Editorial

My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter another way … Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learnt to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test. (James Baldwin [quoted from Achebe 1997], in Mair 2003, xviii; see also Baldwin 2010)

This special issue of Changing English invites you to reflect on the ways teachers and their students might appropriate English for their own purposes, not just narrowly pragmatic ones, such as those emphasised by the neoliberal policies that have proliferated around the world. These policies all emphasise the importance of English for economic growth and its use for people in their efforts to gain a foothold in the economy, never the value of English as a means for people to grapple with dimensions of their experience and identity through language.

Our aim in bringing this special issue together is to explore the capacity of English to open up possibilities for confronting and transcending the model of language embedded in neoliberal blueprints. The contributors come from both ostensibly Anglophone settings and settings where English is a second/foreign/additional language (though we recognise that this distinction is seldom quite so absolute as it usually appears in the discourse of policy). Several contributors explore the imaginative and intellectual potentialities that might be realised through resistance to the colonial legacies of English (Pennycook 1998). All in their various ways take issue with pressures towards uniformity and compliance, affirming what might be gained by embracing the diversity of Englishes and the meaning-making potential of bi- (or multi-) lingualism.

Changing English regularly features articles that highlight how young people in classroom settings are able to draw on their multicultural (and multilingual) heritages to engage in exchanges that exceed the sterile mainstream model of language education. Eliza Kogawa (2021), for one, has shown the capacity of primary school children in the UK to explore the differences between the standard English privileged by schooling and other varieties of English, as well as what they can learn from their experiences of the interface between English and the languages spoken at home. But a larger field of inquiry is also pertinent here, namely the work done by English educators in settings other than Anglophone ones to find ways for their students to appropriate English that allow them to explore their life worlds, when it becomes possible, as Hamid Mirhosseini and Azadeh Emadi express it, to feel that ‘words belong to ourselves’ (Mirhosseini and Emadi 2022). Several of the essays in this volume take up this challenge by showing how teachers with their students can appropriate the English language on their terms, in ways that connect with their experiences.

It is little wonder that the machinery of global English has actively sought to undermine the capacity of people to use English in conjunction with other linguistic and semiotic resources to represent their experience. Supporting students to render their experiences into words might, after all, put them at odds with the designs of corporations and governments in promoting the benefits of a global economy in which English supposedly plays the role of a neutral lingua franca. Standards-based reforms in Anglophone countries and the international EFL industry are geared towards closing down the capacity of people to imagine their worlds differently from the world as neoliberal ideology conceives it. Such orientations attempt to compel English language educators to implement pedagogical practices that severely compromise their capacity to respond to the needs and interests of their students as they attempt to find and own the words that might represent their experiences of the world around them (Freire and Macedo 1978). Those orientations deny the legitimacy of the efforts of students and language learners to represent their experiences through drawing on both English and the languages of their families and communities by imposing a sterile model of ‘correct’ English – the English of ‘the idealised native speaker’, as Constant Leung, Harris and Rampton (1997) put it – an English that paradoxically nobody actually speaks.

Yet, it is also important to recognise that such practices are not only a result of government policy, but arguably also reflect a privileging of ‘native-speakerism’ (Holliday 2006) and so-called ‘mother tongue’ education that is inherent in the ‘project’ of English (Kress 2006), despite a long history of attempts by English educators to ‘reimagine’ what they do in response to the languages they hear their pupils speaking. Although it is rightly celebrated as show-casing the knowledge and experience of progressive educators like James Britton, Douglas Barnes, John Dixon and James Moffett, the famous Dartmouth Seminar of 1966 also featured contributions from educators who flatly declared that an English teacher is ‘someone who teaches English to young native speakers’ (Sinclair 1968, 31), who opined that ‘the vast majority of students’ came from ‘homes where Standard English was the normal vehicle of communication’ (Marckwardt 1968, 2–3). There is ideological blindness here that might be ascribed to the historical moment when these things were said, but we have surely now reached a point in time when as English educators we should all be participating in a reflexive critique of the ideology of ‘native speaker’ or ‘mother tongue’ English, making visible the nexus between disadvantaging and advantaging that this ideology conceals (cf. Connell 1993; Doecke and Mirhosseini 2023; Thomas 2021).

Whatever the burden of history, and whatever the constraints imposed by neoliberal reforms in their efforts to undermine the capacity of people to think otherwise, we remain convinced that the exchanges that actually occur within educational settings cannot ultimately be contained by reified traditions, prescriptions or indeed proscriptions. This, at least, is the lesson that we take from the essays we have assembled in this volume. All acknowledge the larger historical and socio-cultural contexts that variously mediate the teaching of English around the world, while providing rich accounts of pedagogic ‘praxis’ that challenge the values and assumptions of the Global English industry. Although they remain supremely mindful of the ideological work that English has performed (Doecke et al. 2019), they remain committed to enabling their students to bring English together with their languages and cultures in ways that enhance their awareness of what it means to be alive in this world (cf. Doecke and Mirhosseini 2023)

Preparing this special issue of Changing English has been a bit like lesson planning. We don’t mean planning directed at achieving preconceived outcomes, but planning in the spirit that Douglas Barnes conceives it, when the quality of the language and learning in which pupils engage within classroom settings exceeds the teacher’s intentions (Barnes 1992 [(1975) 1992, 14). The contributions to this special issue all do justice to the title ‘Resisting (in) English’ as we initially conceived it, but in many respects they also open up dimensions that we didn’t anticipate. In their contextualised attempts at ‘resisting’ English, many of the writers entertain the prospect of ‘re-imagining’ (in) English, of a creative appropriation of the resources of the English language that is far richer than anything that teachers plan in advance for their pupils to learn (to hark back to Douglas Barnes’s vision of the play between intention and enactment). In many of the essays that follow there seems to be a strong positive emphasis on the potential of English teaching to open up new worlds of thought and imagination beyond a negative critique of neoliberal constructions of English language teaching.

We are nonetheless indebted to Christian Mair, not only for alerting us to James Baldwin’s reflections about being inside/outside the English language (reflections that are also cited by Chinua Achebe 1997, another writer who has explored the significance of being inside/outside English) but for the title of this special issue, which is the title of the first section of an engaging collection of essays that Mair edited: The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Studies (Mair 2003). The distinctive character of this volume consists in the way it brings together people working respectively in the fields of linguistics and postcolonial literary studies in order to develop ‘a discourse-based and dynamic model of varieties of English, which puts the context, the speaker and his/her intentions, and history back into the picture’, that affirms ‘the contextualised, situated appropriation of a language by a postcolonial community on its own terms and for its own purposes’ (xiii). By appropriating Mair’s title, we hope that this special issue of Changing English likewise transcends the reified categories and divisions (most notably that between EFL and English as so-called ‘mother tongue’) that have compromised educators’ efforts to recognise and respond to their students in their attempts to appropriate English on their own terms and for their own purposes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).