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ELT Journal 1999 53(3):200-206; doi:10.1093/elt/53.3.200
© 1999 by Oxford University Press
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Point and counterpoint

Of EFL teachers, conscience, and cowardice

Kanavillil Rajagopalan

Adjunct Professor in Linguistics at the State University at Campinas (UNICAMP, Brazil). He has a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the Catholic University, São Paolo, and has done post-doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include the philosophy of language, linguistic pragmatics, language teaching, and cultural studies (broadly defined). He is co-editor of DELTA, a journal sponsored by the Brazilian Association of Linguists (ABRALIN). E-mail: <rajagopalan{at}uol.com.br>

The central purpose of this paper is to plead for an urgent review of a currently fashionable rhetoric, according to which the spread of English is endangering many regional languages and their corresponding cultures. The unmistakable implication of this opinion is that the spread of EFL ‘has a nefariously aggressive and imperialistic dimension to it’. I contend that the guilt complex which is likely to arise among EFL teachers in particular from a suspicion of complicity in this gigantic enterprise of neo-colonialism is totally misguided. In my view, the whole thesis is based on premises that no longer hold good in a world marked by cultural intermixing and growing multilingualsm at a hitherto unprecedented level, leading to unstable identities and shifting conceptual contours.


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