Lost Book Review IV

Writers in this field have a wearisome tendency to strike radical poses while espousing views that, on closer examination, often prove to be a recipe for keeping things pretty much as they are. It is with some delight then that the jaded reader can report that Marnie Holborow does not fall into this category. Writing from an explicitly Marxist viewpoint, her measured, understated tone serves only to enhance the effectiveness of a critique which strives to reclaim the social nature of language and reject the overblown claims of theorists who see the world as having no reality outside the vortex of discourse.

I imagine that the word “Marxist” in the paragraph above may already have convinced some readers that neither Holborow’s book nor this review of it merit their further attention. Surely, they might argue, Marxism is crude, deterministic old hat and has long since been discredited in the wider world as well as the academy. Holborow, mercifully, is not that kind of Marxist. For her Marxism offers a method rather than a cosmology and her arguments ought to appeal to anybody who thinks that postmodernist views of the relationship between language and society in general, and the work of Michel Foucault in particular, have too often gone unchallenged in recent years.

Holborow sets out by addressing the legacy of the shaven-headed gloomster in her introduction. She summarises his views in the following way.

Discourse in Foucault’s account is pivotal. Foucault’s discursive formations share with structuralism the methodological procedure of providing definitions within a closed system. Like Saussure’s langue, it is self-referential in so far as discourses are defined in relation to other discourses. But its idealism goes all the way down; discourse swallows up all other phenomena, social, political, ideological (p.6).

She goes on to acknowledge that Foucault, eternally reluctant to allow himself to be tied down, might have been unhappy with the starkness of her summary. However, anyone at all familiar with his work would be obliged to acknowledge its fundamental accuracy. Reality, it would appear, is entirely a byproduct of our discursive practices.

What are the consequences of such a view of the world? Holborow is right on the mark when she suggests that no concept of justice can survive in a world where the notion of truth is relativised to particular discursive practices and that

If discourse is the prism through which reality is grasped, indeed is reality, how do you get out of language? What decides whether you can contest a discursive practice? At what point and for what reasons do you break the linguistic chain? Furthermore, if linguistic representation is everything, then politics becomes simply the rephrasing of language…a question of style (p.7).

There is more. The academic fashion for all things postcolonial can sometimes lead to the impression being given that the great empires were talked and written into existence. Indeed one is sometimes tempted to think that they consisted of little more than the orientalist gaze of western intellectuals and politicians playing on their unfortunate colonial subjects. Holborow is not having any of this. As she acutely observes,

Descriptions of starvation are not the same as being hungry. The discourses of imperialism are different to the devastating consequences for the actual lives of countless Indians, Africans or Irish, wrought by colonial capitalism (p.8).

The only thing that may possibly be missing from her discussion is an explicit acknowledgement that Foucault’s notion of discourse can be a useful one, provided that it is not allowed to go ‘all the way down’.

The author goes on to conclude her introductory remarks by wondering to what is that we can ascribe the popularity, in the academy and outside of it, of the ‘discourse is all’ world view. She draws the contentious but credible conclusion that it must have something to do with disillusioned 1960s radicals, having given up on efforts to change the world, trying instead to have it talked and written about in a different way. Having thus effectively dealt with some of the exaggerations and distortions inherent in Foucault’s vision, the author turns her attention to the legacy of Marx.

Marxism is frequently accused of representing relations between the economic base of society with its political and cultural superstructure in excessively simple terms, i.e. with the former rigidly and inexorably determining the shape of the latter. Many go farther and reject the base/superstructure view entirely. It is one of the signal services performed by the author to have gone back to what the founders of Marxism actually wrote in order to determine their views. On the basis of these readings, she convincingly states that

Marx never argued that the cultural and political spheres passively reflect the economic base…while the social relations of production set limits to developments in the superstructure, there is an interaction of all elements…the relationship is not predetermined or simply reflective, but dialectical (p.23).

She also refers to the process whereby ideas appear to take on a life of their own, unhooked from the material reality that helped to produce them, when she argues that

The sheer power that consciousness confers produces another effect: that ideas seem cut loose of reality, as if free-standing, floating above the constraints of the material world…this impression can lead to a distorted view of human mind over matter, to an overblown view of mental power over reality. Instead of history being seen as part of a dialectical process between humans and the material world, mind comes to be seen as the prime mover of historical change (p.21).

Her comments in this section make it clear that Holborow has not fallen out of the Foucauldian frying pan − where language makes the world −only to land in the fire of vulgar Marxism − where there is a lock step relationship between the economic and the cultural and linguistic. There is much more here that ought to cause even the most skeptical reader to pause and contemplate before dismissing the Marxist view of language and society as being past its ‘sell by’ date.

After an enlightening - for this reader at any rate - exposition of the work of the Russian linguists Volosinov and Vygotsky, Holborow turns her attention to the politics of English in the world today. It may seem a statement of the obvious to maintain that

The dominance of English today is the continuation of a process started in the earliest days of capitalism, deepened by the expansion of the British Empire and given further impetus by the commanding position of American capitalism in this century (p.57).

However, I think it is well worth repeating because a great deal is written about the expansion of English that may as well have been written about the growth of moss on a damp rock - one rather gets the impression that it kind of just happened. She goes on to make the worthwhile point that the spread of English, great though it has been, is easy to exaggerate and that, like global capitalism, it has passed large sectors of humanity by.

Turning to the way in which certain sectors of the academy have dealt with the legacies of the empires, once more, she hits the nail on the head.

Colonial ‘discursive practices’, in other words, are not the same as the actual practice of colonialism, any more than it was imperial ‘discourse’ that ran the slave trade or destroyed India’s cotton industry. Crude materialism drove the imperial project and in Victorian Britain this was universally taken for granted, by apologists and detractors alike. Today…seen through the intellectual haze of postmodern introspection, such fundamental questions of material primacy are not so readily accepted (p.63).

One is tempted to suggest that a scroll bearing this quotation should be fixed to the door of the Arts faculty of every university in the English-speaking world.

Robert Phillipson and Alastair Pennycook have in recent years made well-intentioned contributions to the debates surrounding the role of English and English language teaching in the world. Their work receives its critical due here. While acknowledging, that Phillipson’s work has “…raised themes hitherto unaired within English language teaching…”(p.74), and lauding his “…open anti-imperialist stance…”(p. 75) she takes him to task on a number of points. These focus on the inadequacy of a simplistic north-south, centre-periphery, theoretical framework that prevents him from seeing that it is local elites who are the “…agents and beneficiaries of capitalist development” (p.77), and that, consequently, nationalism (including linguistic nationalism) does not necessarily represent an adequate response to imperialism.

Alastair Pennycook’s work, though bearing the surface marks of greater sophistication, is shown to suffer from what, perhaps, are even more severe problems.

For him, there is no rational body of knowledge and no overriding social causes to human activity, merely ‘discourse practices’ that are hegemonic…He also holds that the role of discourse in the process of domination is central (p.81).

Holborow correctly identifies the main problems − which focus on the elevation of language and discourse at the expense of flesh and blood social and economic factors − with these views, most of which can be ascribed to Pennycook’s adherence to a strict Foucauldianism. However, another accusation could be added to the charge sheet, that of performative contradiction. If there is no truth, only ‘truth’ relativised to particular discursive practices, then this insight must apply to Pennycook’s own work too. His epistemological relativism pulls the rug from under his own critique. We simply cannot believe what he says. He tells us so himself.

She concludes her section on the role of English in the world by pointing out that

Like railways, language can be used for many purposes, and not always those laid down by British engineers.

She is also correct to say that there is nothing necessarily progressive about linguistic nationalism and draws on the sorry tale of the Irish language − forcibly suppressed by British colonialists and later subject to attempts at forcible revival by conservative native elites − to make her all too accurate case.

By this stage the reader will not be surprised to learn that Holborow is skeptical about certain aspects of contemporary feminism. She doubts the existence of separate men’s and women’s languages and further questions the possibility of purging language of sexist features by such top down strategies as dictionary reform. She also thinks the desire for such reform can distract feminists from more serious issues. Referring to one particular writer’s criticism of sexist remarks by President Bush concerning the invasion of Grenada she says that

Sticks and stones, alas, are of a different order to words. Concentration on speech codes misfocuses and misfires; it eclipses more severe social realities…(p.113).

Anyone who has ever believed claims for linguistic reforms being the precursor of broader social change will find plenty of food for thought here.

On the debates surrounding standard English her generally sensible discussion succeeds in demonstrating that many commonsense views in this area are not what they appear to be and concludes by saying that

Over-rigid demarcations between non-standard varieties and standard dialects can lead to giving codes and varieties a causative role in inequality, whose roots lie in society not in language (p 185).

There is a lot of truth in this, but as a speaker of Hiberno-English, I am very glad that I had the opportunity to learn the standard written form and am aware that command of it has opened doors that may otherwise have remained closed to me.

Marnie Holborow’s book is perceptive, well-written and timely. The fairness with which she treats her opponent’s arguments only adds to the power of her critique - a critique that demonstrates that postmodernist thought, far from providing a basis for achieving any kind of social justice, serves instead to domesticate and neutralise demands for real change. It should be read by anyone with an interest in the role of English in the world, and more generally, in relations between language, discourse and society.

Education

“Quite the contrary, if the subaltern classes are under the control of the hegemonic class, it is often their own, superstitious, folkloristic conception of the world which is favourable to the maintenance of the status quo.” (p.31)

“But for Gramsci it was, indeed, the universalisation of these traditional ‘conservative’ themes, and not some ‘revolutionary’ alternative education for the working class, which was potentially counter-hegemonic…” (p.40)

Entwistle, H. 1979. Antonio Gramsci: Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics. London: Routledge Kegan Paul.

Crap

According to this story proposals are being drawn up to sack incompetent Irish schoolteachers, within as little as 90 days of their having been so deemed. And who is going to decide if a teacher is incompetent? Why the principle and the school board of course. Would they not be the same people who failed to spot the teacher’s incompetence during the recruitment process or probationary period? They would. Does the story say anything about getting rid of crap principles or school boards? No, only crap teachers. Does the story contain any indication that there might be any problem afflicting Irish schools other than crap teachers? It does not.

A Lost Conference Paper

This is a paper I read at the FAAPI conference in 2001. It still seems pretty relevant today. The text is unaltered apart from the removal of a couple of personal references.

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‘No es el chancho sino quien le da de comer’
Standards, foreign experts, local elites and linguistic imperialism

INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this talk is to try to make some sense of the notion of linguistic imperialism in the context of that part of the Buenos Aires English language teaching (ELT) world with which I am familiar. I will start by outlining and commenting on some of the theoretical proposals, go on to look for evidence of linguistic imperialism in the local context and finally make some recommendations of my own for ELT in Buenos Aires.

LINGUISTIC IMPERIALISM
Much is made of linguistic imperialism these days. Robert Phillipson (1992) first properly opened up the field. It seemed, at first, that here was someone who could cut through the suffocating banalities usually offered to explain the success and spread of English in the world and tell us what was really going on. Phillipson certainly leaves his readers with few illusions about the spread of English having just “happened”. For him the world has to be seen in strictly bi-polar terms with the rich northern ‘centre’ nations  the United States and the United Kingdom in particular  conspiring to protect their own interests by imposing their languages and culture on their poor southern ‘periphery’ counterparts. His analysis, though it ‘…raised themes hitherto unaired within English language teaching…’ (Holborow 1999:74) seemed rather too black and white to be really credible.

If the vulgar Marxism of Phillipson falls short of the mark, can Alastair Pennycook do any better? In two books (1994a, 199 and a stream of articles (1989, 1990a, 1990b, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c, 1994d, 1994e, 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997a, 1997b, 1998a, 1998b, 2001), he has sought to have ELT throw off what he sees as the yoke of the Enlightenment and view the linguistic imperialism question through a kaleidoscopic postmodernist optic.

Pennycook offers a view of language, society and pedagogy that, on the face of it, is much more sophisticated than Phillipson’s. On closer examination, however, it turns out to be no more convincing and, in some respects, less so. Pennycook’s problem is that his postmodernist critique of thought and practices in applied linguistics and ELT  effective enough though it is in places  is based on a relativist epistemology that contradicts its own performance. One cannot credibly attack others for claiming universal validity for their views while implicitly claiming it for one’s own. Furthermore, in the postmodernist hall of mirrors, where there is no truth  only ‘truth’  it is doubtful whether any tenable concept of justice can be sustained. The moral force of Pennycook’s critique is thus also undermined.

However inadequate attempts to theorise it have been, we all know that there is something going on with the role of English language in the world. I will now turn my attention to what exactly that something might be in the context of Buenos Aires.

PRONUNCIATION
It struck me soon after I arrived in Buenos Aires that I had never met English teachers anywhere so concerned about their pronunciation. “Splendid!” you might say. Professionals concerned to maintain professional standards, anxious to set a good model for learners, etc. Well, yes, up to a point. It gradually became clear to me, however, that excessive pressure was being placed on trainees in the Profesorados to produce RP. The consequences of this include the following:
1. Other English pronunciation standards tend to be ignored.
2. Excessive reverence for native speakers of RP, especially teachers, regardless of their skills, qualifications or experience.
3. Form tends to be valued over content. Those who can produce a high-quality imitation RP tend to be looked upon with approval.
4. Everybody worries themselves sick about producing trivial errors. After a conference presentation an acquaintance was congratulated on her lovely pronunciation, not a word was said about the content of her talk.
5. Trainees and teachers are thus effectively infantilised, eternally aspiring to an unreachable and pointless goal.

What is to be done? A broader solution is offered in the next section. However, in the area of pronunciation alone serious consideration should be given to Jenkins’ proposal for the development of ‘…a pedagogical core of phonological intelligibility for speakers of English as an International Language…’ (2000: 123). This would set attainable, realistic goals for trainees and would be a first step towards putting an end to the cultural cringe alluded to in points 1 and 2.

STANDARDS
To what can we attribute the local obsession with RP? Again, a possible broader explanation will be offered in a moment. However, it seems to me that the immediate culprit is the idea that standard English consists of RP plus a strong dose of grammatical rectitude. Consequently writing tends to be, at best, neglected, and at worst, viewed as an opportunity to put trainees through their grammatical and idiomatic paces. Mastery of grammar is a necessary skill for the proficient writer but alone it will not suffice. Failure to address the issue of content emasculates trainees’ critical faculties and helps make them vulnerable to the latest pedagogical fad arriving from London or Los Angeles. The ability to write a cod-literary story bursting at the seams with idioms does not a professional and independent-minded professional language teacher make.

It is my contention that viewing standard English as essentially a written form — with writing understood more broadly than as just an agglomeration of grammatically correct sentences — would give trainees a more realistic objective for their production than trying to achieve RP-like pronunciation. It would also help them develop critical skills vital for their professional futures.

FOREIGN EXPERTS AND LOCAL ELITES
So what are we left with? Phillipson and Pennycook’s very inadequate theories purporting to explain the role of English in the world today, the certainty that the role and spread of English in the world is not a phenomenon that can be explained only in terms of rational individual choice, and finally, a range of beliefs and practices with which we are all familiar in the local ELT community. What sense can be made of them?

Let me start by returning for a moment to re-examine the question of imperialism. It is generally held to be something that is done to “us” by “them” and to be sustained and propagated by force, broadly defined. Among the more notable consequences of this view is that “we” are all victims regardless of our station in life. And if “we” are all victims then the responsibility for our predicament lies elsewhere rather than with ourselves and attempting to change this situation is useless since “they” have a monopoly of power. What I would like to suggest is that things are not quite as simple as that. Assuming such a thing as linguistic imperialism exists and plays a role in the spread of English, then it does so with the connivance of local elites and it is sustained not by force but by an ideology which helps maintain the position of those elites and contributes to the development of subjects willing to participate in their own subjugation.

How does this work in practice? I have already indicated what effect I think the emphasis on RP and failure to attend to meaning has on trainee teachers. There is more to it than that though. Argentines of all stripes are given to lamenting the supposedly nefarious influence of foreigners in their affairs. All the more surprising then the degree of bowing and scraping done before alleged foreign experts in ELT. At last year’s FAAPI conference it would have been easy to get the impression that the English language is something that can only be accessed by the grace of middle-class, middle-aged, white Englishmen jetting in for the weekend with all expenses paid by their publishers. I did not see all the contributions from these people but the ones that I did see were notable for their high ratio of platitude to insight and the patronising manner of their delivery. There was also, in at least one case that I saw, what could most charitably be described as a marked confusion between commercial and academic aspects of the presentation. Several teachers expressed dissatisfaction to me privately about the quality of these talks. None of them spoke up at the time. Why? Fear of that dreaded pronunciation mistake perhaps…

I think it would not be going too far to suggest that teachers and trainees ask themselves the following questions after the next presentation / book launch they attend: “Was the speaker remotely familiar with the reality of the English language classroom as I experience it?”, “Was the presenter trying to promote an expensive, new, imported coursebook, or other new material that did not appear to represent any great advance on the one they were trying to promote last year?”, and finally, “Was one of my main reasons for attending the fact that the speaker was from the United Kingdom and/or a native speaker of English and would I have attended if the exact same points had been made by someone from Lomas de Zamora called Carlos Gómez?”

CONCLUSION
I realise that the interpretation I have offered here could be accused of being sketchy and impressionistic. Regardless of its defects, I would suggest that it is not entirely divorced from reality and will strike a chord with many of you. I also realise that some will say that as a foreigner who only came here in January of 1999 I cannot possibly know what I am talking about. I trust they will apply the same salutary scepticism to the claims made by foreign publishers at the next book launch they attend or the ideas of the next “revolutionary” imported language learning technique they hear about. Finally, I realise that I may be accused of peddling outdated Gramscian-Marxist ideas. Well, I plead guilty to that. I would just ask you to consider if they really are so outdated.

In any case, some things are clear. There is no World Bank of English Words and no International Grammar Fund before which Argentines have to present themselves, cap-in-hand, begging for the resources necessary to use English. The English language is the property of all those who wish to use it. Trainees must leave the Profesorados with a good grasp of standard spoken and written forms but, just as importantly, also with the self-confidence to use and appropriate English for their own purposes. No one here cringes before the Spanish of Madrid and neither should any English teacher feel that their mission in life is to be an ever more exact phonological imitation of a tiny percentage of the native English speakers who live in the south-east of England. Above all, there is no point in English teaching professionals — in their capacity as citizens — complaining about the various ills allegedly visited on Argentina by foreign countries and international institutions if they do not first make an effort to put their own house in order.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Holborow, M. 1999. The Politics of English. London: Sage Publications.
Jenkins, Jennifer. 2000. The Pronunciation of English as an International Language. Oxford: OUP
Phillipson, R.H. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pennycook, A. 1989. The Concept of Method, Interested Knowledge and the Politics of Language Teaching. TESOL Quarterly 23 (4): 589-618.
Pennycook, A. 1990a. Critical Pedagogy and Second Language Education. System 18 (3): 303-314.
Pennycook, A. 1990b. The Diremptive/Redemptive Project: Postmodern Reflections on Culture and Knowledge in International Academic Relations. Alternatives 15 (1): 53-81.
Pennycook, A. 1994a. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. London: Longman.
Pennycook, A. 1994b. Incommensurable Discourses? Applied Linguistics 15 (2): 115-138.
Pennycook, A. 1994c. The Politics of Pronouns. English Language Teaching Journal 48 (2): 173-178.
Pennycook, A. 1994d. Critical Pedagogical Approaches to Research. TESOL Quarterly 28 (4): 690-693.
Pennycook, A. 1994e. Beyond (F)utilitarianism: English as Academic Purpose. Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching 17: 13-23.
Pennycook, A. 1995. English in the World / the World in English. In J. Tollefson (Ed.) Power and Inequality in Language Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 34-58.
Pennycook, A. 1996a. Borrowing Others’ Words: Text, Ownership, Memory and Plagiarism. TESOL Quarterly 30 (2): 201-230.
Pennycook, A. 1996b. English, Universities and Struggles over Culture and Knowledge. In Hayhoe R. and J. Pan (Eds.) East West Dialogue in Knowledge and Higher Education. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 64-80.
Pennycook, A. 1997a. Cultural Alternatives and Learner Autonomy. In P. Benson and P. Voller (Eds.) Autonomy and Independence in Language Learning. London: Longman, 35-53.
Pennycook, A. 1997b. Vulgar Pragmatism, Critical Pragmatism, and EAP. English for Specific Purposes. 16 (4): 253-269.
Pennycook, A. 1998a. The Right to Language: Towards a Situated Ethics of Language Possibilities. Language Sciences. 20 (7): 73-87.
Pennycook, A. 1998b. English and the Discourses of Colonialism. London: Routledge.
Pennycook, A. 2001. Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers.

Democracy

The crisis at the Carlos Pelligrini ( a prestigious state high school in the orbit of the University of Buenos Aires) has been going on for six months now, a period which has seen dozens of bomb hoaxes, a donnybrook in the bar and severe disruption of classes, yesterday claimed the scalp of the of the school’s Head.

A frequently heard demand of the rebellious students and their parents throughout the crisis is that that the school be democratised. Similar demands were at the heart of the crisis that disrupted the administration of the University of Buenos Aires last year and that continues to hamstring it today. As far as I can tell, those demanding it understand democratisation to be the selection of authorities by way of a ballot of all those involved in the institution in question. There is some variation in the demands about how universal such a suffrage would be but there seems little disagreement with the idea that students should have a substantial role in choosing those who lead the schools and university where they study.

So, calls for the Pellgrini to be democratised do not imply that the normal constitutional rights of those who work and study there have somehow been abrogated and ought to be restored to them. Nothing like that has occurred. Such calls amount to a demand for an elite school, graduation from which confers considerable life advantages and which is paid for from general taxation (given the highly regressive nature of the taxation system in Argentina, this means disproportionately paid for by poor people) to set itself up as a kind of miniature republic with its leaders elected, at least in part, by children and answerable to no one but itself.

The absurd and antidemocratic nature of this proposal should be self-evident but I’ll spell some out some reasons anyway. Schools are places where children go to learn. They go there to learn from people who know more about the subjects on the curriculum that they do and to do so in an educational context administered by those with the appropriate experience and training to do so. They don’t go to participate in some kind of publicly-funded playpen democracy and still less to participate in the selection of who administers or teaches in the school or what is to be taught there. They simply don’t know enough and are not mature enough to be able to do so, that’s why they don’t get the vote until they are 18. Teachers and administrators should be appointed on merit, not on the basis of how popular they are with staff and students. I know that deciding what constitutes merit and how to select those with the most of it is not a simple matter but this is no excuse for handing over responsibility for doing so to those plainly unqualified to do so as a result of either their age and ignorance (the children) or the natural human tendency to see the public interest as best served by whatever arrangement best suits one’s own personal ends (the teachers and other staff).