#English Learning

When I watched the videos of student interviews in Ghana, I was shocked by students’ English fluency. In Professor Howard’s research about elite schools on different continents, English is the only language taught by most elite schools. Besides, our readings about the schooling systems in different countries also show that English is the dominant second language taught in some non-English speaking countries. I would like to discuss the two roles of English and language education in general: communication and domination.

Because English has become the leading lingua franca globally, one of its important roles is to facilitate communication between groups of different backgrounds. When considering the four main goals of education, I found that English education in a non-English speaking country would fulfill all the goals: political, economic, social, and cultural. Politically, a country with more people proficient in English will gain more chances of engaging in the global discussion of political issues because English dominates the international discourse. As different regions of the world are increasingly connected by global trade, English proficiency helps the communication of business ideas and supports the efficiency of global trade. With the increasing migration of people across the world and the development of information and communication technology, people can easily meet people of various backgrounds and encounter different cultures online. English helps in socializing with different individuals and learning/sharing cultures globally. In a word, English is essential for the survival and engagement of countries in globalization, especially for non-English speaking countries.

Lots of questions arose when I thought about English as the leading language for communication. Why English? Why not Spanish or Mandarin? Will people in English-speaking countries use the second languages they learned in school? Or will they forget because English is the dominant language and most comfortable for them? Why not create a new language (e.g., Esperanto) that does not represent a specific ideology or power for the world? In my opinion, English education is also a representation of domination. Historically, colonization spread the popularity of English. Politically and economically, the portion of the world that has the most power and control speaks English. For the rest of the world, people are experiencing social and cultural westernization, not globalization. While some people thrive to connect to the world using English, other native speakers are lazy or even unaware of exploring the world outside their English bubble. My cousin studied in an elite international primary school in Beijing. While learning and speaking entirely in English in school, he must use Chinese in daily life. However, merely receiving an English education made him lose touch with Chinese society and culture. He easily became an American after immigration without any culture shock, and his transition to US school life was smooth. It strongly convinced me that English is more than just communication but implicit domination of dominated ideology and power. 

Language domination also happens in more local contexts, even outside of English education. In my community service for the left-behind children of the Dong ethnic group in a Chinese village, we assisted their Mandarin literacy (and also English) so that they could survive in the fierce education system and end their poverty and loneliness through successful academic performance. However, fewer children can speak the Dong language now, and Dong tradition might only appear in museum exhibitions one day. Combining with my own experience of learning English mandatorily as a second language, I know deeply about how powerful the education of the dominant language can penetrate, change, and even reshape a local world.

While learning languages is essential for communication, language education can also be a form of domination that prevents real communication from happening across a broader range. The education of the dominant language, especially English, will be an interesting angle to study globalization vs westernization, global citizenship education vs “western” elite schooling, and power in general.