Power, according to Fairclough (1989), is exercised by the
dominant groups in two main ways through coercion (the use of force) or through
consent (willing acquiescence). Consent, however, is not always the result of
conscious choice; rather, it comes about through the unconscious acceptance of
institutional practices.
Institutional practices which people draw upon without thinking
often embody assumptions which directly or indirectly legitimize existing power
relations. Practices can often be shown to originate in the dominant class or
the dominant bloc, and to have become naturalized. (p. 33) In other words, practices which are unconsciously accepted
as the natural and inevitable way of doing things may in fact be inherently
political, serving to maintain the relative position of participants with respect
to each other--they help to perpetuate existing power relations. These
everyday, taken-for-granted practices constitute what Fairclough calls ideological power, one
of the central mechanisms of ensuring control by consent He argues that
language has a particularly important role in exercising this control:
Authority and power are manifested by institutional practices
around language use.
Several recent analyses document the ways that language policies
in general, and policies around the imposition of English in particular,
function as tools of domination and subordination on a global level.
Tollefson (1991) argues that language policies are a central
mechanism in ensuring that vast numbers of people will be unable to acquire the
kinds of language competence required by modern social and economic systems. As
he says, "Language is one criterion for determining which people will
complete different levels of education. In this way, language is a means for
rationing access to jobs with high salaries" (pp. 8-9), thus creating
unequal social and economic relationships. Skutnabb-Kangas (1988) calls this
type of control linguicism and defines it as "ideologies and structures
which are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce an unequal division of
power and resources (both material and nonmaterial) between groups which are
defined on the basis of language" (p 13). Phillipson (1988, 1992) situates
linguicism within a broader theory of linguistic imperialism, arguing that
English linguistic imperialism (in which "the dominance of English is
asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural
and cultural inequalities between English and other languages'' (1992, p. 47)
has come to be a primary tool of postcolonial strategy: "Whereas once
Britannia ruled the waves, now it is English which rules them'' (1992, p. 1).
Whereas the mechanisms of ideological control exercised through
language policy have been examined extensively on a global level, they have
been less fully explored on the level of day-to-day interactions between
teachers and learners What I want to show in this paper is that the insistence
on using only English in the classroom represents precisely the kind of
taken-for-granted and naturalized everyday practice which Fairclough discusses:
Although it has come to be justified in pedagogical terms, it rests on
unexamined assumptions, originates in the political agenda of the dominant
groups, and serves to reinforce existing relations of power. Precisely because
its mechanisms are hidden, it is a prime example of Fairclough's notion of
covert ideological control. This paper, thus, is meant not as an attack on
those who advocate the monolingual use of English, but rather as an invitation
to reexamine these practices in light of their often invisible ideological
roots their pedagogical effectiveness, and their implications for the ESL
profession as a whole.
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