As-salaamo alaikam - Peace be upon you!

 

We are pleased to announce that TESOL Islamia has launched its new website. The site has many additional features and resources, which we are continually updating. Please feel free to look around and share your comments with us.
 

For those of you are unfamiliar with our work, TESOL Islamia is an independent professional organisation primarily concerned with the teaching of English as a second language (ESL) to Muslims worldwide. We encourage everyone - Muslims and non-Muslims - involved in ESL to participate in the discussions on the interplay between 'English and Islam' in English medium education. For further information about our work, read the FAQ's section.

 

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Viewpoint is a new addition to the TESOL Islamia website and aims to provide featured articles of opinions, news and literature reviews related to the teaching or spread of English in the Muslim World.

 

Our first featured article has been submitted by Professor Alastair Pennycook:

 

"Teaching English as a Missionary Language (TEML)"

 

In this disturbing article, Alastair Pennycook and Sophie Couthand-Marin raise important ethical questions about the alarming expansion of English as a missionary language. Pennycook and Couthand-Marin have unravelled a plethora of websites that overtly use English as a tool for proselytising Muslims and inhabitants of ex-Communist countries. A very common and striking feature of these websites is their endorsement of the 'stealth tactics' widely used by many evangelical Christian groups. The following extract from the article sums up the urgency for reviewing the ties between English and evangelism and implications for the Muslim World:

"The recent shift in global relations, with the rampant ascendancy of an aggressively conservative, capitalist and Christian United States (supported particularly by Anglophone allies in wars against Islamic states), alongside the ever-increasing global clamour for English and its changing role in the world, has led to a new and troubling set of relations between English language teaching and Christian missionary activity."
>>>click here to read the full article

We are also planning to release this feature in Arabic - insh'Allah.

 

Alastair Pennycook is professor of language education at the University of Technology in Sydney. He is the author of Cultural Politics of English an International Language (Longman), English and Discourses of Colonialism (Routledge) and Critical Applied Linguistics (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

 

If you would like to submit an article for our Viewpoint page, please contact us at info@tesolislamia.org

In an insightful article of this week's edition of Al Ahram Weekly, Edward Said argues that Orientalist discourses about the Arabic language continue to play a pivotal role in silencing dissent from Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Easterners. He writes:

One of the basic themes of all Orientalist discourse since the mid-19th century is that the Arabic language and the Arabs are afflicted with both a mentality and a language that has no use for reality. Many Arabs have come to believe this racist drivel, as if whole national languages like Arabic, Chinese, or English directly represent the minds of their users. This notion is part of the same ideological arsenal used in the 19th century to justify colonial oppression: "Negroes" can't speak properly therefore, according to Thomas Carlyle, they must remain enslaved; "the Chinese" language is complicated and therefore, according to Ernest Renan, the Chinese man or woman is devious and should be kept down; and so on and so forth. No one takes such ideas seriously today except when Arabs, Arabic and Arabists are concerned.
>>> click here to read the full article

Although the focus of Edward Said's article is principally on the increasing influence of 'Christian Zionists' in US domestic politics and on their perceptions of Arabs and the Middle East, the same sort of attitudes are arguably very much alive in a lot of the TESOL discourses. Certainly one could argue that by suggesting that Arabic is somehow an inadequate medium for making meaningful statements about the real world such discourses only help to maintain the hegemony of English in the Muslim world.

For our current poll we are asking: Can a developing country modernise without adopting English?

 

Modernisation and learning English are often presented and treated as one indivisible package. Khaled Al Maeena of Arab News argues that English is key to understanding the wider world and that it is useless and pointless to argue the reasons why English is dominant. But how really crucial is the role of English in ensuring that a developing country can modernise? Has the case for English as a tool for modernisation been rigorously thought through? Robert Phillipson and others have argued that a lot of the promotion rhetoric behind English is often accompanied by inflated claims and questionable assumptions. In his book 'Planning Language, Planning Inequality' James Tollefson questions the underlying ideas of 'modernisation theory' and argues that English supports unequal relationships between developed and developing countries and is also associated with the institutionalisation of inequality within developing countries.

 

Perhaps we're asking the wrong question here: What does it mean that a country is modernising or a country is modern? And if a country chooses to be inhospitable to English, are we to assume that the country is backward? What is the link between English and modernisation?

 

We would like to hear your views on this topic. Please submit your comments in the discussion forum.

In May 2003, Robert Phillipson gave an exclusive interview to TESOL Islamia in Abu Dhabi. Robert Phillipson spoke about some of the key ideas that have informed his work in language policy.

For this new feature we would like to build a database of ESL material resources for Muslim students. We welcome contributions from ESL  teachers who have been able to adapt or develop materials in Muslim ESL contexts. Please submit a short lesson plan along with materials. Contributions will be accepted in MS Word format and converted into pdf format.

 

We look forward to receiving contributions.

 

 

Wassalaam - Peace!

 

 

Sohail Karmani

TESOL Islamia

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates