The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language. Adrian Holliday

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      First published 2005

      2012

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      Preface and methodology

      The element of struggle in international English language education exists in two respects. It resides in the need for educators to re-align themselves in the face of the changing ownership of English and culturally divisive ideologies and practices. This book explores this struggle by means of a critical sociology of their worlds and conflicts. But the struggle also resides in how it is possible to write about an area of conflict while being situated within it in a position of power and privilege – from an English-speaking West which has dominated the TESOL world with its well-resourced institutions of teaching, training and publishing and the residues of a colonial past. I draw on email accounts from 36 ESOL educators from 14 countries, who include 20 colleagues from outside the English-speaking West. Their accounts have indeed influenced the direction the book has taken – often to unexpected areas of discussion – but their presence raises the issue of who I am to be able to incorporate their voices. Though it may exaggerate an opposition which does not always exist, one must take seriously Canagarajah’s concern about ‘white-skinned teacher/researchers from rich communities’ who ‘visit dilapidated classrooms of brown-skinned vernacular-speaking students in periphery communities’ (1999: 51). It cannot be denied that ‘Centre’ researchers trying to empower ‘Periphery’ communities to which they do not belong may in the end only strengthen the discourses of the ‘Centre’.

      There are several factors to consider. First, English-speaking Western TESOL is itself a diverse, divided, and complex culture. The focus of this book is the cultural prejudices which emerge from a dominant, though particular ideology which has its origins within this culture but does not govern the thinking of all its members. A British academic critiquing this ideology is not therefore indulging in self-flagellating soul searching, but struggling for independence from thinking with which he and many of his colleagues do not wish to be associated. Second, cultural distance is relative. One cannot necessarily claim insider understanding of people because they come from one’s own community. Differences of age, class, institutional culture, gender, personal ideology, and so on also mediate in our visions of each other. I am not always in a better position to understand my British colleagues in Canterbury than the Egyptian colleagues I worked with so closely for five years. There is also a broader professional community which in a multiplicity of ways interconnects ESOL educators of all types. Its ideological, political, and economic divisions not so much inhibit cultural study, but characterize the particular coherence of the culture which enlivens my investigation.

      The interconnectedness of the broader TESOL community can be appreciated by means of thick description, which is the central discipline of the progressivist paradigm of qualitative research which the book employs. The accounts of my informants are thus set against other examples of professional and academic life, from classrooms, conferences, documents, the ‘corridors’ of institutional life, and so on. The piecing together of a description of the high level of surveillance in a U-shaped classroom in Britain, a Pakistani teacher’s statement about how she is discriminated against because of her supposed speakerhood,