At What Price English?

The best speech I saw at the KOTESOL conference this weekend was one that a lot of people seemed to skip, one that a friend said he wasn’t all that interested in, but which I found fascinating and explanatory of a lot of things I’ve seen in Korea.

It was Language Policy and the Construction of National Cultural Identity, delivered by Amy B. M. Tsui, from University of Hong Kong. Professor Tsui discussed the history of English study — encompassing English as a foreign-language subject of study, as well as English as a MOI — that is, as a medium of instruction, either in an immersion system or out of necessity in areas where the local language simply hasn’t developed a scientific or technical vocabulary for certain subjects but instead simply is displaced by English as the MOI for that subject. The history she covered included colonial inheritance of English-language study/English-MOI dealt with briefly, followed by the post-colonial disbanding of English study and then its eventual reinstatement in many areas.

The questions she raised were fascinating and immediately pertinent to my own work: whether English requirements safeguard elites or democratize language resources by opening up English to the masses; how people in non-Western cultures regard English study, individually and as a society, given the fact that English includes a wide range of cultural assumptions which are not fully compatible with traditional nonWestern societies; the purposes for langauge study and the way they inform the type of study performed; and what kinds of linguistic resistance arise when governments institute language and language-education policies.

Some of the points regarding Korea were pretty interesting. There was a nervous chuckle about a quote from a Korean-designed textbook that explained to students the value of studying English which was to be found in the comparative advantage of “knowing one’s enemy better.” But this reflected a deeper sensitive-spot in the Korean national psyche which even later on that day was demonstrated for me: if English is so necessary, well, then, is there something lacking in Korean?

The answer to this question, of course, is that there is not: it’s a matter of historical circumstance that English is the lingua france, just as French was some time ago and Spanish or Chinese may yet be in the future, depending on what happens to various economies in the world. But of course, given the colonial experience in Korea, including the Japanese occupation during which Korean was sidelined and Japanese language education and even naming policies were instituted, I believe it’s somewhat an understandable anxiety.

It’s easy for me, as an Anglophone Canadian, to shake my head and reflexively mutter, “Get over it.” It’s easy for me to say, “Look, the more you arm yourself with English, the better equipped you’ll be to keep your culture, but also to change it as you wish.” And to some degree, I believe that learning a language is like learning to play an instrument. Sure, you forge yourself a new identity in that language as part of the learning process — I’m more of a cusser in French, I’m (usually) more polite and slightly punnier in Korean. But this doesn’t mean that you give up the original identity that you built for yourself in your mother tongue; it doesn’t automatically translate into being someone else, at the end of the day.

Frankly, if and when exposure to ideas in another culture result in adoption of those ideas, I hardly think it’s because this is an automatic, unthinking response to the second language: after all, some ideas I’ve encountered while studying Korean rub me the wrong way. While I can parse or comprehend them when I interact with others in Korean, it’s not as if automatically adopt them and transform myself along their lines. The ideas I like, I accept into myself; the ideas I don’t like, I think about and compare to their analogues in my own society, and eventually reject them. Viewing language as a medium for transcultural “infection” basically ignores the fact of human agency, the idea that people can think about ideas and question them, and choose whether to accept or reject them.

And yet I can also agree that as part of the victory of the idea that “modernization” is synonymous with “Westernization”, people have lost a lot; this is because, perhaps, most people, even if they do have the ability to think through and choose what to accept and reject, for whatever reason don’t actually think through and decide: they simply let media, or the crowd, decide for them. Young people choose electric guitar or drums instead of their country’s traditional instruments, or any other country’s native instruments; businessmen wear suits as universally as any soldier wears a uniform. Art around the world reflects the modern art of Europe and the Americas, and the world’s main form of entertainment now is the movie. While people in other nations still adapt these things to their own cultures, and make each of them “their own”, it’s hard to believe that some degree of agency and power isn’t lost when these “foreign” things become the universal standards.

Of course, the forms of resistance look really unusual to us foreigners: we witness a number of stock phrases such as repeated declarations of how the Korean language and writing system are extremely “scientific” and “easy to learn” offered as explanations of why Koreans love their native tongue so dearly, and why Korea has an apparently much lower illiteracy rate than we see in other nations; but I wonder if this extends to stock affirmations about Korea in general, such as the 5,000 years of history and the “Korea has four seasons” memes that English teachers seem universally to encounter, and generally find odd in their apparent universality.

Of course, what to do with this is the big question. For example, is it better to point out that lots of other countries have four seasons, and at what level should one do that? How important is it to get students talking about Korea? (Given that this is an activity I have found most students find boring unless they have a teacher who is–or claims to be–new to the country.) And how much of my role in teaching English is to teach the underlying culture that English contains and embodies? This doesn’t come up much in my lower-level classes, but it does come into my upper-level classes, I think, a little more.

Anyway, I am interested in hearing others’ thoughts on the subject.