The role of culture in English language education: key challenges

Abstract English language education is in the process of change regarding teacher identity and the ownership of English. Cultural issues are implicated in this change. Critical cosmopolitan approaches in the social sciences are critiquing the primacy of national cultures which they consider a Western imposition on the emergent identities of the Periphery. Within this climate traditional native–non-native speaker categories become a Centre professional imposition which imagines a ‘non-native speaker’ Other to be culturally deficient. The English as a lingua franca movement, while attempting to undo the supremacy of native speaker models of English, has therefore become implicated in a cultural struggle in which Centre definitions of language are accused of denying the voice of the Periphery. Proposed solutions suggest that the Centre must withdraw from defining the nature of culture and language, to allow Periphery educators and students to claim English and English language education in their own terms. Definitions of culture, such as collectivism and individualism, and of speakerhood and language standards, must be acknowledged as ideological acts within an unequal world.