© 1999 by Oxford University Press
Point and counterpoint |
On EFL Teachers, awareness, and agency
Taught English language and literature in the war-torn region of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, for about ten years before joining the City University of New York (Baruch College) as an Assistant Professor in English. Until he obtained his doctorate in Applied Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, he had all his early education in the vernacular in Sri Lanka. Most of his papers in TESOL Quarterly, Language in Society, Written Communication, World Englishes, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and Multilingua were written from Jaffna. His research involves codeswitching, bilingual communicative strategies, and academic literacy. E-mail: 
canax{at}aol.com
If the rhetoric of linguistic imperialism (hereafter LI) has been fashionable for some time, we are now seeing another rhetoric become more fashionable and pitted against it. What I will call the linguistic hybridity movement (LH) celebrates the fluidity in languages, identities, and cultures, thus pluralizing these constructs. In their extreme versions, while LI is absolutist in defining these constructs monolithically as constituted by one ideology or the other, LH is relativistic in seeing them as always shifting in meaning and shape. While LI is deterministic in perceiving these constructs as always pliable in the hands of dominant forces, LH is antinomian, in seeing them as perpetually unstable, and resisting control. While LI is activist in struggling against hegemonic discourses to reconstruct a more democratic order, LH leads to apathy (as languages are seen as deconstructing themselves, transcending domination) or even playfulness (as the provision of new meanings to these constructs is treated as subverting the status quo). Leaping from one rhetoric to another without engaging rigorously with any, or clobbering one rhetoric with the other, are easy and eventually unproductive exercises. These are, after all, times when academic discourses, spawned freely in opposition to each other, swing wildly between extremes like a pendulum. As a teacher, focused on the concerns of my students, I negotiate with these divergent rhetorics to consider how they may develop a richer awareness of language and social life, enabling me to act more rewardingly in the classroom.