English Language Teaching in its Social Context

222 A. SURESH CANAGARAJAHearly OS), male, “progressive,” Christian, culturally Westerniied, middle class, nativeTamil,bilingual, director of English teaching at the university are the identities that I believe weremost salient for the students. So students’ insistence on the use ofTamil in the classroom,for example, is motivated by my being a bilingualTamil. If there had been a native-Englishspeakingteacher, students would have been compelled to use English. Additionally, use ofEnglish with me would havc been perceived to violate our Tamil in-group solidarity.(However, my class and cultural identities separate me from the rural poor and would likelyhave increased students’ inhibitions in using their marked English.) Our common Tamilidentity would likely have also forced students to sound more nationalistic, especially as thepresent communalist mood tends not to tolerate neutrality. In this context, however, theiraffirmation of English is daring. On the other hand, because I was in an institutionallypowerful role, instances of opposition to English (as their falling attendance) are significant.The same identity, however, would have motivated students to affirm the language, textbook,and the course. (In a sense, then, my multiple subject positions seem to qualify each other.)Although the uniqueness of each teacher/researcher-student interaction should not beslighted in favor of the gcncralizability of this study, we have to note that almost all SriLankan ESOL teachers are Westernized, middlc-class, bilingual, native Lankans like me.Contextualizing student oppositionAt face value, the findings of the study seem inconclusive, if not contradictory. On the onehand, students seemed to gradually lose motivation in the course, as it was most objectivelydisplayed in their record of attcndance.There is reason to believc that this drop in motivationwas related to an oppositional response to the threats posed by the discourse inscribed inthe language, pedagogy, and the textbook. At the very least, students were experiencing atension or discomfort in the confrontation between the discoursc they preferred and thediscourses informing the ESOL course. But, on the other hand, students insisted that theyworked hardest in English compared to all the other subjects (which is true because theyhad been attending private classes as well). They maintained, as they did in the beginningof the course, the importance of English and the high priority given to learning the language.They went further to insist that they enjoyed learning Western culture and using the U.S.textbook (although they did not find them useful from the examination point of view). Ingeneral, the oppositional attitude was manifested in the largely unrcflected, untheorizedlived culture of the students emerging from their glosses in the textbooks and my field notes;the receptive attitude emerges from the more conscious expression of their views in thequestionnaires and interviews.As a way of reconciling this tension, we have several options: We can suppress one setof data in favor of the other; we can judge the students as confused and contradictingthemselves; or we can simply fault the methodology. Not seeing valid reasons to do any ofthis, 1 find it challenging to preserve both sets of data and consider how both attitudesof the students display a complex response to the learning of English. It appears that thesedual attitudes simply dramatize the conflict students faced in the course between the threatsof cultural alienation experienced intuitively or instinctively and the promises of asocioeconomic necessity acknowledged at a more conscious level. The students experienceddiscomfort in the face of the alien discourses, although they do not theorize about it. Butthis experience has to be juxtaposed with their awareness of the powerful discourses whichglorify the role of English (such as those of policymakers Goonctilleke, 1983, and Hanson-Smith, 1984), the pressure from the educational system to display proficiency in English,