Jaberwocky

This is my bb posting.

We are now have already been English teachers and have decided to be English teachers – at least by taking this course [EDUC7032] - because subconsciously we admit ourselves to the invasion of the spread of English. English has a power; do you still remember when we decided to choose TESOL or English language education to be our major when we started entering University? Tell me honestly for what reason we chose English Language education or TESOL as our major?

The spread of English has been flourishing since the colonialism began until the present time and may be by the end of the world? We can not deny the market of English is highly demanded in a non-English spoken country as it was justified by Brutt-Griffler (2002) with his term of world econocultural system. This term is supported by Phillipson and Skutnab-Kangas in Penycook (2000:114) saying that U.S, UN, World Bank, IMF and some more world policy organisation use English as their dominant language and consider to be a big business commodity around the world, as if everybody does not have any choice to choose other language if he/she wants to be involved in the globalisation. For example in Indonesia, those who can speak English are considered to have a higher status because some simple examples like understanding English news, English movies, English books, magazines and any other media will be, at least, empowering those who master the language compare to those who are not able to use English. Then everybody try to learn English to get the higher strata of life such as getting a job easily, getting an access to the source of information in English to get the most up-to-date information and so forth.

Knowing this condition, we can see that we are trapped into colonialism. We, as a second language user (teacher and learner), have to take for granted for being victimised by colonialism. Ironically, the victims are quite pleased and even pursuing the power which was derived from colonialism. In other words, colonialism has been successful in giving the impact to the colonised society. Let me point out my view, there are two sides of images for the colonised society that can be reflected as oppressed and empowered society (colonialism hold the power) as Phillipson’s belief to be “English Linguistic Hegemony” (Pennycook 2000: 133). The oppressed society might find a way to be used against the colonialism that might be post-colonialism. But I’m not sure the idea of post-colonialism came from the oppressed society or from the power holder of colonialism. The other group, the empowered society will act "the show must go on" because they have been ‘lullabied’ by the colonialism.

However, there is a counter argument to reconcile those who are oppressed; Post-colonialism. The term Post-colonialism which promote the ability to empower themselves by valuing what they have.  Apparently, post-colonialism is created to be an anitidote for an apologetic expression to the colonised society. In my point of view, post-colonial appear to eliminate the colonialisms while somehow colonialism, inevitably, does still exist and would have never been eliminated. A very clear illustration of colonialism has just happened in front of our very own eyes as every Commonwealth countries have been celebrating the Commonwealth Game in

Melbourne

two days ago.

Source:

Pennycook, A.(2000). English, politics, ideology: From colonial celebration to postcolonial performativity. In T.Ricento (Ed.) Ideology, Politics and Language Policies: Focus on English (pp. 107-119). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Brutt-Griffler, J. (2002). The becoming of a world langauge. In World English: A Study of  Its Development (pp.107-125). Clevedon

UK

: multilingual Matters.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Teaching-Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.