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

international professional-academic identity, which is expressed in the way that, from our different backgrounds, we come together in faculties, projects, and conferences across the world. At a general level, we are all involved in doing the ‘same thing’, and share the same purpose of teaching English.

Political division

      Where the first perspective depicts TESOL as a shared professional activity, the second focuses on the problematic reality that one very distinct part of the TESOL world is different from and tends to dominate and move out over the rest. There is no doubt that colleagues who come from the English-speaking West have a privileged and dominant position, as has been pointed out and discussed extensively over recent years (for example, Phillipson 1992; Holliday 1994a; Pennycook 1994, 1998; Canagarajah 1999; Jenkins 2000). This conflict can be characterized in a number of ways.

      Influenced by Phillipson (1992), it has been common for writers about the politics of TESOL to focus their attention on the unequal power relationship between different regions of the world – between a well-resourced, politically and economically aggressive, colonizing, Western ‘Centre’ and an under-resourced, colonized ‘Periphery’. This distinction is important as a backdrop and starting point to my discussion; but there are a number of difficulties related to it. To begin with, ‘Centre’ is too easily associated with a monolithic ‘West’. This is misleading for two reasons: first, of course, the West is by no means a uniform entity in respect to its socio-political and linguistic make-up, and second, the political divisions within TESOL are sometimes within the West itself. I will therefore refer to the English-speaking West as the source of dominant TESOL thinking, which does not include much of Western Europe. Second, associating TESOL power relations with regions of the world is limiting. Many of the people I have come to know during my professional career, some of whom are included among my interviewees, who come from places which would be labelled ‘periphery’ are far from peripheral in their thinking. It is people, not places, who have professions, prejudices, and cultures.

BANA and TESEP

      Another way of describing the political division within TESOL is in terms not of location but of professional culture. Such is the BANA-TESEP distinction (Holliday 1994a), which attempts to group ESOL educators in terms of Bernstein’s (1971) categorization. BANA comprises an innovative, often predatory culture of integrated skills, which is located in the private sector or in commercially-run language centres in universities and colleges in Britain, Australasia and North America. TESEP comprises a more traditional culture of collections of academic subjects, which is located in state tertiary, secondary, or primary schools throughout the world. The BANA-TESEP distinction thus provides a picture of types of ESOL educators in terms of their educational occupations and preoccupations. TESEP people are mainstream in the sense that they do very similar work, with similar initial qualifications to teachers and lecturers of other subjects, with whom they will share a similar status. Their students will in most cases be their compatriots; and the strongest encounter with the foreign Other will be with the actual language, its texts and its methodology. BANA people come from the English-speaking West and are characterized as having an overactive professional zeal connected with the notion that English and English teaching is originally theirs. They are not mainstream in educational terms in that they often stand outside established academic departments in schools, colleges, and universities. In most cases, their students are not their compatriots and represent the foreign Other in their classrooms.

      There are however problems with the BANA-TESEP distinction. First, the professional cultural distinction is often lost in the way the terms have come to be used. Because the vast majority of people who work within the TESEP culture come from outside the English-speaking West, TESEP has become associated with a region of the world, not unlike ‘Periphery’. Because BANA directly refers to the English-speaking West, it has become synonymous with ‘Centre’. The fact that the TESEP culture has much in common with teachers of modern foreign languages in the state system and also present within university applied linguistics in the English-speaking West has often been overlooked. (Bernstein [1971] in the original categorization referred only to Western education systems.)

      Second, there are exceptions to the massive groupings which it characterizes. It does not account for the large number of English-speaking Western ESOL educators who work in ‘special needs’ or language support in the state sector, who have much in common with the TESEP group. Outside the English-speaking West there are also many teachers in university language centres who provide language support or initial language training to students of other subjects, and in private sector language schools. They have similar status problems to English-speaking Western colleagues in that they stand outside the established academic faculty. There are also an increasing number of colleagues from across the world who work within the English-speaking West, especially as teaching assistants in North American schools, colleges, and universities. An outcome of the large numbers of ESOL educators outside the English-speaking West who go to North America to do master’s and doctoral degrees is that many of them stay either as university teaching assistants or faculty members and suffer status problems (Braine 1999: xiii). By email, Ryuko Kubota notes that:

      Another aspect of marginalization applies to so-called ‘non-native’ K-12 teachers in North American public school from Latin American or Asian countries. They are hired because the school thought that they would be able to best assist the students because they can speak their language. While they are valued to some extent, they are also marginalized simply because the field of ESL is marginalized. They end up attending a lot of mandatory meetings related to ESL students and cultural diversity on behalf of their native speaking colleagues.

(email interview)

      One could interpret this movement as part of the same globalization trend as the colonization of the West by small communities from the rest of the world, which in turn has something to say about centre-periphery issues, where ‘the flow of cultural traffic can often be in many directions simultaneously’, and ‘cultural flows do not necessarily map directly on to economic and political relationships’ (Ahmed and Donnan 1994: 3). The foreign Other is thus no longer in distant lands, especially with the increasing movement of different types of people and their multicultural embedding in each other’s societies (Ibid.: 5).

‘Native’ and ‘non-native speakers’

      Division within TESOL can also be described in terms of ‘native’ and ‘non-native speakers’. There is now however a considerable amount of discussion about the viability of the terms implicit in this distinction. Throughout I place ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’ in inverted commas to show that they are as stated by the discourse, and as such are disputed. One problem is that the use of ‘non-’ usually signifies a disadvantage or deficit. Especially when the terms are reduced, as is often the case in common talk and even writing, to ‘native’ and ‘non-native’, the identity of the latter is further weakened by appearing ‘not native’ to anything. There is also the problem of imprecision in the meaning of the term itself. Braine (1999: xv, citing Kramsch) suggests that ‘native speakers’ themselves ‘do not speak the idealized, standardized version of their language’ any more than ‘non-native speakers’, that both groups are influenced in their speech ‘by geography, occupation, age, and social status’. Jenkins (2000: 8–9) presents an argument for the notion of ‘non-native speaker’ being ‘anachronistic’:

      The term … fails to recognize that many varieties of English in outer circle countries, such as Singapore, are spoken not only as official languages but also in the home … that English is often one of several languages available in the repertoires of the multilingual populations of, for example, India and African countries … [where] it is often difficult to ascertain which language is a person’s L1 and which is their L2. The term perpetuates the idea that monolingualism is the norm, when, in fact, precisely the opposite is true of the world at large.

(Jenkins 2000: 8–9, citing Brown and Bisong)

      At the same time, others argue that it does depend where one comes from, and that the native-non-native speaker distinction exists, for better or worse, as part of our professional discourse and has therefore to be worked with. By email, Ryuko Kubota has the following to say:

      I don’t consider myself as a ‘native’ speaker of English, so I use