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Development, culture and language: ethical concerns in a postcolonial world Introduction On the first page of a recent edition (October 99, Issue # 237) of the EL Gazette (‘English Language Journal Opening Doors Across the World’), a picture of laughing children (announcing ‘News Analysis’ on page 3) is accompanied by the subtitle "English is key to a better life for the poor". On p.2 the editorial explains further that "for many of the world’s poorest people, English can hold the key to escape from grinding poverty" (emphasis in original). And finally on p.3 the article itself carries the title "English language could be the key to a better life for the underprivileged", and the subtitle "The benefits of primary English language teaching are finally being recognized". Alongside an interesting question of modality as the headlines move from "English is key" to "English can hold the key" to "English language could be the key", these statements go to the heart of some of the issues that need to be addressed in the context of language and development. The article itself argues that the benefits of primary school English language teaching have long been overlooked. Suggesting that English teaching has often been the domain of the privileged, aimed at overseas travel, tertiary education and so on, the article argues that by introducing widespread English into the primary sector, there will be greater access for all, and a greater democratisation of English. This is because "the impact of communication in English is immense: it affects those normally excluded from development. Rural workers now speak to the outside world through mobile phones, and write only using the Internet, both of which may be powered by solar energy. The real impact of the Internet is that anyone can make contact almost anywhere in the world immediately, and much of this contact is conducted in English." So English is widely used, particularly in new technologies, parents around the world are demanding greater access to English, and therefore to provide more English at the primary level will enhance development. Seductive though such an argument may appear, there are several fundamental flaws. First, there are numerous questionable assumptions in this argument: Which rural workers have mobile phones? What languages would they use to speak to "the outside world"? Who has access to computers and the Internet? What actually are the languages of the Internet?. Second, there are some deeper questions we need to ask here: Does parental demand amount to a sufficient reason for wider provision? What may actually be the results of wider provision of English in schools? And most importantly for this discussion here, how might such access to English be linked to poverty, inequality and development? I shall deal with these first two issues very briefly. The problem with the parental demand argument is that although on the one hand it looks like a basic question of educational equity, the issue is often one of parents demanding access to the language that inequitably divides social, educational and economic access. Hong Kong has been a good example of this: parental demand produced extensive schooling in English, which did not have the effect of giving people greater access to resources; rather, it gave people an inadequate education both of and through their first language. The second question has to do with the need to look very carefully at primary school education, much of which around the world suffers from immense lack of resources. We need to ask how limited resources can best be employed in order to provide more opportunities for children in general, for girls more particularly, many of whom still receive little or no schooling, and for other impoverished and disadvantaged groups. That may be instruction in mother tongues, other languages, literacy, health, agriculture, basic economics, any number of local concerns. Unless we look at the particular contexts of schooling, the funding available, the local needs, the type of access and so on, it is impossible to determine what role education in English might play, or what detrimental effects it might have. But the key question here is how might English — and other languages — be related to development. There appear to be two basic sets of propositions in the arguments outlined above, both of which are problematic. On the one hand is the idea that language education, and particularly English language education, may cause development. The suggestion above that the presence of English in a school curriculum may in fact have negative consequences in terms of keeping other, more useful, languages and subjects out, already points to the issue that English may be negatively related to development. At the very least, for some sort of causality to be shown, the argument would need to be based on far more complex understandings about how language education may be related to change. The second major problem is that the argument above only suggests that English may help people "escape from grinding poverty". Thus, any form of gain is discussed in terms of individual or group escape rather than systemic change. It seems to me that if we want to discuss a relationship between language and development, we need to address ways in which language education may be related to other forms of positive change rather than in terms of escape. Indeed it might well be argued that escape from poverty through English (which still in any case needs to be demonstrated) perpetuates inequality and holds back development since it only provides access (for some) to inequitably distributed resources rather than change the distribution of those resources. At the very least, we need to understand these issues as related in complex, contextual ways. Indeed at this point, we need to address a whole series of questions about what we mean by development, how language education may be related to it, and what different contextual factors may lead to very different configurations of useful language education for different people in different places. Language in relationship with development In this paper, therefore, I want to discuss some of the basic problems involved in language and development. First of all, I would like to dwell on some different possible relationships between the notions of language and development. Given that our overall topic here is not language development (therefore to do with language learning and teaching themselves) but rather with language AND development, we need to ask how the processes of language learning and teaching may be related to broader processes of social, cultural, political and economic development. The ‘and’ here suggests little more than a conjunction of terms. If we substitute various prepositions for this, however, we get various other possibilities: Language as development, language in development, language for development, and language of development. Language as development is akin to the notion discussed above, where language development is in itself the developmental goal. In this sense, then, which might be glossed as ‘language teaching and external funding’, development is an assumed goal of external funders — aid organizations, the World Bank, NGOs etc — and language education is one particular funded aspect of development programs. Development in this context, therefore, comes to mean little more than improving language education with funding from outside both state and commercial systems. This, then, is the first possible meaning of language and development, where language development (i.e. improvements in language education, particularly in dominant languages such as English) is assumed to equate with overall development. While making language usefully central to our concerns here, this first meaning suggests that language development is the same as language and development. Language for development, by contrast, tends to distance the two processes, suggesting that the main issue here is one of improving language capacities so that people can better participate in development projects. Thus, while on the one hand this usefully distances itself from the assumption that language improvement is development, on the other hand this position tends to accord only a functional role to language as a tool to gain access to the development process. In terms of English language teaching, language for development is concerned merely with teaching English in order that people can participate in business, agriculture, trade and the like. Language in development (and cf Markee, 1999) seems to take us further than these two positions by asking what the role of language education may be in relationship to processes of development. Of course, this still leaves open the question of what development may be, but it enables us to see language education not as development in itself, nor as merely a tool to gain access to development, but rather as an important interrelated piece of the puzzle. Finally, language of development points to a very different issue, namely the need to look at the discourses of development, the ways in which development is constructed as a field of practice and knowledge. I shall return later to discuss the question of the importance of always looking at the language of development while we try at the same time to work out how language may operate in development. In order to try to open up discussion of this issue, I shall look at three related sets of problems: the problem of development, the problem of culture and the problem of language. The first set of questions have to do with the whole notion of development and the relatively recent addition of the notion of sustainability to development. A crucial question here is: What images of development and sustainability are put into place by language programs? This leads to the second set of issues: What images of cultural difference and what forms of cultural exchange are produced in language programs? And finally: What images of language are conveyed through language programs and how do these relate to culture and development? In the conclusion I shall return to the question: What broad considerations does this suggest for language and development?
The problem of development Development has of course come in for a great deal of criticism over the years. Of particular significance was the work that showed how much development aid was ultimately self-interested: it only served to recreate bonds of economic dependency (see, for example, Preston, 1986). Although there is considerable debate about when the current notion of development came in to being , it is nevertheless useful to observe that economic advantage was for a long time at the heart of much imperial education policy. According to the 1854 Despatch from the East India Company, which was to set the educational policy in India and elsewhere for the rest of the century and beyond, and which put firmly in place a principal of the moral duty to educate and a policy of vernacular education, there were more material reasons for providing education to the Indian population, since such an education will teach the natives of India the marvellous results of the employment of labor and capital, rouse them to emulate us in the development of the vast resources of their country, guide them in their efforts and gradually, but certainly, confer upon them all the advantages which accompany the healthy increase of wealth and commerce; and, at the same time, secure to us a larger and more certain supply of many articles necessary for our manufactures and extensively consumed by all classes of our population, as well as an almost inexhaustible demand for the produce of British labor. (Bureau of Education, 1922, p. 365) A critique that only looks at economic concerns, however, has a number of shortcomings: Since it is based on the premise that the notion of development was disingenuous because it in fact sought economic servility rather than independence, it suggests that where economic gain can be shown to have occurred, presumably this was then development. But as many other critiques suggest, alongside the notion of economic development, many other problematic relations are put into play, including development as: patronising charity politics, a eurocentric model of progress, and a discourse that represents and produces the Other. Criticising aid programs for their failure to incorporate local needs and ideas, Morris (1991) argues that development aid is frequently an attempt to assuage "the collective guilt induced by the legacy of our colonial predecessors" (p.1). Thus, rather than being aimed principally at helping in the process of development, its central concern is with assisting Europeans with their guilt over the past. This view, Morris suggests, rests on what he sees as "a peculiarly Christian insistence on the ultimate triumph of altruism" (p.3). Like landed gentry handing out food at the gates of their mansions, this aspect of development has more to do with using charity to improve how one feels about oneself rather than actually trying to change inequitable conditions. A major focus of critique is that models of development have been profoundly eurocentric, conflating development, modernization and westernization, and promoting particular worldviews, cultures and technicist rationalism. Thus, the whole notion of development was based on the notion that in order to become more developed, societies needed to follow a ‘western’ pattern of modernization, politics, economy, education, language policy, and so on. The assumptions of European and American superiority that underpin such a view have a long history: According to McGee (1995), "in the sense of the assumption of European supremacy, New Zealand, Australia and American attitudes towards their Pacific neighbours are no different from the French or the British towards Indo-China or the Middle East during the colonial period" (p.194). Thus, even if colonial exploitation is no longer the context in which development is promoted, the assumptions about the path it should take remain the same. While the eurocentrism of development models frequently leads to a singular path of upwards development, it also simultaneously produces images of the Other, images of non-development that need to be overcome. Arturo Escobar (1995), in his fierce critique of the ways in which "the ‘Third World’ has been produced by the discourses and practices of development since their inception in the early post-World War II period" (p.4), argues that development discourse " has been the central and most ubiquitous operator of the politics of representation and identity in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the post-World War II period" (p.214). According to Escobar these areas of the world have suffered "a succession of regimes of representation" that originate in colonialism and continue into the discourses of modernity. "From the will to civilization in the nineteenth century to today, violence has been engendered through representation" (p.214). Thus, as Escobar reminds us, "in many places there are worlds that development, even today and at this moment, is bent on destroying" (p.226). It is this concern that can be taken up by a focus on the language of development, an issue to which I shall return. Sustainable development Despite these critiques of the concept of development, there remains a need to have available some notion of possible development, betterment or improvement. The notion of sustainable development has, to some extent, stepped into the gap here, linked as it is to notions of local involvement, continuity, and ecological soundness. The notion of ‘sustainable development’, however, is by no means unitary or uncontested. Streeten (unpublished manuscript cited in Goulet, 1995) suggests a range of different meanings of sustainable development: 1. The maintenance, replacement and growth of capital assets; 2. Maintaining the physical environment for people’s well-being; 3. Developing a resilient system that can resist shocks and strains; 4. Avoiding burdening future generations with debts; 5. Political and administrative sustainability (participation); 6. Handing over projects to local participants. All share the common goal of concern for the future and the viability of the project in the long term. On the other hand, they differ in terms of their focus on capital accumulation, the environment, resistant systems, avoiding debt, involving local participants, and handing projects over. Language in sustainable development programs may be viewed along similar lines, covering anything from an economically sustainable program, or a hope that external funding will go on forever, to a focus on local involvement, handing the program over to local management, or even making discussion of the larger context of sustainable development part of the curriculum. I shall return to these issues later. But not only are the meanings of sustainable development varied; it is also a contested notion. As Redclift (1994) points out, to the extent that sustainability is wedded to the notion of development, it represents something of a high-water mark of the modernist tradition. And yet, since many proponents of sustainable development also argue that sustainable development must be based on local, cultural understandings of the environment, development and change, sustainability also seems wedded to a more postmodernist vision of difference. Thus there is an interesting tension between the modernist progressivism of development discourse and the postmodern particularism of aspects of sustainability. Other critiques have also pointed out that this move to take greater account of local participation still nevertheless continue with many of the great exclusions that marked modernist development discourse. Thus, feminist critiques of sustainable development have pointed to the continued exclusion and marginalization of women from development paradigms (Harcourt, 1994). It has also been suggested that sustainable development has become something of an unquestioned given, a notion so linked to the moral discourses of enviromentalism that it is hard to question its practices. Adams (1995) suggests that in spite of the multiple meanings of the notion, sustainable development has "colonized academic discussion of development", and is rarely given any careful scrutiny or critical analysis (p.87). The discourse of sustainable development, he argues, has its origins not so much in development theory as in "Northern environmentalism" (p.88), and thus it is tied more to a form of environmental moralising than to more direct concerns for local participation in local based projects for improvement of different conditions. Looking at the ways in which sustainable development derives from "technocentrist environmentalism", Adams argues that it "shares the dominant industrialist and modernist ideology of ...developmentalism", based as it is on rational capitalist planning models (pp. 89-90). Thus, sustainable development may be seen "as simply one more transient label on the trickle of capital flows of aid donors from the industrialized North, and something that allowed ‘business as usual’ by international capital" (p.99). Escobar (1995) argues along similar lines when he suggests that the introduction of the notion of sustainable development, "inaugurated a period of unprecedented gluttony in the history of vision and knowledge with the concomitant rise of a global ‘ecocracy’" (p.193). According to Escobar, sustainable development remains locked within a logic of management, a world in which "The Western scientist continues to speak for the Earth" (p.194), a view of the world in which ‘development experts’ can help poor countries move smoothly towards development by a process of rational planning. Adams (1995) also links sustainable development to Northern ‘preservationism’ as it seeks to protect and conserve: "By the 1970s, international conservation was as much part of the growing global hegemony of western culture as capitalist economic development and industrialization were part of the project of ‘developmentalism’" (p.93). This notion of ‘preservationism’ is a crucial one here since it links both to the broader question of representation and to concerns in language maintenance (see below). Such preservationism may be seen as part of an Orientalist drive to create a notion of an idealised past in which all was sustainable: "Efforts in the post-colonial world to reinvent a pre-colonial Eden that never existed in fact have been no less violent in their scripting of identity than those that practice domination in the name of development" (Manzo, 1995: 238). I shall return to these issues later. To conclude this brief discussion of (sustainable) development, it is worth reiterating the point that although we need some model of possible development here (the argument is not that development cannot or does not happen), there are also several problematic elements of development discourse that raise important questions for the following discussion of language and culture: Development, it seems almost by definition, seems to imply an upward, linear path of development that is easily conflated with notions of modernization and westernization; the addition of a notion of sustainability or of alternative development does not do enough to destabilise the discursive relations this puts in place; development puts into play a series of representations which continue to construct the recipients of development aid as backward, underdeveloped, static, traditional; sustainable development and related constructs often lead to a model of ‘preservation’.
The problem of language While we need to problematize the notions of development and sustainable development, we are also faced by a particular challenge related to language: what models of language in the world are we using to understand the role of language education in development? In this section, then, I shall discuss a range of possible understandings of English in the world in order to see how they relate to questions of development. These models I shall term the colonial celebratory, laissez-faire liberalism, modernization, imperialism, linguistic hybridity, and postcolonial performativity. Colonial-celebration I do not intend to dwell on this position in detail since a number of us have already documented it at length (see, for example, Bailey, 1991; Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 1998b). Simply put, this is a position that trumpets the benefits of English (or, of course, other languages in other contexts) over other languages, suggesting that English has both intrinsic (the nature of the language) and extrinsic (the functions of the language) qualities superior to other languages. I use the term colonial in conjunction with celebratory here because I believe these celebrations of the spread of English, its qualities and characteristics, have a long and colonial history, and form part of what I have elsewhere called the ‘adherence of discourses’ (1998b), the ways in which particular discourses adhere to English. Although I am giving this position short thrift here, it is worth observing that it is backed up by a very long history of glorifying English, and that it remains extremely popular, as shown by the public response to writers such as Honey (1997). Most importantly, this view has no place for a sense of diversity: to promote diversity is simply to deny people access to the most important language of our time, English. Modernization The second framing of English sees its significance less in terms of inherent internal qualities and more in terms of the roles that English is deemed to play in the process of development and modernization. There are several ways in which these connections are drawn: First, English is assumed to be a language that is better suited for modern use, for science, technology, global communication, and so forth. Hogben’s (1963) proposal for Essential World English, for example, suggests a global role for English in which it serves people around the world as a "medium of communication about what will matter to most of us in what we hope will be the One World of Tomorrow" (p.7), a universal second language "for informative communication across their own frontiers about issues of common interest to themselves and others" (p.20), while other languages play a role as "a home tongue for love-making, religion, verse-craft, back chat and inexact topics in general" (p.20). This pernicious dichotomy survives in many more recent formulations of English as the global language of communication, with local languages relegated only to the role of local, personal, traditional topics. According to Hogben all language planners agree that we need a bilingual world "in which one language has priority by common consent as the sole medium of informative communication between speech communities which properly prefer to retain their native habits of discourse for reasons which have little or no relevance to the exacting semantic demands of science" (pp. 28-9). As Dua (1994) has argued in the context of India, such a formula needs to be resisted if other languages are to be given a chance to play other than these ‘traditional’ roles. This construction of English as the language best suited to the modern world is constantly bolstered by images of English that associate it with computers, technology, science, tourism, diplomacy, internationalisation, globalisation, modern financial markets, the internet, e-learning, whatever is new. Such images are constantly produced in advertising for language schools, English language teaching conferences, textbooks, and other products associated with English. We live now amid a vast number of visual and graphic associations between English and modernization. Finally, English is linked to processes of modernization not only as the most modern of languages, but also through its supposed role as the means to social and material change. Thus, as in the discussion above of English as the key to poverty, the very presence and use of English is seen as indelibly linked to processes of modernization. As I suggested, any such connections need to be demonstrated not assumed; and the role of English in potentially changing people’s lives must be seen in the context of the potential harms it may bring to other languages, and the role it may play in the reproduction of inequality. Recent debates in the Philippines about the notion of English for Global Competitiveness point to some of these concerns. As Ordoñez (1999) put it "English continues to occupy the place of privilege — it being the language of the ruling system, government, education, business and trade, and diplomacy... English for global competitiveness fits into the type of education that would conform to the requirements of an export-oriented economy pushed by the IMF-World Bank for the Philippines" (p.19). Ordoñez goes on to suggest that "The role of Philippine education ... seems to be that of supplying the world market economy with a docile and cheap labor force who are trained in English and the vocational and technical skills required by that economy. As it is we do have a decided advantage in the export market of domestic helpers and labourers. Cite their knowledge of English as that advantage" (p.20). Santos (1999) suggests that "to push our global competitiveness as a people and as a nation with and through English Studies, we must be sensitive to the cultural violence that the pursuit of such a goal had wrought on our people in this ending century, and must yet impose on majority of our people at the present time" (p.25). Such discussions raise much more serious concerns for how we might understand relationships between English, development and modernization.
Laissez-faire liberalism The most common line on English within the fields of English language teaching and applied linguistics tends to take a more ‘neutral’ line than either the colonial-celebratory or modernization arguments, espousing what I call a liberal laissez-faire attitude. The most recent example of this line of thinking is David Crystal’s (1997) globally marketed book on the global spread of English. What Crystal tries to argue for is a complementarity between a support for the benefits of English as a global means of communication and the importance of multilingualism, a balance between the dual values of "international intelligibility" and "historical identity". On the one hand we have all the advantages created by the spread of English: ease of communication, global travel and communication etc; while on the other we work to sustain local cultures and traditions. All we need in this way of thinking is to celebrate universalism while maintaining diversity. The TESOL organization also reflects this naive liberal idealism in its mission statement "to strengthen the effective teaching and learning of English around the world while respecting individuals’ language rights". Unfortunately the very seductiveness of this easy formulation makes its social and political naivety dangerous. Reviewing Crystal’s book, for example, John Hanson (former director-general of the British Council) is able to view everything in terms of individual choice. For Hanson, the spread of English is the result of "countless millions of acts of choice, by students, teachers, employers and the employed who have no interest in the health, future, spread, or whatever of the English language. What ‘drives’ them is a view of their job prospects, their relationship with the rest of the world, their excitement in youth culture, a wish to be insiders, to be in touch" (1997: 22). Such a view of individual agency and choice fails to account for social, cultural, political and economic forces that compromise and indeed produce such choices. And such a view leads all too easily back to a colonial-celebratory mode: "English speakers, relax: English is streets ahead and fast drawing away from the rest of the chasing pack...On it still strides: we can argue what globalisation is until the cows come home — but that globalisation exists is beyond question, with English its accompanist. The accompanist is, of course, indispensable to the performance" (ibid.). Once again, these liberal laissez-faire views are inadequate because they fail to account for the power of English, and thus the inequitable relationship between English and local languages. A simplistic view of complementary language use — English will be used for international and some intranational uses, while local languages will be used for local uses — does not take into account the far more complex social and political context of language use. As Dua (1994) points out, looking at the context of India, such a view is quite inadequate: "the complementarity of English with indigenous languages tends to go up in favour of English partly because it is dynamic and cumulative in nature and scope, partly because it is sustained by socioeconomic and market forces and partly because the educational system reproduced and legitimatizes the relations of power and knowledge implicated with English" (p.132). Phillipson (1999) has recently argued that Crystal’s attempt to describe the global spread of English in ‘neutral’, ‘apolitical’ terms results in nothing but "an uncritical endorsement of capitalism, its science and technology, a modernization ideology, monolingualism as a norm, ideological globalization and internationalization, transnationalization, the Americanization and homogenization of world culture, linguistic, culture and media imperialism" (p. 274). Thus, the ideology of laissez-faire liberalism, with its emphases on personal choice, neutrality and complementarity may be seen as potentially the most dangerous of these three paradigms. Language ecology, language rights, linguistic imperialism Arguing against apolitical understandings of English, Dua (1994) goes on to argue that "It must be realized that language is basically involved with class, power and knowledge. Unless the newly emerging classes associated with the Indian languages organize themselves into counter-hegemonic struggle and fight for a different political, social and cultural arrangement of power and knowledge, they will not only fail in constraining the expanding and strengthening hold of English but also contribute to the marginalization of their languages and cultures. They will thus betray the cause of both the language and cultural renaissance and the destiny of [hu]mankind" (p.133). A number of approaches to language planning have developed frameworks for starting to address such concerns. Tollefson’s (1991) ‘historical-structural’ approach to language planning views language policy as "one mechanism by which the interests of dominant sociopolitical groups are maintained and the seeds of transformation are developed" (p.32). Tollefson’s ultimate interests in looking at language policy are to work towards a more equitable world: "To understand the impact of language policy upon the organization and function of society, language policy must be interpreted within a framework which emphasizes power and competing interests. That is, policy must be seen within the context of its role in serving the interests of the state and the groups that dominate it" (p.201). Tollefson goes on to argue for the importance of an understanding of language rights. This means that we need to go beyond a general respect for diversity and instead view access to education and other domains of use of the mother tongue as a fundamental human right: "A commitment to democracy means that the use of the mother tongue at work and in school is a fundamental human right" (p.211). A similar perspective has also been developed by Robert Phillipson and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. Drawing on Tsuda’s (1994) distinction between a "diffusion-of-English paradigm" and an "Ecology-of-language paradigm", Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas (1996) argue that rather than accepting policies that promote the global spread of English, we should work towards the preservation of language ecologies. This notion of language ecology suggests the importance of "the cultivation and preservation of languages" (Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1996: 441) in a way parallel to how we understand natural ecologies. M?hlhäusler (1996) has developed this idea considerably, arguing that the introduction of languages and literacy into particular language ecologies may have devastating affects on other languages and their uses. Taken alone, however, the language ecology metaphor is limited since it relies so heavily on a notion of what is ‘natural’ and therefore on what may at times appear a conservative notion of preservation (and compare my earlier comments about ‘preservationism’ and sustainable development). Conservation may easily slide into conservativism. Like M?hlhäusler and Tsuda, therefore, Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas consider two components essential to this view of language ecology: the external threat posed by dominant languages such as English (linguistic imperialism), and the grounds for arguing for internal support for minority languages (language rights). A term that Skutnabb-Kangas (1998) makes central to her view of the inequitable allocation of language rights is ‘linguicism’. Linguicism, she argues — akin to racism and ethnicism — is a sort of "linguistically argued racism" (1998: 16), a process by which an unequal division of power is produced and maintained according to a division between groups on the basis of the language they speak. Phillipson has taken up this term and looked specifically at one form of such linguicism, namely what he calls "linguistic imperialism", and particularly English linguistic imperialism. It is important to view Phillipson’s arguments on linguistic imperialism in this light, for although his concerns about the global spread of English can be taken on their own, they are also deeply connected with this threat to linguistic human rights. What Phillipson tries to do is to show that there are significant relationships between frameworks of global imperialism — that is to say continuing relationships of global inequality in terms, following Galtung (1980) of economic, political, military, communicative (communication and transport), cultural and social imperialism — and the global spread of English. English linguistic imperialism Phillipson defines in the following way: "the dominance of English is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages (1992: 47). That is to say, the dominant role of English in the world today is maintained and promoted through a system both of material or institutional structures (for example through English maintaining its current position as the dominant language of the Internet) and of ideological positions (arguments that promote English as a superior language). The important point with Phillipson’s view is to understand what it can and cannot do. As he suggests, the issue for him is "structural power" (p.72), not intentions, and not local effects. He is interested in "English linguistic hegemony" which can be understood as "the explicit and implicit beliefs, purposes, and activities which characterize the ELT profession and which contribute to the maintenance of English as a dominant language" (p.73). Thus, it is the ways that English is promoted through multiple agencies and to the exclusion of other languages that is the issue. What this of course lacks is a view of how English is taken up, how people use English, why people choose to use English. As Canagarajah (1999a) comments, "In considering how social, economic, governmental, and cultural institutions effect inequality, his perspective becomes rather too impersonal and global. What is sorely missed is the individual, the particular. It is important to find out how linguistic hegemony is experienced in the day-to-day life of the people and communities in the periphery. How does English compete for dominance with other languages in the streets, markets, homes, schools, and villages of periphery communities?" (pp. 43-44). Thus, if a framework such as Phillipson's is used only to map out ways in which English has been deliberately spread, and to show how such policies and practices are connected to larger global forces, it can be useful. But the moment it slips into apparently implying effects of such promotion, it is limited. What Phillipson shows, therefore, is how and for what purposes English is deliberately promoted and spread. What he does not show is the effects of that spread in terms of what people do with English. It is perhaps the very power of Phillipson’s framework that is also its weakness. The main mode of opposition to this external threat posed by dominant languages is through a notion of language rights (Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996; Phillipson, 1998; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1998). Reviewing various documents on human rights, they suggest that there is little provision for the positive right to education in a mother tongue. Thus, Skutnabb-Kangas argues, "we are still living with linguistic wrongs" which are a product of the belief ("monolingual reductionism") in the normality of monolingualism and the dangers of multilingualism to the security of the nation state. Both, she suggests, are dangerous myths. "Unless we work fast", she argues, "excising the cancer of monolingual reductionism may come too late, when the patient, the linguistic (and cultural) diversity in the world, is already beyond saving" (p.12). What is proposed , then, is that the "right to identify with, to maintain and to fully develop one’s mother tongue(s)" should be acknowledged as "a self-evident, fundamental individual linguistic human right" (p.22). These "universal linguistic human rights should be guaranteed for an individual in relation to the mother tongue(s), in relation to an official language (and thus in relation to bilingualism), in relation to a possible language shift, and in relation to drawing profit from education as far as the medium of education is concerned" (1998: 22; emphasis in original). This, then, is a powerful argument in favour of the support for diversity in terms of fundamental human rights. Where laissez-faire liberalism supports diversity in terms of pluralism for its own sake, and within a framework a comfortable complementarity with other languages, the language rights argument supplies a moral imperative to support minority languages as they are threatened by other languages. It is the strength of this position that gives weight to Tollefson’s (1991) demand that an applied linguist committed to democracy must also show "a commitment to the struggle for language rights" (p.211). Powerful though such arguments are, there are also some concerns here. First, there is at times a tendency to slip into simplistic dichotomizations: Skutnabb-Kangas (1998), for example, talks of the way language perpetuates the division between "the A-team, the elites of the world, and the B-team, the dominated, ordinary people" (p.16). Such dichotomising between the "haves and have-nots" can obscure social realities far more than they reveal them. Second, there is a related tendency to then suggest that those that have rights have full access to all aspects of language, while those without such rights do not: "Linguistic majorities, speakers of a dominant language, usually enjoy all those linguistic human rights which can be seen as fundamental, regardless of how they are defined. Most linguistic minorities do not enjoy these rights. It is only a few hundred of the world’s 6-7,000 languages that have any kind of official status, and it is only speakers of official languages who enjoy all linguistic human rights" (Phillipson, Rannut and Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994: 1-2; emphasis in original). My concern here is that while an important struggle is being fought here on one front, on another there is a problem that the belief that speakers of "official languages" enjoy "all linguistic human rights" may overlook many other concerns to do with access and representation in language, concerns that are significant for speakers of both official and non-official languages (see Pennycook, 1998a). Others concerns have to do with the difficulties in translating broad appeals to language rights into legal definitions, and in using the notion of human rights as a universal concept. Coulmas (1998), for example, draws attention to the problems involved in defining what a language and a speech community is (see also Pennycook, 1998a) and the problems in getting states to adhere to such necessarily vague definitions. "While general proclamations of linguistic human rights may not do much harm," he suggests, "it is doubtful that they can be translated into law" (p.72). Rassool (1998) and I (Pennycook, 1998a) have also questioned the possibility of using human rights discourse as an unacceptably fundamentalist claim to morality in the contemporary world. Rassool argues that the complex, interconnected nature of the modern world means we have to investigate other ways of looking at questions of language rights: "in the light of these dynamic changes taking place globally and nationally can the argument for a universalizing discourse on cultural and linguistic pluralism be sustained?" (p.98). Finally, Coulmas also asks whether the notion that language shift is necessarily a catastrophe may be a passing ideological fashion, based as it is on a "nineteenth-century romantic idea that pegs human dignity as well as individual and collective identity to individual languages" (1998: 71). Thus, while these perspectives take us far beyond the apolitical stances outlined above, while it is clearly the case that many languages are under threat, and while there are strong arguments to be made in favour of educational and other rights in mother tongues, there remain questions about the extent to which a model of linguistic imperialism and language rights is adequate for the task of understanding how languages are used. Linguistic hybridity Rajagopalan (1999) critiques the notion of linguistic imperialism and suggests that "the very charges being pressed against the hegemony of the English language and its putative imperialist pretensions themselves bear the imprint of a way of thinking about language moulded in an intellectual climate of excessive nationalist fervour and organized marauding of the wealth of alien nations — an intellectual climate where identities were invariably thought of in all-or-nothing terms" (1999: 201). Thus Rajagopolan is suggesting that the critical discourse employed by notions such as linguistic imperialism draw on the same modernist European frameworks that have been the cause of precisely what they seek to critique. In place of linguistic imperialism, Rajagopalan argues for a ‘world Englishes’ perspective that focuses on how languages change and adapt. This perspective (see, for example, Kachru, 1990), which has become something of an orthodoxy within applied linguistics, looks at the many new and changing forms of English around the world, suggesting that rather than an imperial imposition, the many new Englishes (Indian, Singaporean, Nigerian etc) are hybrid forms produced by appropriating English. Although such an argument provides a useful corrective to an over-deterministic position on linguistic imperialism, there are dangers with this position. While acknowledging the problems with the absolutism of the notion of linguistic imperialism (LI), Canagarajah (1999b) also takes the world Englishes ‘linguistic hybridity’ (LH) position of Rajagopalan to task for its apolitical relativism. "While LI is deterministic in perceiving these constructs as always pliable in the hands of dominant forces, LH is anti-nomian, in seeing them as perpetually unstable, and resisting control. While LI is activist in struggling against hegemonic discourses to reconstruct a more democratic order, LH leads to apathy (as languages are seen as deconstructing themselves, transcending domination) or even playfulness (as the provision of new meanings to these constructs is treated as subverting the status quo)." (1999b: 207). Thus, in avoiding the determinism of some critical stances, we need to be cautious not to slide back into apolitical relativism. We must be cautious not to lose sight of the very real forces of global capital and media while also seeking to understand the response to cultural and linguistic spread and not assuming its instant effects. Postcolonial performativity In trying to find a possible way of thinking about English that acknowledges the significance of both the linguistic ecology/ imperialism/ rights perspective and the notions of appropriation and hybridity, I have started thinking in terms of what I term postcolonial performativity. Like Canagarajah (1999a), I think we need both a political understanding of the global role of English and a means to understand contextually how English is used, taken up, changed. The notion of appropriation is crucial to postcolonialism, since a central part of the postcolonial is not only a critique of the ‘metropolitan’ categories of knowledge and culture, but also a taking over of and reuse of language, culture and knowledge. But postcolonialism also demands that we work contextually. Thus, in trying to explore further what I earlier (1994) termed the ‘worldliness of English’, postcolonial performativity suggests that to understand what role English plays in particular contexts we need specific sociologies of those contexts. If we start to pursue such questions in terms of local contexts of language, it becomes possible to consider using English not so much in terms of some inevitable commonality, but rather — as with Judith Butler’s (1990) understanding of gender as something performed rather than pregiven — as another form of ‘performativity’. Thus we need both a more complex understanding of globalization and a more complex understanding of language. Appadurai (1990) suggests the "new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models" (p.296). This position moves towards the "conceptualization of global culture less in terms of alleged homogenizing processes (e.g., theories which present cultural imperialism, Americanization and mass consumer culture as a proto-universal culture riding on the back of Western economic and political domination) and more in terms of the diversity, variety and richness of popular and local discourses, codes and practices which resist and play-back systematicity and order" (Featherstone, 1990: 2). From this point of view, both the liberal approach of Crystal, with its global and local languages in mutual relationship, or the more critical view of Phillipson and others, with its local diversity threatened by global homogeneity, may be inadequate. But so too is a view that suggests that forms of language and culture are easily taken up and changed. Thus, while never losing sight of the very real forces of global capital and media, we need, at the very least, to understand the response to cultural spread and not assume its instant effects. As Claire Kramsch (1993) suggests, we need to start thinking here of what is produced in cultural encounters, not just homogeneity or heterogeneity, imperialism or resistance, but rather what ‘third cultures’ or ‘third spaces’ are constantly being created.
The problem of culture Finally, I want to suggest that one of the major problems that continues to constrain successful language development (and other) projects is a lack of adequate models for understanding and working with cultural difference in language education. There are two principal concerns here: First, language education has for too long been considered within a framework of language teaching methods, which on the one hand discounts the much larger concerns of development and language discussed above, and on the other hand, constructs language teaching in terms of a Eurocentric path of upward progress. Second, much work in language education and applied linguistics has operated with simplistic categorisations of difference that construct identity along lines of fixed characteristics. The developmental model of Methods The history of language teaching has been dominated by a Eurocentric version of the upward progression of teaching methods. The popular version of this myth is that much of language teaching prior to the 20th century and most language teaching outside the Western industrialised nations has been conducted according to a so-called grammar-translation methodology. In the wealthy industrialised nations this was then replaced by a revolution in language teaching that focused on the Direct method, followed by a series of methods, starting with audiolingualism, developed during and after WWII and employing structural linguistics and behaviourist psychology, and then various contenders for method status, including the audiovisual method, cognitive code, a cluster of new methods that emerged in the 1970s including the Silent Way, Suggestopedia, and Total Physical Response; and finally the modern era of communicative language teaching and task-based learning. There are several problems with this version of the history of language teaching as an upward history of methods. First, the notion of methods itself is a highly problematic, reductive way to think about language teaching (Pennycook, 1989). As Clarke (1983) suggests, "the term ‘method’ is a label without substance" (p.109). This leads to a narrow focus on what language teaching comprises (thus ignoring large domains of language teaching, such as which languages get taught, or what the cultural and ideological content of language teaching may be). Second, this history is an ethnocentric and developmentalist history. It is a result of a particular telling of history, a product of the "method boom" (Stern, 1985: 249) of the 1970’s, an attempt to justify this faddish, market- and career-driven era in North America by attempting to locate it within an unfolding history. Most importantly, to the extent that this history presents an upward path of development, from weaker methods to more modern teaching, it suggests a problematic progressivism, whereby whatever is happening now is presumed to be superior to what happened before. Such claims are often made by contrasting a modern "scientific approach to the study of language and of language learning" with a past guided only by tradition (Richards and Rogers, 1986: 8). Yet, as Kelly’s (1969) work suggests, the history of language teaching has been far more cyclical than linear: "Nobody really knows what is new or what is old in present day language teaching procedures. There has been a vague feeling that modern experts have spent their time in discovering what other men[sic] have forgotten" 1969: ix). Thus, in the international context this view of methods reproduces highly problematic scales of relative development. As Tang and Absalom (1998) suggest, much of the discussion of ELT in China "concentrates on the ‘backwardness’ of Chinese EFL in the eyes of critics who contrast it with Western methods often applied in ESL and second language teaching" (p.118). Most of this writing, they suggest, "has become polarised, focussing on the contrasts between the ‘traditional’ aspects of Chinese EFL and the ‘progressive’ aspects of Western second language teaching" (p.119). The Othering of learners If on the one hand there has been a tendency to work with developmental models of teaching methods that ignore alternative ways of teaching, and indeed consign them to the category of ‘traditional’, there has also been a major tendency to operate with static models of cultural difference, static definitions of culture that dichotomise a West/East, Them/Us polarity of difference: what I have termed maps of the other. Such maps have a long history and centre around the process of fixing the Other. I could give dozens of such examples (see Pennycook, 1998b) but I shall illustrate my point with just one, drawn from an article on Chinese education in A Cyclopedia of Education published in 1911 (Monroe, 1911), in which Isaac Headland, professor in the Imperial University, Peking, explains that
Here we see repeated the classic colonial images of a dormant and passive people, unable to think scientifically or produce commercially (two of the great virtues of imperialism). Many such fixed cultural images have their origins in colonial relations (see Pennycook, 1998b). As Alatas (1977) illustrates in his book The Myth of the Lazy Native, the image of lazy Malays, Indonesians and Filipinos was a view that developed under colonial rule as colonists combined their derogatory images of native peoples with the view that they were lazy if they did not participate in the colonial economy. This idea that native peoples were lazy "was an important element in the ideology of colonial capitalism. It was a major justification for territorial conquest, since the degraded image of the native was basic to colonial ideology" (p.215). Cultural fixity is not tied only to ‘negative’ images, however; other fixed images may, to a degree, be seen as ‘positive’, such as "the friendly, fun-loving Filipinos" or "the happy, gentle Thais", common images revealed in a study by the Asian Society (1979) of how Asia is represented in 260 American textbooks.
I have summarised the common constructions of difference to be found in applied linguistic and ELT writing in the table above. Such ‘maps of the Other’ can be seen as instances of Orientalism. Two recent articles have specifically drawn this connection between Orientalism and ELT in Japan. Drawing on the work of Said (1978) Susser (1998) convincingly shows how a great deal of writing on ESL/EFL in Japan can be described as Orientalist. Analysing writing on Japan according to the Said-inspired categories of Othering (dichotomous productions of Self and Other; East and West; Confucian and Christian), stereotyping (fixed assumptions about Japanese as group-oriented, hierarchical, authoritarian, passive, silent); representing Japan typically as homogeneous and harmonious; and essentializing by talking of ‘Japan’, ‘the Japanese’. Susser concludes this comprehensive study of texts on Japan by suggesting that "there is considerable Orientalism in the ESL/EFL literature on Japan" (p.63). Thus, he suggests, the point "is not that there are occasional stereotypes or factual errors; ... these fictions have been woven into a pervasive discourse that shapes our descriptions and then our perceptions of Japanese learners and classrooms" (p.64). Kubota (1999) also looks critically at ways in which Japanese and other cultures are constructed in relationship to ELT. She points to the ways in which attempts to understand cultural difference in language education "have tended to dichotomize Western culture and Eastern culture and to draw rigid cultural boundaries between them. They have given labels such as individualism, self-expression, critical and analytic thinking, and extending knowledge to Western cultures on the one hand, and collectivism, harmony, indirection, memorization, and conserving knowledge to Asian cultures on the other" (p.14; emphasis in original). As Kubota points out, such views are based on a form of cultural determinism that reproduces colonial relations of Self and Other (and see Pennycook, 1998b). Distinctions such as extending knowledge vs conserving knowledge, for example, reproduce the distinction between changing, developing and modern cultures on the one hand, and static, conservative and traditional cultures on the other. As Kubota goes on to show, the Japanese themselves have also played a role here with their own particular productions of the uniqueness of Japanese culture. Even approaches that critique the cultural stereotypes prevalent in so much writing on cultural difference in education still frequently reproduce the same cultural dichotomizations. Thus Littlewood’s (1999) exploration of learner autonomy in South East Asia criticises cultural stereotypes but goes on to reproduce them in a series of charts with the proviso that they are only tendencies and do not apply to everyone. Such an approach may criticise the stereotype, but at the same time it reproduces the same patterns of difference, thus failing to take into account the ways in which these categorisations reproduce cultural fixity (see Pennycook, 1998b). Thus while some work suggests a certain caution and argues that we should not overgeneralize, or that these characteristics only apply to some people, this fails to account for the question of representation, and the problem that such models still produce forms of cultural fixity. An irony here is that work that seeks to ask the important question of appropriacy, often then falls into this trap of reproducing cultural dichotomies. ‘Is communicative language teaching appropriate in Vietnam?’, therefore, becomes a question with the answer ‘no’ because ‘Western’ culture is like this and ‘Eastern’/Vietnamese culture like that (cf. Achren and Keovilay, 1998) . Similarly, Adrian Holliday, in his key book, on ‘Appropriate methodology’, problematizes simplistic cultural dichotomies while at the same time putting into play broad dichotomous frameworks of collectionist vs integrationist orientations suggesting that language educators in the public sector in the less industrialized countries are "essentially collectionist", rendering them predefined before they have had a chance to move.
Towards appropriable pedagogies To conclude, I shall try to pull together the interrelated themes I have been discussing here. I suggested that there are a number of difficulties in trying to understand relationships between language and development. The notion of development itself is a problematic category, all too often implying an upward, linear path of progress that is easily conflated with notions of modernization and westernization, and a series of representations which continue to construct the recipients of development aid as backward, underdeveloped, static, and traditional. As with views of English or of English language teaching as modern, preferable and new, developmentalism divides the world in detrimental ways. Sustainability has opened up new directions but does not escape the problematic forms of representation put into play by developmentalism. Like the language ecology paradigm and the static dichotomization of cultural difference, we are left only with the possibility of ‘protectionism’. In addition, there has been inadequate work on establishing how language education might be related to forms of development or change. Sustainable development may be related to language projects in terms of keeping a language project going, making sure that there will be funds for it to continue, that there is enough local expertise for a project to continue, that a language development project fosters independence and not dependence. But all these are internal links that address the sustainability of a language project, not external links that show how language education may be related to development. What I want to ask, by contrast, is this: If we can assume that language and sustainable development mean more than merely sustaining a language program, if, by analogy with other issues in sustainable development that ask about the environment, the legacy more broadly to future generations, then, I think we have a rather different set of questions to pursue. How might language development projects be seen not in terms of their own sustainability but in terms of wider questions of sustainable development? I am concerned here not about the economy and environment so much as issues to do with language and culture. How does a certain language program relate to the sustainability and development of other languages and cultures in the context in which it operates? How in working in the area of language and development can we envisage a version of development that avoids Eurocentrism, developmentalism, preservationism? If, for example, we consider Moffatt’s argument that an implicit aspect of all definitions of sustainable development is "the moral conviction and ethical desirability that the current generation should pass on their inheritance of natural and cultural wealth, not unchanged, but undiminished in potential, to support future generations" (p.32), then we need to ask how (English) language education might try to achieve such goals. If sustainable development ultimately hinges on an argument for the ethical desirability of passing on an undiminished potential of cultural wealth, this needs to be related more explicitly and carefully to changes in language and literacy practices. Language in sustainable development needs to be understood as both locally contingent and globally related, involving local participants in shaping their globally connected lives. As Rassool (1999) puts it in her discussion of literacy and sustainable development:
It may also be useful to distinguish between development in terms of having more and being more (Goulet, 1995). The first is always important as both a significant material base for survival and a progressive improvement of the material conditions of life. But it is also limited as a vision because it is too easily tied to an empty acquisitional materialism, in which development is simply greater access to material goods. The other side of the equation, then, concerns what it means to ‘be more’, to have more possibilities. It is this vision that is expressed educationally in Roger Simon’s (1992) notion of a ‘pedagogy of possibility’. It is this that gives us a sense of education not merely about providing the means of access to material goods but about the possibility of envisioning other possible worlds. For language education, then, we are faced by a an ethical question that asks not only does, say, English provide access to social and economic advance, but also whether teaching English opens up more possible worlds. How we understand the role of language, and in particular of English, in this process will depend very much on the models we use, from colonial celebratory, modernization or laissez-faire liberal views that fail to problematize the role of English and its relationship to other languages, to linguistic imperialism, language rights, language hybridity, and postcolonial performative perspectives that give us ways of understanding language in its political and ethical contexts. It depends very much how we view English in relation to culture and development. What forms of culture and knowledge may be related to English will depend very much on our different views of English and then on how we go about teaching it. Adrian Holliday’s (1994) work, as well as a number of other discussions of teaching approaches in crosscultural contexts, aims to develop teaching methodologies appropriate to the social and cultural context, based on much greater understanding of classrooms and much greater collaboration between what he sees as the ‘two wings’ of ELT. The notion of appropriacy, however, while seemingly a desirable goal, may still put into play problematic dichotomies and static forms of difference. Indeed, in the context of appropriacy models of language variation, Fairclough (1992) has suggested that they "help to endow prescriptivism with a relatively acceptable face" (p37). In the guise of proposing appropriate competencies or performances for different social contexts (rather than one normative vision), they nevertheless operate with a normative and concealed notion of what is right and proper. Such models, therefore, tend towards homogeneous and static descriptions of difference. Having looked at ways in which language is taken up, played with, and creatively used in classrooms in Vietnam, Kramsch and Sullivan (1996) move beyond a call only for appropriate pedagogy: "we can envisage the potential of an appropriate pedagogy which would, at the same time, be a pedagogy of appropriation, based on the unique privilege of the non-native speaker to poach on the so-called authentic territory of others, and make the language their own" (p. 210). This notion of appropriable pedagogy can help tie together the notion of language as postcolonial performativity, of culture as difference, of sustainable development being about creating the possibilities for being more. This syncretic model of cultural interaction works with a version of cultural difference that acknowledges that cultures are heterogeneous, diverse and dynamic; that cultural relations produce hybrid forms; that people actively appropriate cultural forms (rather than either accept or reject them); and that the product of such appropriation may be different from and greater than the sum of its original parts (heterosis). Finally, then, we need always to consider the larger context of what we are doing, the cultural, political, social and economic implications of language programs. What might language development in English mean for other languages? What might it mean for the representation of culture? What forms of culture and knowledge may it privilege and what may it deny? What world is opened up by an education through English? How might English be a language that allows us to be more rather than just to have more? How can the relationship between outside and inside participants foster appropriability? What might a model of post-development discourse (cf. Escobar, 1995) look like? How might the notion of language as postcolonial performative start to inform language in development programs? How can we work towards an understanding of culture as difference and of pedagogy as appropriable?
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