Abstract
Does English instruction “bestow” a language upon disadvantaged people “to illuminate a shining world of opportunity and social mobility” (p. 8)? Does it simply teach a global language? Or is it modern-day colonizing, the “unconscious, unplanned, even incidental reproduction of the status quo” (p. 8)? Whatever your answer to those questions, and whether you are an educator, teacher educator, administrator, multilingual learner, or lifelong speaker of English, Suhanthie Motha’s book is a vital resource for radically rethinking English teaching and learning. Motha addresses our collective inheritance of power inequity, cultural dominance, colonial control, language hierarchy, imperialism, and racism in the context of English language teaching (ELT) and explores how we can work for change.
Through a nuanced interrogation of the histories, oppressions, liberations, and consequences of ELT, Motha offers readers a wealth of thoughtful problem posing, a depth of scholarly support, and an illuminating case study of four novice teachers grappling with antiracist practice in ELT classrooms. Motha’s ability to weave these three strands into a thought-provoking, practice-oriented, critical whole is noteworthy, as is her commitment to raising vital issues at the intersection of ELT and race, culture, language, and power. Although her case study focuses on K-12 teachers, the topics, questions, and concerns she explores are indisputably applicable to adult ELT. She divides the book into five sections, along with an introduction and a thoughtful appendix focused on her research philosophy of “telling someone else’s stories.” The five central chapters are as follows:
Operating in Concert: Empire, Race, and Language Ideologies
Teaching Empire or Teaching English?
English, Antiracist Pedagogies, and Multiculturalism
Producing Place and Race: Language Varieties and Nativeness
Toward a Provincialized English
Each chapter presents theoretical and practical concerns, data and analysis from the case study (written in a welcoming narrative style), concluding thoughts, and a topical list of questions for readers. This praxis-oriented arrangement makes the book useful not only as a whole but also in parts.
Motha explores the far-reaching consequences of the positioning of monolingualism as “normal” (Chapters 1 and 2), postcolonial shame and its effects on English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) learners and teachers (Chapters 1 and 2), traditional versus critical multiculturalism (Chapter 3), the segregation of multilingual learners of English students in schools and society (Chapter 3), standard English and Whiteness (Chapters 3 and 4), World English as a racially constructed category (Chapters 3 and 4), and the deterritorialization of English (Chapter 5). This final chapter—focused on how English has stretched to permeate the globe, thus losing its sense of place and locality—leads to her major conclusion: the necessity of provincializing English. In Motha’s words, teaching and learning a provincialized English means developing an “intense awareness of the effects of English’s colonial and racial history on current-day language, economic, political, and social practices” (p. 129). More particularly, Motha argues that teacher education and ESOL learning must be reoriented to offer multiple readings of what happens when English is learned, of what happens to the individual when she or he learns English, of what happens to the world when entire populations learn English, and to more cohesively connect these understandings about English to the effects of racism, Empire, and students’ political action and agency. (p. 132)
I found Motha’s explanations in this concluding section to be more nebulous than those throughout the rest of the book, and wished for additional concrete examples of teachers putting this provincialized English into practice. In recognizing that I wanted more, however, I realized that Motha had already accomplished her primary objectives: to encourage me to ask difficult questions; to help me engage with research, peers, and mentors; and to catalyze critical, creative thought and action in my own particular context. Motha’s insightful, powerful writing challenges us to reconceptualize our understandings and practices of teaching, learning, and using English. In the midst of our day-to-day teaching and learning, may her words remind and inspire us to continue cocreating a more racially, linguistically, economically, and socially just and hopeful world.