From a Critical Deconstruction Paradigm to a Critical Construction Paradigm: An Introduction to Decolonisation, Globalisation and Language-in-Education Policy and Practice

ANGEL M.Y. LIN and PETER MARTIN

The turn of this century has witnessed a heightened sense among language educators and researchers of the need for critical analytical approaches to language-in-education (LIE) and language planning and policy (LPP) issues in diverse contexts of the world. There are many recent important and useful anthologies embodying such approaches. The question arises why the present volume is needed, or indeed what new kind of insights or contributions will it make theoretically, politically, educationally and practically? Is it just another addition to the already burgeoning critical academic discourses on LIE and LPP issues?

As all good questions do, they push us to go further than just putting together a collection of regional reports on LIE and LPP issues in a range of postcolonial contexts. We endeavour to do more than that. From the outset, we are committed to both theorising and problematising issues in these contexts, to provide the reader with more than just an encyclopaedic walk through the uneven histories and developments of LIE and LPP in different postcolonial contexts. We do not want to provide the reader with an excursion like that of a cultural tourist (and in this case an 'intellectual tourist') – a neocolonialist textual journey into different 'exotic' temporalities and localities – without also raising thorny, uncomfortable questions about the political and educational dilemmas and the new subtle ways of marginalisation and collusion under new forces of globalisation. Fully aware of such a risk and trap (of providing just another comfortable, exotic cultural and academic tour) in embarking on this textual-political project (as all textual projects are simultaneously implicit political projects), we have contracted critical educators and researchers working in different postcolonial contexts who have a track record of not stopping at a comfortable academic excursion only, and who are committed to asking bold questions about existing social, cultural, economic, political and educational formations which in new complex ways effect new forms of educational, social and material inequalities under new forces of globalisation and global capitalism.

What stands out as a key distinguishing feature of this collection of essays is the attempt by the authors to link old colonisation processes with new globalisation processes, seeing the latter as in many ways a continuation of the former and yet not in a simple binary imperialism-resistance logic, but in new, complex ways that also offer new opportunities of collusion and interpenetration, hybridisation and postcolonial reinvention, ways that go beyond the essentialist, nationalist identity and 'two cultures' politics (see Allan Luke's critique in his Foreword to this book) that defined the earlier phases of decolonisation, nationalism and national culturalism in the process of nation-building in many postcolonial societies. In the following sections, we shall propose a framework to see how the different essays in this volume link together and what kinds of new insights they offer to us in current LIE and LPP studies in postcolonial contexts that will allow us to advance from a critical deconstruction paradigm to a critical construction paradigm which will offer not only policy and practice critiques but also practical policy, pedagogy and curriculum alternatives.

'The Empire Strikes Back'? The Global Spread and Hegemony of English Riding on New Wings of Globalisation

The papers in this volume cover an array of societies which are at different historical and economic conjunctures of their respective developmental trajectories, with both similar and distinct pathways. It is important that they are not seen as merely lying on different points of a singular, linear developmental pathway, as Western modernism might have us believe. Having said that, one has to note that they do, however, seem to share a similar moment in their respective histories: that in all their encounters with the West, now dispersed into the globe in various forms of global capitalism, global mass-media flows and global technological and communications penetration, English has often been perceived as an indispensable resource which many postcolonial peoples and governments seek for themselves and their younger generations in their respective socioeconomic contexts. This is often infused with a strong desire for economic development, technological and material modernisation, and human-resource capital investment for current and future successful participation in the new global economic order (that is, the desire to have one's cake and eat it). Such capital includes English communication skills, information technology, business management and commercial know-how and so on, and very often English comes in a package with all these desirable 'goodies', or it is the indispensable medium for bringing in and acquiring these goodies. How to make English linguistic capital accessible to more of the school population and how to spread English capital more efficiently and evenly across different social sectors in the society become important issues in critical (if not always government) research in policy, curriculum and pedagogy, and very often occupy priority places in national development agendas. The main initiatives (sometimes coming from government, sometimes coming from local communities or both) found in different societies to reform their former largely...