Encounters With ‘Strangers’: Towards Dialogical Ethics in English Language Education

This article takes the inquiry into ‘nativeness’ and ‘non-nativeness’ to the level of developing an ethical framework for professional practice in English language education. In so doing, our aim is firstly to use the ‘sociology of the stranger’ as a framework to problematize discourses on the Other and Othering. We shall argue that these discourses are sedimented in the modernist project of perpetual purification in which “order making … becomes indistinguishable from announcing ever new abnormalities, drawing ever new dividing lines, identifying and setting apart ever new strangers” (Bauman, 1997 Bauman, Z. 1997. Postmodernity and its discontents, Cambridge: Polity. [Google Scholar], p. 11). Our next step is to open up the possibility of transcending these discourses in education through a dialogical ethics of respecting the otherness in the Other. Pedagogy based on the ethics of dialogical recognition emphasizes the value of difference in learning through the ‘surplus of vision’ that the Other provides for constructing new meanings and new ways to mean (Bakhtin, 1981 Bakhtin, M. 1981. The dialogic imagination, Edited by: Holquist, M. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. [Google Scholar]; Levinas, 1969 Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority, Edited by: Lingis, A. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. [Google Scholar]). The recognition of ‘the foreigner in the self’ has significant pedagogical implications for language educators and marks the movement from ethics to politics.