The Author Responds: (Un)Raveling Racism in a Nice Field like TESOL (original) (raw)

Idealized Nativeness, Privilege, and Marginalization in English Language Teaching

TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, 2024

The field of English language teaching (ELT) emerged out of global, imperialistic attempts to create colonial subjects and assert control over their minds and resources. ELT thus served as a means both to impose essentialized ways of thinking, speaking, sounding, behaving, and knowing upon local populations, and to devalue and erase localized being, knowing and doing via both epistemic and actualized violence. ELT was predicated upon an idealized nativeness in English affording authority and corresponding privilege to select, white members of colonial societies both domestically and abroad. White, Western "native speakers," whose identities corresponded with notions of idealized nativeness, were imagined as ideal instructors of the "English language." The monolingual principle (Howatt, 1984), or the view that English should be taught exclusively in English, was a further means to marginalize locals as "non-native" learners, users, and teachers. Idealized nativeness has served as an (unachievable) benchmark for "success" in (and beyond) ELT, in diverse, contextualized ways. Whether presented as a theoretical abstraction, or as the foundation for conceptual frameworks detailing "normative" behavior, idealized nativeness continues to influence approaches to theory, research, policy, materials development, teacher education, classroom practice, and hiring in ELT settings around the globe. Colonialism past and present, and the ever-increasing local-global movement of people, information, technology, goods, and finances, have resulted in the emergence of a wide array of contexts, varieties, and functions of "English," and of unique ways of being, becoming, and belonging. Colonialism and movement have also perpetuated the now dominant neoliberal narrative found both within and beyond ELT, that English is "the" global language. Attention both to the history of ELT, and to diversity and complexity, has led to critical problematizations of ELT