خلاصة:
: Many people believe that language teaching is a neutral practice. However, this belief is not without its own opponents. To many scholars, teaching languages cannot be devoid of teaching cultural values of the target language, which tacitly aims at denigrating cultural values of the community of the learners who are learning it. The ultimate purpose of such cultural oppression, according to these scholars, is to provide the owners of the target language with a means to establish their supremacy and maintain a hegemonic control over other cultures. This article tries to present the arguments that scholars provide against the common belief that holds ELT as a neutral and unbiased profession. The article also tries to provide practical guidelines for ELT practitioners to help them uncover the hidden tenets that govern the ELT profession in today’s world.
ملخص الجهاز:
Mohammad Mehdi Soleimani* Islamic Azad University, Karaj Branch Received: September 26, 2011 Accepted: January 12, 2012 : Many people believe that language teaching is a neutral practice.
The history of the English language and its teaching is fraught with hegemonic coloration that can be manifested in four interrelated dimensions, namely the scholastic, linguistic, cultural, and economic (Kumaravadivelu, 2006).
At pedagogical level, Kumaravadivelu (2006) calls for a renewed relationship between the center and periphery regarding the major areas of ELT activity that include materials development, teaching methodology, and teacher education.
As he argues, this corpus of international Englishes would provide the materials developers with rich samples of non-native made language that can be used for developing ELT materials.
As for the teaching aspect, Kumaravadivelu (2001) proposes the idea of a post-method pedagogy to give the community of non-native English teachers a voice to activate their latent agency in the ELT profession.
It goes without saying that most ELT practitioners assume that achieving native-like competence or proficiency is the ultimate goal of English language learners.
Second, the proposition that the learners of English need or desire the so-called native speaker competency is erroneous because many learners have goals other than integrating in the target language community.
We therefore need to change our attitude toward the native speakers’ advantage and superiority in teaching languages and stop marginalizing non-native speaking teachers, because the process of marginalization aims at maintaining the authority of the center over the periphery.