Cultural Bridge or Colonial Imposition?

From 2007 to 2011, I was the director of an English language teaching center at a university in Hong Kong, where I was also cross-appointed to a department of curriculum and instruction in the faculty of education. Before becoming the director, I had worked in the same ELT center as an assistant professor from 1996 to 1998, and I had accumulated a decade of experience working in Hong Kong, in many of the country’s main universities, by the time I left in 2011. Since stepping down as the director and leaving Hong Kong, I have had the time to reflect on some of the challenges of leading, managing, and teaching in a university English language center in such a setting.

When I first went to Hong Kong in 1995, it was still part of the British Empire, and I went there, in part, to witness the historic “handover” of sovereignty from British rule to Chinese rule on 1 July 1997. The colonial history of Hong Kong would be one of the major challenges faced in the transition, as the 15-page booklet, English Teaching Profile: Hong Kong, from the British Council indicated: “The main strength of the English language teaching situation in Hong Kong is the colony’s need to maintain its position as a cultural bridge between East and West” (1986, p.1).

Statements such as that led to the question: Is English in Hong Kong really a “cultural bridge” or is it just a “colonial imposition”? This led to a many other questions about why we were teaching English there in the first place, what the motivations of the learners were, what the agenda of the administration (governmental and university) was, and how to reconcile all of these competing concerns.

From my point of view, I had to accept that, whatever else English was in Hong Kong, it was required—and without it, the undergraduates would not be able to successfully complete their programs, unless they were from the English department there. This raised the perennial issue of motivation. Fortunately for me, during my first stint in Hong Kong, in 1999, Eva Lai, who had been the director of the same university ELT center previously, published a brief but helpful paper titled “Motivation to Learn English in Hong Kong” (1999).

In the paper, Lai compared the pre- and post-1997 attitudes to learning English in Hong Kong, based on surveys carried out in 1980, 1992, 1995, and 1998. Lai concluded that “the data confirm the strong instrumental, career-related motives of the learners, which has been previously reported not only for Chinese learners but for Asian learners generally” (1999, p. 280). Studies such as those helped us shape the English language program, so our courses could tap into those “strong instrumental, career-related motives.” But that still left the question of the complex and complicated relationships between the first language, Chinese, and English.

Caught in the Post-Colonial Crossfire

At that time, and to a significant extent still today, English in such settings—and the centers that teach that English—are caught in the post-colonial crossfire. For example, at the same time as Lai’s article came out, Suresh Canagarajah’s much-cited book Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching (1999) was published. Canagarajah started by stating, in his introduction, that “if we are to appropriate the language [English] for our purposes, the oppressive history and hegemonic values associated with English have to be kept very much in mind” (p. 2). Canagarajah’s work built on the earlier book, Linguistic Imperialism, by Phillipson, published in 1992. Phillipson started by stating his position that “whereas once Britannia ruled the waves, now it is English which rules them. The British Empire has given way to the empire of English” (p. 1).

Before I went to Hong Kong, I read as much as I could about its history, cultures, and languages, not least because I too was a colonial product of the British Empire, as my family had been captured and enslaved in India, generations before I was born and raised in England. So, I understood both personally as well as professionally more than most of the people I knew about what it meant to be the product of such a process. But there I was, in charge of a university ELT center in a far-flung corner of the empire, attempting to balance the “oppressive history and hegemonic values” of English with the required and requested want and need for English.

This tension turned out to be at the heart of many of the difficulties and dilemmas we faced. For example, Lai reported that “the recent data show a strong movement among both parents and teachers to preserve English-medium education, as an essential means of achieving English proficiency” (1999, p. 280). The conclusions of these kinds of studies appeared to be in such stark contrast with the works of Canagarajah (1999), Phillipson (1992), and others that this resulted in what Groves, who was also teaching at a university English language center elsewhere in Hong Kong, referred to as “linguistic schizophrenia in Hong Kong” (2011, p. 33).

Groves (2011) took the term “linguistic schizophrenia” from Braj Kachru’s 1983 work on models for nonnative Englishes, and although her paper was on the tensions between the local Hong Kong varieties of English and native-speaker norms, the notion of linguistic schizophrenia in Hong Kong captured for me the ongoing ambivalence and ambiguity surrounding English in Hong Kong. Also, in my work with teachers from many different countries, I can now see that it is not only Hong Kong where these kinds of ambivalences and ambiguities exist.

For example, earlier this year, I was invited to give the closing plenary at a conference on “English Language Teaching in the Context of a Globalized World,” in Tamil Nadu, South India. As part of my research for that talk, and during my time in India, I read about and saw many examples of what could be called a kind of linguistic schizophrenia in India, perhaps as a result of similar historical and political reasons for the linguistic schizophrenia we experienced in Hong Kong.

Redefining the Linguistic Norms

Groves explains that “in the case of the status of English in Hong Kong, most ‘new Englishes’ classification schemes have been either controversial or inconclusive” (2011, p. 1). Drawing on Kachru’s definitions, Groves defines linguistic schizophrenia as contexts in which “people are exonormative in ideal—holding to the ideals of native speaker English—but endonormative in practice—in actual fact, speaking their own local variety” (p. 1). This was certainly my experience also during my 10 years there, the most unexpected example of which arose as a result of our policy of hiring nonnative speakers to be English language instructors and senior instructors in our center.

During my time as director, we made it a point to hire not only local, Cantonese-speaking teachers, but also teachers from Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, mainland China, and elsewhere, as well as teachers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other English dominant countries, referred to by Kachru (1983) as “inner circle” countries. When I wrote the language center’s annual report, I highlighted the number of nonnative English-speaking teachers we had hired as a positive point. But to my great surprise that was one of the points most criticized by some of the local Hong Kong teachers. “How can we be taken seriously as a university English language teaching center without teachers who are native speakers of English?”

Not only was that a redundant question, as we did have many such teachers at that time, but more important, it also showed how deeply ingrained the belief in the inherent desirability of and preference for native speakers of English can still be in postcolonial settings, long after the empire has left—even among those who had been, according to Phillipson (1992), Canagarajah (1999), and others, “oppressed” by English during more than 150 years of colonial occupation, in the case of Hong Kong.

Some Concluding Points

The English language teaching and learning contexts in countries such as Hong Kong and India today are largely the result of the British Empire in its heyday. However, the more TESOL professionals I meet in and from other countries, the more it seems that some of the challenges in such settings may also apply to others as well. One example is the tension between localized varieties of English and the norms of the inner circle countries, especially the United Kingdom and the United States, and the desire to acquire English while at the same time preserving the integrity of the local languages and cultures.

Tertiary institutions are, by definition, the last layer of the educational system before students leave full-time education and enter the world of work. As such, university language centers occupy a key position in that study-work interface, trying to balance a host of competing and potentially conflicting demands and desires of students, parents, university and governmental administrators, future employers, and other stakeholders in the processes and products of the education system.

It is also worth noting that, in case anyone thinks that issues such as linguistic imperialism are behind us now, Phillipson (2012) wrote a recent article in a U.K. newspaper titled “Linguistic Imperialism Alive and Kicking,” in which he claims that: “British policies in Africa and Asia have aimed at strengthening English rather than promoting multilingualism” (para. 6) and that: “The demand for English has been orchestrated by western governments and their allies worldwide, and key bodies such as the World Bank” (para.12).  It seems, then, that these issues will continue to be a challenge for university English language teaching centers in Hong Kong, in India and elsewhere for some time to come.

References

British Council. (1986). English teaching profile: Hong Kong. London: Author.

Canagarajah, S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Groves, J. M. (2011). “Linguistic schizophrenia” in Hong Kong. English Today, 27(4), 33–42.

Kachru, B. B. (1983). Models for non-native Englishes. In K. Bolton & B.B. Kachru (Eds.), Critical concepts in linguistics (Vol. 4, pp.108-130). London: Routledge.

Lai, E. F. (1999). Motivation to learn English in Hong Kong. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 12(3), 280–284.

Phillipson, R. H. L. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Phillipson, R. H. L. (13 March 2012). Linguistic imperialism alive and kicking. The Guardian. Retrieved from

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/mar/13/linguistic-imperialism-english-language-teaching

Andy Curtis received his MA in applied linguistics and his PhD in international education from the University of York in England. He has been the director of English language centers in England, Canada, and Hong Kong, and he served on TESOL’s Board of Directors from 2007 to 2010.