Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Internationalism and second languages
For many students, the second language has no real role within their own society;
English is not learnt in China because of its usefulness inside China. Instead, the
second language is taught in the educational system because of the benefits it
brings from outside the home country. Any language may be taught with the aim
of promoting relationships with other countries that use it.
So a particular country, or indeed a particular individual, may decide to learn a
second language for a purpose outside their own society, whether to do business
with other countries, to gain access to a scientific literature or to a cultural her-
itage, or to be able to work in other countries. In Israel, English is seen as ‘the cus-
tomary language for international communication and for overcoming barriers to
the flow of information, goods and people across national boundaries’ (English –
Curriculum for all Grades, 2002). Such use of an international language does not
necessarily entail any acceptance of the values of the society from which it origi-
nates. Steve Biko justified English as the language of the Black People’s Convention
in South Africa because it acted as a lingua franca and it was ‘analytical’ (Biko,
1978). Anti-English graffiti in Belfast were written in English, not Irish. The
speaker’s attitudes to the target culture are marginal to such uses.
Sometimes, as a legacy of colonialism, the original speakers of an international
language feel that they have the right to say what it should be or how it should be
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taught. We can complement the advertisements for native speaker English teach-
ers in Chapter 10 with the examples of the Alliance Française in London claiming
French ‘taught by French nationals’; the Eurolingua Institute, ‘lessons are given by
experienced and fully qualified mother tongue teachers’; and Language Trainers,
‘All our German teachers are native speakers (from Germany, Austria or
Switzerland)’. While the aims of the UK schools syllabus for French refer to
‘French-speaking countries’; this is automatically taken to be France, as a student
from the Ivory Coast bitterly pointed out to me.
Setting aside political or commercial motivations, the responsibility for interna-
tional languages has passed out of the hands of the original owners. Furthermore,
the right to say how something should be taught is even less a right of the native
speaker than the right to say how something should be said. An Englishman or an
American has no more intrinsic right to tell an Egyptian how to teach English
than does a Japanese; the only one who can decide what is right for Egypt is the
Egyptian: as a spokesman said in China, ‘For China we need a Chinese method.’
Whether an idea or an approach to language teaching is useful does not depend
on which country it comes from. Its merits have to be accepted or rejected by the
experts on the situation – the teachers and students who live and work there.
As we have seen in this section, language is not politically neutral. Deciding
which language should be used in a particular country or which other language
should be taught affects the economic and cultural life not only of the country
itself, but also of the country from which the language comes. Take the example
of English. On the one hand, in Singapore the decision to make English its ‘first’
language must have played a significant part in its economic success. On the other
hand, the UK itself can try to keep economic links with many parts of the world
by promoting English. This is without taking into account the vast sums of money
involved in the language teaching operation itself, whether in the sales of British
books or the students coming to UK schools and universities.
Robert Phillipson (1992) calls this ‘linguistic imperialism’ and sees it as a special
case of Galtung’s (1980) concept of ‘a dominant Centre (the powerful western
countries) and a dominated Periphery (the under-developed countries)’. The cen-
tre can exert this domination in part by forcing the periphery to use its languages.
So English as a centre language is used for business purposes of trading between
periphery countries and the centre. However, this use has been so successful that
English escaped the hands of its originators and allowed periphery countries to do
business with each other rather than with the UK itself.
In addition, educational systems in the periphery emphasize English and indeed
have instruction through English, particularly at university; the University of
Gaza, for example, uses English as the means of instruction for all subjects, as do
universities in Egypt, the Netherlands and Botswana. Above all, English is a
requirement for scientific writing and reading: few scientists can make a proper
contribution to their field without having access to English, either in person or
through translation of one kind or another: 86 per cent of research papers in biol-
ogy are written in English, and 97 per cent of those on cross-cultural psychology.
While the teaching of scientific English may be of vital importance to the individ-
ual learners, the pressure to use English for science is a form of linguistic imperi-
alism. Publication in scientific journals depends on getting over an additional
obstacle that native speakers do not have to face; journals that come from the cen-
tre are not going to value independent views from people outside this area. Even
in the SLA research area, this is apparent; it is dominated by literature in English
and biased towards accounts of acquisition of English in highly developed 
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countries; an international conference on cross-cultural psychology only used
English, despite the fact that many participants did not speak it well. Academics
who live in centre countries naturally feel they cannot compromise academic
standards – but it is the standards of the centre that are continually perpetuated,
not the potentially infinite richness of scientific exploration possible through dif-
ferent cultures and approaches.
Indeed, the influence of the centre is not just on the choice of language that
other countries need to learn, but on the very means of teaching them. French
audio-visualism was exported to francophone Africa, British communicative
teaching to most parts of the globe. Adrian Holliday (1994) points to the perma-
nent guilt feelings of the local teacher who is never able to apply the centre-
approved methods to their own satisfaction, basically because they were not
designed specifically for the needs of any local situation.
Recently, however, the concept of linguistic imperialism has been criticized on
various grounds (Canagarajah, 2005). One is that in many cases English is not so
much imposed from outside as requested by the locals themselves, as a way of
communicating with the world at large, not just with the centre of an empire – a
network with many connections rather than a spider’s web leading only to the
centre. The other reason is that fears of English replacing other languages seem to
have been exaggerated; for instance, in India the shift is not towards English, but
towards local regional languages (Bhatt, 2005). Of course, this may be the unique
situation of English as the hypercentral language, as seen in Chapter 10, and not
necessarily true of supercentral and central languages.