This is from a very interesting piece from the latest issue of EL Gazette:
Can we disentangle TEFL from its colonial past?
... it was actually during the historical period after colonialism (so-called ‘post-colonialism’, although the idea that there has ever really been a ‘post’ period to colonialism has been hotly contested by scholars and writers alike) that the spread of English as a lingua franca really flourished. Post-colonial theory maintains that this was a time during which empires were looking for methods of conserving the subservience of previously colonised countries (see Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction by Robert JC Young, 2016). As Suhanthie Motha explains in her book Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching (2014), this is what is stamped on the profession that we, as TEFL teachers, occupy today.
This idea that English is a tool for the enlightenment and civilisation of certain uneducated people still persists. A great deal of research has gone into analysing the prevalence of this sort of neo-colonialist thinking within TEFL materials (see Linguistic Colonialism in the English Language Textbooks of Multinational Publishing Houses by Jairo Eduardo Soto-Molina and Pilar Méndez, 2020, for example). It is common to see the reproduction of old colonial notions of Self and Other (a concept developed by Gayatri Spivak in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, 2010). We see presented a modern, forward- thinking, educated (English-speaking) society, which is contrasted with a society that is static, conservative and uneducated. One acts as an active transmitter of knowledge and the other a submissive receiver of knowledge. There is little room for interculturality and English is presented as the dominant, most economically useful global language.
Within this we see the glorification of the native speaker who, regardless of educational or professional experience, is appraised as the worthier teacher. This is something that Robert Phillipson famously discussed in his book Linguistic Imperialism (1992). He looked at how ‘native-speaker supremacy’, as well as English- only policies within the classroom and the idea that using other languages in the classroom reduces English standards contributes towards the hegemony of English...
Can we disentangle TEFL from its colonial past? | E L Gazette
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With links to the books here:
Linguistic Imperialism - Wikipedia
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction | Wiley
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction: Young, Robert J. C.: 9781405120944: Amazon.com: Books
Can the Subaltern Speak? | Columbia University Press
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And more here:
Jay Doubleyou: empire 2.0 and the 'imperial nostalgia' driving the british culture war
Jay Doubleyou: what's a 'native speaker' of english? part two
Jay Doubleyou: challenging white supremacism in australia and new zealand
Jay Doubleyou: "we need to insist on english as our language in this country."
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