Pennycook

NOTE: The article below is mirrored from the JALT Teacher Education SIG website.

Teacher Talking to Teacher: Vol. III, No. 3, Oct. 1995, (pp. 21-23).

BOOK REVIEW

The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language
by Alastair Pennycook (1994) Harlow, Essex, UK: Longman Group Limited This book is about the cultural and political implications of the spread of English across theglobe over the last four centuries. It raises fundamental questions about the nature of education, language, and culture. Pennycook challenges the traditional views of English language teaching and applied linguistics has nothing to do with politics. He underscores how language is always taught in a political context. Teachers who assert they're "only teaching language" will find it hard to acceptmany of the ideas in this book. Throughout this book Pennycook exhorts readers to critically reevaluate existing concepts, particularly those claiming to somehow be "universal". Pennycook insists that any academic discipline should be evaluated in terms of the vested interests supporting it and the historical contexts in which it arose Many of Pennycook’s statements are a variation of theSapir-Whorf hypothesis. However, he criticizes Whorf for being too structuralist in his approach and for failing to explore the concept of social class. Pennycook feels the most fruitful way to consider language is as a locus of a political struggle. He uses the term 'political struggle' in a Freireian sense: as an endeavor to ascertain contending values and to establish a personal worth. Envisioningculture as an "active process by which people make meaning of their lives" (p. 61), the author portrays cultural politics as a "struggle over different meanings" (p. 66). He disputes the Marxist tendency to view culture as "a superstructural phenomenon determined by the socioeconomic 'realities'" (p. 63) as well as the positivist view of culture as the action of nation-states within a high/lowdiametric field. Pennycook discusses the spread of English in terms of Galtung's (1971) concept of Center and Periphery. He points outs how English media from 'developed' countries have penetrated the media of developing nations. This essentially one-way flow of information erodes the national sovereignty, cultural identity, and political independence of developing nations. Though institutionsconsidered along the Periphery tend to become distributors of knowledge received from the Center, Pennycook emphasizes that the actual situation is more complex. Many institutions in the third world are more than passive information receptors. Through the process of 'writing back' – of expressing their own values and vision – marginalized populations can gain dynamic voices. Pennycook concurs withAppadurai's (1990) appraisal that, "the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which can no longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models." (p. 32) Outlining the global spread of English in recent centuries with the expansion of Anglo-American power, Pennycook disputes the assumption that its proliferation has been natural, neutral, orbeneficial. He also refutes claims made by Fishman et al. (1977) that English is not "ideologically encumbered." Every language, Pennycook maintains, carries the weight of a civilization. The decision to use a certain language means to support the existence of a given cultural matrix. Phillipson's (1986, 1988, 1992) notion of "English linguistic imperialism" is considered in depth. The authorconcedes Anglo-American expansion has gone hand-in-hand with the expansion of English and that the American and British governments have fostered the disciplines of EFL/ESL and organizations such as the British Council and Peace Corps. Pennycook, however, criticizes Phillipson for not adequately considering how English can be used in diverse contexts. Although the author concedes that English is...