the local level I can tell

you that there's a big battle going on at my own institution Copenhagen business school at the moment for the survival of a variety of foreign languages because most foreign languages

are being pushed out by English at the moment uh and the whole question of how the department which is combining a department of cultural studies and language studies and uh computational

Linguistics and such like uh so that certainly ongoing struggles to do with what is considered relevant or legitimate naming departments are an instance of micr

level battles which of course reflect macr level Trends globally the same is true in terms of work in language rights and linguistic human rights which again

I don't have time to go into but I have written or edited a great deal on the topic of linguistic human rights as you can see from my website but the last thing that I would

say in relation to uh combining the micro and the macro is that I think that our knowledge base needs to be much more

multidisiplinary multi disciplinary in in tsau or El and the book that I edited in the year 2000 uh rights to language Equity power

and education has contributions by 50 Scholars from all over the world and it has articles by people who are in

anthropology sociology social Linguistics social psychology minority education media studies multilingualism

linguistic I law discourse analysis economics policy studies political science language policy bilingual

education indigenous cultural studies sign language studies and even some contributions by creative writs a poet and a novelist so somehow or other the

challenge for all of us is to get our everyday lives into context and that's where a whole lot of disciplines can in fact assist

my third and final point was whether academic freedom is being restricted is it being subjected to a purely economic rationale with major limitations on

language policy on the Ecology of languages and ultimately on freedom of EX freedom of speech and linguistic human rights are very much a way of

making concrete the right to use certain languages rather than others I'm afraid my own view is that tsol

International and the Brit and British Council because of the kind of expertise that there is in North America and in

the UK and Australia they are part of the problem rather than part of the solution and the whole question then is what one can do about it well a lot of what I write is trying to influence

decision makers in our part of the world because I do think that uh there is more and more evidence and for instance my uh quotes from the uh

Guardian weekly are are very good instances of this uh that there are very serious existential issues which are not being addressed at the moment in tsol

and El and I can give you one example of this as well there are now universities being exported from the United States from Australia from the UK to China to

Malaysia and the Arab world where the websites of these universities proudly claim Proclaim that they are exporting exactly the same content of education

and the same medium of instruction in those contexts as in the Home Country this to my mind is practical in some ways of course there are things to be

leared from the West which it is vital that other contexts should know about but the idea that you can simply export these without taking local consideration

into account local educational cosmologies and principles is in fact fundamentally wrong and I think there's an increasing awareness of this just the same as there is about the role of

native speaker teachers being exported by the Thousand to China or Japan or Korea where the results are to put in politely not

encouraging another example there are lots of handbooks of social Linguistics of educational Linguistics of social

Linguistics being produced nowadays there are handbooks there are lots of encyclopedias in them too there's also a risk of narrow specialization other languages in

English don't figure at all there are virtually no references to material written in Spanish French German or other languages and there is a great deal being written there a lot of good

work being written in Scandinavian languages as well as English but because of the Monopoly of Western Publishers uh these are being excluded

from uh what are regarded now as benchmarks as as the state of the art and if I have trouble in getting into print or getting articles accepted

by wellestablished journals in the UK and I do uh I've I've I've had other examples as well as the one I mentioned earlier you can just imagine how difficult it is for Scholars from the

periphery from postc Colonial worlds to get into print in journals which are dominated by Western academics and by Western

Publishers and clearly those policies so far as the Publishers are concerned are dictated by corporate interests by the uh agenda of of the powerful in the

modern world and in conclusion I would say that this is why it is important to fight for freedom of expression for academic freedom for a change of

Paradigm in much of the way El and T are understood and if I haven't convinced you so far I hope that you can actually go to my website because there's a great

deal of material that can be downloaded from that and I'll give you the website address it's www. CBS Copenhagen business school. DK

www. CBS Copenhagen business school. DK

Denmark SL staff philipson thank you very much for listening goodbye