By Lukey Lu

“You belong to English. English belongs to you. There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t need to apologize for your English. Right? Like so we talked about kind of big picture principles (to the students). But yeah, absolutely, in practice, how do you implement?”

This is a quotation from my interviewee Frank — a learning strategist from CLSS. However, he has a special background: just before his position as a learning strategist, he worked as an English language instructor and has rich experience in consulting with international students. In our interview, he spoke the above quotation in a powerful but urgent tone when I asked how he embeds his critical view towards language instruction in programming. Slightly different from other learning strategists, when facing questions about his real-life practice, he always replied with more excitement and had a correspondingly clear way to navigate those contradictions in work.

In my research, I found that most learning strategists’ counter-hegemonic acts against the neoliberal education system work by implicitly providing students with alternative mindsets for thinking about the system and environment. However, Frank’s way of embedding counter-hegemony is a bit ‘special’: his practice may be more ‘explicit’ and directly visible to students. Unlike other learning strategists, Frank’s counter-hegemonic practices happen more on a linguistic level, which is closely connected to his prior identity as a language instructor. Thus, this blog post is dedicated to this ‘special case’. I intend to reveal Frank’s counter-hegemonic practices through a linguistic anthropology view and invite readers to be inspired by this counter-hegemonic practice as a way to navigate through constraints in daily life and further rethink language usage.

One of Frank’s core teaching or consulting strategies is related to his language ideology: the distinction between ‘Englishes’ and ‘English’. For him, there is no ‘correct’ way to speak English — every variety of the English (e.g., Singlish and Chinglish) is equally validated. Thus, in his practice, he always tries to recognize diversity and confirm its validity by calling English ‘Englishes’.

However, as a language instructor, it is always challenging for him to fully convey such counter-hegemonic language ideology to students. On one side, since English is the basic medium for learning and academic function in the university, students who seek help usually come with greater anxiety and have a strong desire to solve their ‘English problem’ — e.g., speaking with accents or expression issue. On the other hand, due to the wide domination of an idealized ‘imagination’ of native speakers — an imagination of ‘unaccented’ English, the varieties (e.g. Englishes) always face the ‘risk’ of being abjected and delegitimized as ‘marked’ category. Thus, this strengthens students’ desire for linguistic assimilation into the dominant speech ‘reality’. Frank knows this is an institutional and social issue, and he knows he doesn’t have the power to individually change the entire structure. However, speaking is doing and acting. Linguistical practices thus have the potential to covertly embed unexpected amounts of power, and through actual daily speech, materialize those powers in reality.

Thus, Frank navigates through such contradictions by creating new linguistic practice – telling students not to apologize for their ‘English’. As he mentioned in the above quotation, he discourages students from apologizing for their own English. In his experience, many ESL students like to say: “I’m sorry that my English is not good” when they are talking to others in class. Rather than saying this, Frank suggests his students change the way they meta-linguistically ‘talk’ about their ‘language ability’ — say “If you don’t understand anything I said, please feel free to stop me and ask me to clarify.”

For him, by changing to such a way of speaking, students can move away from the view that they have ‘English issues’. Such speech act (expression) shifts away from the identification of ‘problem’ in those ‘Englishes’ varieties. Conversely, this practice brings students back to the ‘driver’s seat’ in controlling their own speech practice and the potential judgments towards it. While bringing back students’ confidence in speech even as ‘marked’, this also brings back students’ own subjectivity and agency into their own speech through their own establishment of legitimacy and confidence in the speech. Such a shift in expression thus also encourages students to break the normalized ‘ideal English’ imagination and resist the power inside this hegemonic concept that always intends to discipline and assimilate the varieties into the discourse.