Books and Book Chapters (Linguistics)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/5246

Browse

Browsing by Subject "Contemporary political economy"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Foreword. In: BethAnne Paulsrud, Zhongfeng Tian, and Jeanette Toth (Eds.), At the crossroads of english-medium Instruction and translanguaging
    (Multilingual Matters, 2021) Antia, Bassey E.
    Exclusive English-medium instruction (EMI), especially one that also takes its norms for the ‘E’ exogenously, is an aberration in those countries that lie outside of the ‘inner circle’ of the UK, USA, Anglophone Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and parts of the Caribbean in Kachru’s (1992) World Englishes model. Aberration is also arguably apt as a description for the practice of EMI in certain communities in these inner circle countries. Exclusive EMI in ‘outer or expanding circle’ countries and communities is a cultural travesty, one that highlights the hegemonic slant and reach of either or both colonial cultural politics and contemporary political economy. On this view, then, EMI in content area pedagogy, even when it is initiated locally, is cut from the same ideological fabric of ‘linguistic imperialism’ as the ‘monolingual fallacy’ in the teaching of English in outer/ expanding circle environments which Phillipson (1992) criticises. In both content and English language pedagogy, EMI guarantees that the inner circle has a huge market for educational resources and services, as well as a cheap and readily usable workforce. Because language, as critical language awareness reminds us, is more than a means of communication, EMI in outer/expanding circle contexts is easily able to shape local aspirations and serve as a local system of social selection for a global marketplace that is tied to the apron strings of the inner circle. To take on the ‘E’ in EMI, as this collection does, is therefore much more than an exercise in documenting pedagogical practices.