The Church of Please and Thank You
The growth of English abroad is putting words in the mouths of students—even changing their identities. “Let’s do lunch” and other ways EFL teachers spread the gospel of English overseas
BY Julie Traves
Illustration by Ian Phillips
Michelle Szabo smiles encouragingly as a young businessman talks about his hobbies in broken English. She is a Canadian teacher at Aeon’s language school in Kawagoe, Japan. He is a prospective student she’s charged to recruit as part of her job. The two meet in a drab five-storey office building outside the train station. The room is so small it fits only a table and two chairs. But making the sell to would-be learners has little to do with décor. What counts is Szabo’s final handshake.
More than contact with an attractive young woman, her personal touch symbolizes a grasp on a better life. In the competitive marketplace of Japan, English test scores make or break job applications. Getting ahead means getting into classes with teachers like Szabo. “I would ask so many people, ‘do you expect to use English in your life?’ And most people would say ‘No, no, no, I just need this test score,’” says Szabo. “I think it’s sort of a given for all families—it’s like food, shelter, English.” Some sarariiman (salarymen) were so excited they trembled when they took her hand.
In addition to the 380 million people worldwide who use English as their first language, it’s estimated there are 350 million to 500 million speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL)—and the number is growing. For people from affluent and developing nations alike, it is clear that the secret passwords to safety, wealth and freedom can be whispered only in English. Even 66 percent of French citizens, linguistic protectionists par excellence, agreed they needed to speak English in a 2001 Eurobarometer poll. While thinkers such as John Ralston Saul proclaim the death of globalization, locals from countries around the world are clamouring for English training.
Enter thousands of Westerners who spread the English gospel overseas each year. Like the Christian missionaries who came before them, many are young, have a blind faith in the beliefs they’ve grown up with and are eager to make their mark on the world. Unlike the 19- to 26-year-olds who proselytize for the Latter-day Saints, however, these new missionaries are also out for adventure, good times—and hard cash. Part of a $7.8-billion industry, instructors can earn $400 a month plus room and board in China and up to $4,000 a month in Japan. That’s a lot more than a McJob back home.
But students expect more than lessons in syntax and style. EFL teachers are also hired to share Western customs and values. “‘Let’s have lunch sometime’ doesn’t mean stop by my office tomorrow and we’ll go out and have lunch. It means something more general, like ‘It’s been nice talking to you and maybe at some point I’d like to continue the conversation,’” says Diane Pecorari, a senior lecturer at the University of Stockholm. “When you’re teaching formulae like ‘Please,’ ‘Thank you,’ ‘Can I split the cheque?’ you also have to teach the context in which they come up. That means teaching culture.”
But what is the effect of that culture on students’ dialects, customs—their very identity? Ian Martin, an English professor at York University’s Glendon College in Toronto, points to a troubling precedent for the current explosion of EFL. “One of the big moments in the spread of English took place in India in 1835. [British politician] Thomas Babington Macaulay proposed that English be used to create a class of Indian middlemen who would be sympathetic to British interests, without the necessity of large numbers of British citizens coming out and running the show.” Instead of invading India at great economic and human cost, English allowed the British to transform the country from within. With English on the tip of their tongues, Indians could much more easily swear allegiance to England.
Today’s linguistic imperialism has a similar goal. Where once English facilitated the staffing of colonial offices, now it helps fill the cubicles of multinational corporations. Teaching locals Western speech and when it’s appropriate to use it no longer transforms them into perfect Englishmen, it makes them into perfect businessmen and women. The politics of English haven’t changed—the language simply serves a new corporate master.
To be sure, even those who are fascinated by the countries where they teach sometimes can’t help transforming “the natives” as part of their work abroad. Canadian Michael Schellenberg, who taught in Japan more than a decade ago, loved learning about Japanese customs but also sheepishly admits he urged students to express themselves—quite against the Japanese grain. “One of the sayings in Japan is that the nail that sticks up will get pounded down. They wanted people to conform,” he says. “I remember classes where I’d be like, ‘Just be yourself!’ As someone in my early 20s, I had a pretty good sense of how I thought the world should be. I felt pretty confident being forthright about that.”
Teaching materials subtly suggest the superiority of Western values. Produced primarily in the US and UK, textbooks propagate the advantages of materialism, individualism and sexual liberation. For example, Ian Martin recalls an Indian friend’s reaction to one textbook that showed Jack and Jane meeting in lesson one and dancing alone together by lesson three. “Where are the parents?” his friend wondered.
Some newer textbooks are more culturally sensitive. But in many of the books currently in circulation, says Martin, “there’s nothing about environmentalism, nothing about spirituality, nothing about, say, respecting non-native [English] speakers. And there’s very little realism in any of the language learning material that I’ve seen. It’s this mythic world of dream fulfillment through consumerism and Westernization.” The Aeon language franchise in Japan uses Cameron Diaz and Celine Dion as its poster girls.
Of course, not all teachers aggressively peddle a mythic world—some have their soapbox thrust upon them. In her book The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo, California writer Paula Huntley chronicles her experience teaching English to the survivors of the area’s brutal ethnic clashes. Huntley doesn’t believe her language and culture are better than any other. She wants to learn from the Kosovars as much as they want to learn from her. It’s her students who are convinced that the American way is the way forward, that English is the true language of progress.
Before leaving for Kosovo, Huntley crams for four weeks to complete an English as a second language instructors’ certificate. But this is not what impresses the owner of the Cambridge School in Kosovo, a man named Ahmet whose house and library of 5,000 books were destroyed by the Serbs. Barely looking at her CV, he tells her she’s hired. “‘You are an American,’” he says. “‘So you can teach our students more than English. You can teach them how to live together, with others, in peace. You can teach them how to work, how to build a democracy, how to keep trying no matter what the odds.’”
Then there is the conflicted experience of Kathy Lee. She teaches at Guangdong Industry Technical College in China. In a suburb called Nanhai, the school is putting up satellite facilities eight times larger than the main campus. Teaching labs have banks of computers and a plasma screen TV. But like so much of the country, there is such impatience to forge ahead that Lee conducts her three classes a week amid construction because the school is expanding so fast.
Her pupils are equally anxious to take part in the country’s massive business boom. Though most of them have been studying English since primary school, their fluency is strained. They tell her: “The world is growing and many people speak English. If I want to do business with them, I must speak English well too!” What students want is a foreign teacher to help them get up to speed. That’s why the college has hired the 23-year-old Canadian at 4,000 RMB a month, two to three times the average salary for Chinese teachers.
The payoff is more than just monetary for Lee. Born in China but raised in Canada, she accepted the job so she could live in Hong Kong, within a short train ride from her sick grandmother. But now, her feelings have deepened. “When the schools were asking me why I wanted to teach in China, I BS’d and said it’s because I wanted to learn about my ‘other’ culture,” she says. “But the more I said it, the more I believed it. Now, I feel that I need to be here and learn what it means to be a Chinese person.”
Yet the way of life Lee is trying to understand is challenged by her methodology in the classroom. By the end of term, her students will be well practised in communication modes that are entirely un-Chinese. Lee worries about this—and the general English fever sweeping the country that even includes television programs that aim to teach English.
“I know that if everyone spoke English in the world there would still be cultural differences, but the differences between cultures will become less and less,” she says. “Why is China pushing English so hard? [My students] get the sense that their own language is not good enough. To prosper, they need English. What was wrong with the way it was before? Why do you have to be Western to be competitive in business?”
If it is tough for teachers to come to terms with these questions, it is even more complex for students. While some are in what Martin calls a “process of self-assimilation,” others are much more ambivalent about the course they are on. These students may be struggling with the political implications of learning English in places where the language is associated with American or British hegemony. Or they may simply recognize that as English proliferates, the survival of their own customs and dialects is under threat.
Take 27-year-old Sanghun Cho of South Korea. He is a graduate student in Toronto and has a Canadian girlfriend. But when he thinks of English he also thinks of the US. “It’s a kind of dilemma for Koreans,” he says. “I don’t like America in Korea because they want to control the Korean government, but to survive in this kind of competitive environment I have to speak English and I have to know what English culture is.”
Another South Korean student puts it even more bluntly. Part of a multinational research project Martin has been conducting over the past five years to examine why students study English as a foreign language, the student was asked to draw a picture of his future with English, and describe the picture. He sketched Uncle Sam extending a fishing line from the US across the Pacific Ocean, a hook dangling above the student’s open mouth. His description: “English is the bait that Americans are using to catch Koreans in their net.”
Marta Andersson is a part of the last generation of Poles forced to learn Russian in school. When she was able to study English after the fall of communism, she was thrilled. On the one hand, it paid off: she got a good job in Poland, is now studying abroad and speaks English at home with her husband. On another level, though, Andersson is aware that using English is eroding part of what her people fought for. “I have just started to lose the sense of my native language and just wait when it will become moribund,” she says, “Yet I cannot imagine my future without the presence of English.”
Swede Hélène Elg is also concerned about the fate of her language as English words invade it the way they do in “Chinglish” and “Franglais.” “I think it’s important to separate the languages in order to ‘protect’ our own,” she says. “I realize that languages evolve, allowing new words to come into use, but we should be aware of that development and be cautious about it. The reason I feel this is because languages are so much more than just words. Words have cultural connotations. As with languages, cultures evolve, but that development should not be about adopting another culture.”
Can students fight back? it’s arguable that withdrawing from English would exact too high a cost for those who want to be a part of a global economy. Instead, what’s changing is how people from around the world use English. Rather than simply conforming to an English steeped in Western values, many students are co-opting the language for themselves.
On an internet discussion board for EFL teachers, one teacher writes: “I feel the need of reminding our students and young colleagues that the purpose of learning English is not for us to ‘speak and act’ like an English person … but to ‘speak English’ as an educated Indonesian.” Similarly, one Cuban who participated in Martin’s project drew a picture of a rocket being launched into the sky with the description: “English is the rocket which will allow Cuba to tell its own stories to the world.”
A new “global” English is emerging that is a bridge language between cultures, not simply a language that supplants other cultures. As Salman Rushdie is quoted as saying in the best-selling history The Story of English, “English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots; and those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves. The Empire is striking back.”
Along with students, many teachers are joining the fight to create a more egalitarian English. They do not want to be cultural colonialists. As David Hill, a teacher in Istanbul, writes in The Guardian Weekly: “English is global for highly dubious reasons: colonial, military and economic hegemony, first of the British, now of the US…. If we are not to be imperialists then we must help our students to express themselves, not our agenda.”
To do that, new programs are emerging, like the Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language, which Martin coordinates at Glendon College. It pays close attention to issues of cultural sensitivity and autonomy when training teachers. As Martin says, “We’re trying to come to grips with the effect of globalization on language teaching. Do we want a globalization that is going to be assimilationist to Western models of communication only? Or, do we want to help people gain a voice in English?”
Michelle Szabo is one teacher who has tried to give her students a voice. After her stint in Japan, she took a job at Chonbuk National University in South Korea from 2003 to 2004. On one November morning, she recalls encouraging discussion about the power of English. Her hope was to give pause to students who’d never considered the impact of studying English on their lives—as well as a place for those who had thought about it—a rare place to vent.
And there was plenty of venting as students heatedly debated face-to-face from desks arranged in a conversation-friendly horseshoe configuration. “One side was feeling very pressured and resentful,” says Szabo, “and one side was saying, ‘No, [English is] opening doors for us.’” Szabo tried to “equalize” the class by sitting among the students. She also said little. She wanted a forum that conveyed the message, “I’m not here to change you, to acculturize you, to force my beliefs on you,” she says.
But even Szabo’s new self-consciousness about what it is she is selling to her students along with English grammar has limits. English has irrevocably changed and acculturated the world already. Even if locals don’t want to participate in the global capitalist machine, they need English to truly challenge it. As one of Szabo’s students couldn’t help but point out during the debate, “Isn’t it ironic we’re discussing the effect of English—in English?”
