Abstract
Standard language ideologies, hierarchical language structures and resulting ethnic and racial inequalities have long been reinforced within and by means of the TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) field. These standards and structures echo the colonial history of forced language assimilation and indigenous erasure, a history that in many ways continues today. This chapter proposes language learning and ongoing reflection on the language learning process as a critical framework that English language teachers and researchers should adopt and apply to their work. When teachers and researchers take on the language learner identity inside and outside of classroom/research spaces, they equip themselves to dismantle rigid power structures in TESOL, transforming the colonizer narrative into one of decolonization, collaboration, and equity.
TopIntroduction
Standard language ideologies have long been leveraged to create and maintain social, cultural and economic hierarchies that perpetuate racial and ethnic inequalities in the US and around the world. Language is considered standard when it adheres to the explicit rules and/or implicit expectations of society’s elite—those at the top of the educational, political and/or socioeconomic ladder. As James Milroy (2001) describes, standardization is not just about “uniformity” but about who in society uses a (certain type of) language and how they are associated (or not) with “prestige” and “legitimacy” (pp. 531–2). Prestige and legitimacy are deeply racialized concepts, made evident in prevalent language biases. For instance, variations of English associated with white, historically colonial powers (British English, Standard American English, Australian English) come with perceptions of correctness, legitimacy and prestige, and are taught and otherwise institutionalized as “correct” English; meanwhile, variations of English associated with non-white, historically colonized peoples (e.g. Black Standard Vernacular, Indian English, Philippine English) are perceived as less correct, legitimate, and prestigious, though no less uniform within their own standards (Rubdy, 2015). Frantz Fanon (1970) famously depicts the relationship between whiteness and linguistic power as a product of colonization in Black Skin, White Masks: “The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter—that is, he will come closer to being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language” (p. 18). Throughout the book, Fanon describes how French colonization in the Caribbean tethered whiteness to correctness and humanity (and blackness to wrongness and inhumanity) through language.
These biases about language and race have very real social and economic consequences that are actively reproduced by academia. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1991) Language and Symbolic Power illustrates how standard language use translates to symbolic competence within society; it grants access to being considered credible and knowledgeable, key gateways to power and upward mobility. Teaching and research are key institutions that uphold the relationship between standard language and symbolic competence due to their control over “correctness” and “expertise.” Teachers and researchers are deemed the valid constructors and distributors of knowledge based on how well they have learned and can reproduce elite academic standards. In turn, education and science continued to be used to privilege the knowledge, language and culture of dominant groups and oppress that of minoritized and/or colonized ones. On these bases, the reproduction and rigidity of standard languages have been key mechanisms of colonization, indigenous erasure, elitist language hierarchies and other institutionalized processes that perpetuate ethnic and racial inequalities.
Today’s critical TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) practitioner increasingly recognizes and theorizes the need to decolonize their practice, but perhaps falls short in identifying actionable ways to do so. Determining such methods necessarily involves seeing the deep-seated linguistic power dynamics in English language teaching and research, reflecting on how one consciously and unconsciously feeds into these dynamics and finding ways to disrupt this system in one’s everyday practices. Applying such methods takes dedication, time and humility as an expert admitting they must unlearn and reframe the very systems and benchmarks that propelled them to their current position of academic and cultural power. This kind of time and humility can and should be grounded in the practitioner (re)positioning themself as a learner and engaging in ongoing critical reflection about their learning.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Emic Perspective: An insider understanding of a culture or practice due to one’s lived experience of that culture, often difficult to recognize because it is so normal to the individual unless questioned by etic perspectives from a cultural outsider or investigator.
Academic Elitism: Keeping dominant groups in power by standardizing their knowledge, language, and culture, which become gatekeeping mechanisms to institutional access and power.
Role Fluidity: Rejecting rigid roles according to title, such as only teachers teach and only students learn, embracing instead the idea that everyone has much expertise to share and everyone has much to learn, and so facilitating a (learning) space as such.
Translanguaging/Translingualism: The bringing together of various languages to co-construct meaning and communication without adhering to monolingual ideals of the languages used.
Standard Language Ideology: The belief in “correct” and “incorrect” language production and use (and subsequent associations with education level, socioeconomic class, racial or ethnic background, etc.) based on rules explicitly and implicitly normed and enforced by the educated, ruling elite. This enforcement is systematically maintained and reproduced by institutions, such as the rigid language parameters for different forms of writing, oral presentation, etc. taught in schools and used as gatekeeping mechanisms to elite academic spaces and subsequent power.
Positionality: One’s role and/or power in a certain space or context based on their title, identities and/or other factors that yield cultural expectations.
Academic Equity: Working to make content and academic participation accessible to all students, no matter their background, prior knowledge, or identities.
Etic Perspective: An outsider observation of a culture or practice of one that has never lived within that culture, prone to assumptions, misunderstanding and othering unless informed by emic perspectives from a cultural informant.
Monolingual Standards: Basing linguistic and cultural proficiency on the monolingual speaker’s range of vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, pragmatics, etc. instead of mutual comprehensibility, causing exclusion of non-native language speakers and multilinguals that make up a large majority of the globe and, increasingly, the US.
Decolonization: Dismantling values and systems that keep the dominant language and culture in power and prevent non-dominant languages and cultures from gaining power, oftentimes rooted in historical and/or contemporary colonization.