16.3452, Review: Applied Ling/ESL: Braine (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3452. Sat Dec 03 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3452, Review: Applied Ling/ESL: Braine (2005)

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1)
Date: 29-Nov-2005
From: Ingrid Piller < ingrid.piller at unibas.ch >
Subject: Teaching English to the World: History, Curriculum, and Practice 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2005 18:44:43
From: Ingrid Piller < ingrid.piller at unibas.ch >
Subject: Teaching English to the World: History, Curriculum, and Practice 
 

EDITOR: Braine, George
TITLE: Teaching English to the World
SUBTITLE: History, Curriculum, and Practice
PUBLISHER: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2510.html

Ingrid Piller, English Department, Basel University, Switzerland

This book is a kind of reference to English teaching in a number of 
countries. The editor has collected 15 articles which are all structured 
in the same way. Each article begins with a brief introduction to the 
country, usually of a geographical, demographic or historic nature. 
This is followed by an historical account of English Language 
Teaching (ELT) in the country under discussion. The third section is 
devoted to the ELT curriculum in that country. The next main section 
is devoted to a biography of an English teacher in that country - in 
most cases the author's autobiography. Each paper ends with a short 
conclusion, mostly mentioning challenges or problems for ELT in the 
nation under discussion.

Most of the featured nations are in Asia (PR China, Hong Kong, India, 
Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Sri Lanka). The others are located in 
the Middle East (Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey), Europe 
(Germany, Hungary, Poland), and Latin America (Brazil). The editor 
does not explain his rationale for these choices except for the 
absence of ELT in any African nation: the editor tried to find a 
representative of ELT in an African nation but didn't succeed 
and ''believe[s] [his] failure to some extent reflects the trauma of the 
African continent, devastated by civil wars, the AIDS epidemic, and 
economic and political crises'' (p. ix). However, a collection such as 
Owino (2002), with its contributions to questions of language 
education and policy in a range of African nations, written by leading 
African scholars, throws that assertion somewhat into doubt.

Given the reference character of the chapters and their uniform 
structure, I will not summarize individual chapters. Instead, I will move 
on to evaluating the undertaking as a whole.

With this, as well as a previous edited volume entitled Non-Native 
Educators in English Language Teaching (Braine, 1999), and his work 
as the founding president of the Nonnative English Speakers in 
TESOL Caucus (http://nnest.moussu.net/history.html), George Braine 
has established himself as one of the key spokespersons for non-
native English-speaking teachers' (NNEST) issues. While most of the 
contributions to Braine (1999) were concerned with aspects of ELT 
and NNEST in the North American context, the concept of the NNEST 
has, in the present volume, been transplanted to contexts where 
English is a second or foreign language. I also reviewed the 1999 
volume (Piller, 2000), and the contributions to that volume convinced 
me of the usefulness of the concepts of the NEST and NNEST to 
understand aspects of the ELT profession in North America. However, 
this is not the case with the present volume. There is such a diversity 
of contexts that the focus on 'non-/nativeness' seems to cloud an 
understanding of ELT in many of the contexts described rather than 
the opposite. 

To begin with, it is not always NNEST who are being discriminated 
against in ELT institutions. The chapter by Claus Gnutzmann on 
Germany, for instance, indicates that it is next to impossible to find an 
ELT position in German public schools without German citizenship and 
local education and training. In this context, it is thus NEST who are 
being discriminated against. In this context, the differential valorization 
of NEST and NNEST coincides with the public-private divide in 
education. The public education system, where the state invests into 
the reproduction of the social order favors Germans, i.e. NNEST; 
whereas private ELT schools, which follow an economic imperative, 
favor NEST. Even within private schools the desired outcome may 
skew hiring practices differentially for N/NEST, as Chang (2004) 
explains with reference to ELT in Taiwan. There, conversation schools 
favor NEST while prep schools for various state exams favor bilingual 
Taiwanese teachers, i.e. NNEST.

The public-private divide points to another divide in international ELT 
that runs across the N/NEST divide, namely class and, often 
simultaneously, the rural-urban divide. A number of contributors 
bemoan the lack of ELT quality in their countries, but the contribution 
by Kanavillil Rajagopalan and Cristina Rajagopalan seems to be the 
only one that actually links differential English achievement in Brazil to 
persistent differences in wealth and privilege. Pasassung's (2003) 
ethnographic study of ELT in a remote village on Sulawesi is a good 
example of an ELT context where the issue of N/NEST is completely 
besides the point. In that context, ELT is of very low priority for both 
teachers and students, and the limited ELT that is imposed on them by 
the state is marred by lack of access to basic resources such as 
proper classroom accommodation or durable books.

Pasassung (2003) also shows that for a few girls in that village trying 
to excel in their English studies is their way of being ''modern'' 
and ''good'' at the same time. Clearly, gender is another key issue that 
permeates ELT internationally. The fact that ELT is a highly feminized 
profession, particularly at the lower levels (Pavlenko & Piller, 2001; 
Piller & Pavlenko, 2004) remains conspicuously invisible in the present 
papers - except in Peter Medgyes delightful account of his training as 
an English teacher in Hungary. This contributor acknowledges that his 
success as an English teacher had ''much less to do with [his] 
excellence than with the fact that [he] was a male in a female 
profession'' (p. 54). 

As I have pointed out, the organization of the volume around nation 
states obscures key division in ELT within those countries - be in 
those of public vs. private education, those of teaching aims, those of 
class, or gender. However, it also obscures the global influences on 
ELT that work above the level of the nation state. Numerous 
commentators on globalization have pointed out that the loss of 
national sovereignty is a hallmark of globalization (e.g., Beynon & 
Dunkerley, 2000; Holton, 2005; Lash & Urry, 1994). The inexorable 
spread of English is another. Many of the practices described in the 
sections of the various ELT curricula can only be understood in 
relation to each other, and not as specific to a particular nation.

In sum, the combination of the two guiding principles of a focus on 
NNEST and a country-by-country focus has resulted in a rather 
unenlightening total. However, within that total there are some 
interesting individual reads, and readers interested in ELT in any of 
the 15 countries named above might still turn to the paper in question.


REFERENCES

Beynon, J., & Dunkerley, D. (Eds.). (2000). Globalization: The reader. 
New York: Routledge.

Braine, G. (Ed.). (1999). Non-native educators in English language 
teaching. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Chang, J. (2004). Ideologies of English language teaching in Taiwan. 
Unpublished PhD, University of Sydney, Sydney.

Holton, R. (2005). Globalization. In A. Harrington (Ed.), Modern social 
theory: An introduction (pp. 292-312). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lash, S., & Urry, J. (1994). Economies of signs and space. London: 
Sage.

Owino, F. R. (Ed.). (2002). Speaking African: African languages for 
education and development. Cape Town, SA: CASAS.

Pasassung, N. (2003). Teaching English in an ''acquisition-poor 
environment'': An ethnographic example of a remote Indonesian EFL 
classroom. Unpublished PhD, University of Sydney, Sydney.

Pavlenko, A., & Piller, I. (2001). New directions in the study of 
multilingualism, second language learning, and gender. In A. 
Pavlenko, A. Blackledge, I. Piller & M. Teutsch-Dwyer (Eds.), 
Multilingualism, second language learning and gender (pp. 17-52). 
Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Piller, I. (2000). Review of: Non-native educators in English language 
teaching. Edited by George Braine. Language, 76(4), 960.

Piller, I., & Pavlenko, A. (2004). Bilingualism and gender. In T. K. 
Bhatia & W. C. Ritchie (Eds.), The handbook of bilingualism (pp. 489-
511). Oxford: Blackwell. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ingrid Piller (PhD in English Linguistics, University of Technology, 
Dresden, Germany, 1995) holds the Chair of English Sociolinguistics 
and the Sociology of English as a Global Language at Basel University 
in Basel, Switzerland. Her current research focuses on linguistic 
aspects of globalization, specifically in the contexts of English 
language teaching and learning, romantic relationships and tourism. 
Her work has appeared in a variety of edited volumes and journals, 
including Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, International Journal of 
Bilingualism, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and Language in Society. Her 
most recent book is Bilingual Couples Talk (John Benjamins, 2002).





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