Page 255 - Beyond Methods

Ensuring social relevance 243
remains the most potent instrument of cultural control” (Bill Ash- croft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, 1995, p. 283).
Connecting this line of thinking specifically to English language teaching (ELT), Alastair Pennycook (1998) offers an in-depth analy- sis of what he calls “the continuity of cultural constructs of colo- nialism” and demonstrates how ELT is deeply interwoven with the discourses of colonialism. ELT, he argues, “is a product of colonial- ism not just because it is colonialism that produced the initial con- ditions for the global spread of English but because it was colonial- ism that produced many of the ways of thinking and behaving that are still part of Western cultures. European/Western culture not only produced colonialism but was also produced by it; ELT not only rode on the back of colonialism to the distant corners of the Empire but was also in turn produced by that voyage” (p. 19). Based on his analy- sis, Pennycook calls for concerted efforts to decolonize English lan- guage education by finding alternative representations and alterna- tive possibilities in English language classes.
Consolidating an alternative approach to the issue of standardi- zation, Peter Lowenberg (2000, p. 69–70) observes that “the norms of Standard English in any variety—native-speaker or non-native— are not what any outsider—native speaker or non-native speaker— thinks they should be.” Accordingly, he operationally defines the standard model of a variety of English—native or non-native—as “the linguistic forms of that variety that are normally used in formal speaking and writing by speakers who have received the highest level of education available in that variety.” The assumption that na- tive speakers should determine the norms for teaching and testing Standard English around the world, he rightly asserts, betrays a neo- colonial attitude. Lowenberg’s observations are consistent with the stand other scholars have taken in the field of World Englishes such as Kachru (1982), Krishnaswamy and Burde (1998), and Kandiah (1998). They hold the view that the pluralistic nature and the dy- namic linguistic and creative processes of non-native varieties ex- press the social identity and the cultural values of the speakers of those varieties, thus constituting standard varieties by themselves.