Abstract
Preparing future citizens for “post-national society ” (see Ramirez, Bromley, and Russell in this volume) necessitates an education for communication in intercultural and international contexts. English language education , which is now a global phenomenon, is an illustrative example. In this chapter, we investigate the cross-national institutionalization of English as a regular school subject over the past century and discuss how the rise of English as a global language in today’s curricular policy models around the world reflects an expansive conception of supranational citizenship that emphasizes the empowerment of the individual in global society. We also extend our discussion to the possible problem that the discursive rationalization of English language education as an indispensable tool to help children become supranational citizens can also lead to the legitimation of some new forms of social inequality both within and across countries, especially if curricular policies on English language education are not accompanied by sustained and shared efforts to constantly identify and minimize their unintended consequences.
This chapter is a substantially revised version of an earlier article: Educating Supranational Citizens: The Incorporation of English Language Education into Curriculum Policies, American Journal of Education, Vol. 117, pp. 183–209, Cha and Ham (2011). The work on the current version was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean government (NRF-2014S1A3A2044609).
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Notes
- 1.
Although there have been some critical views on the growing impact of English on local cultures and languages around the world, a certain high level of ability to communicate in English seems to be becoming in many countries a new kind of basic literacy that no longer conveys narrowly Western ideological connotations (Crystal 2003; Graddol 2006; Honna 2005). English proficiency may be comparable to the new digital literacy for information and communication technologies, which is now part of basic competency for tomorrow’s global citizens (Ham and Cha 2009).
- 2.
See also Tsuda (1999), who notes that the rise of English as the most dominant international language may create communicative inequality among people with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, giving an unearned advantage to the speakers of English as their mother tongue.
- 3.
It is important to note that the transnational isomorphism in educational policy discourses inevitably involves the pervasiveness of various “loose couplings” (Meyer et al. 1997; Weick 1976) within individual countries. The reason is that imported models may be “indigenized” or “hybridized”, at various levels of policy and practice, into innovations extensively different from the original models that have been officially adopted and institutionalized (Anderson-Levitt 2003; Paine and Fang 2006). Such institutional isomorphism accompanied by local or national recontextualization processes is primarily due to the “structural duality of educational policy” (Ham et al. 2011) through which nation-states successfully incorporate and display elements that conform to global epistemic models of education and yet preserve considerable autonomy of state action.
- 4.
For data sources, see notes 5 and 10 in Cha and Ham (2011).
- 5.
For a bibliography of our prior exploratory studies, see the “References” section in Cha and Ham (2011).
- 6.
Only independent (or self-governing) countries were included for analysis; societies under colonial rule were not included until they became formally independent. Including all societies for analysis wherever data were available regardless of formal sovereignty did not change overall historical patterns, however.
- 7.
In our data, either a compulsory or compulsory elective subject taught in primary or general secondary schools was considered as a regular school subject in this study, but an optional subject was excluded from analysis.
- 8.
If English was an official language in a given country and, at the same time, was the first language of more than half of the population, we regarded the country as having English as the first/national language and thus excluded the country from the sample. In other words, unless English was used as the first language by more than half of the population in a given country, we regarded it as de facto a foreign language even if it had an official status in the country.
- 9.
The effects of interest did not much differ if countries that were once under colonial rule by an English-speaking country were added to the sample. The results are available on request.
- 10.
The linguistic diversity of the world is often seen to be threatened by the rise of English as a global language. Such a view is based on the analogy between an increasingly reduced number of living languages in the world and an increasing number of endangered species in the natural ecology. Of course, this ecology metaphor is useful to draw attention to diverse linguistic heritages around the world. However, many sociolinguists today observe a variety of modern Englishes that have evolved in different parts of the globe (Davies 2005; Kachru 1990), thereby questioning the traditional assumption that English has some unidirectional influence from one particular culture to another. As Honna (2005, p. 76) notes, “the spread of English as a language for multinational and multicultural communication utilized by an enormous number of non-native speakers shows that English is becoming more and more de-Anglo-Americanized in many regions of the world”.
- 11.
The word “myth”, as used in Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) seminal work, emphasizes that an institutionalized rule often conflicts with practical efficiency but persists as a taken-for-granted routine.
- 12.
In other words, some countries that are highly developed and modern may delay adopting innovations; since they are already deeply integrated into world society, conforming to additional world standards may not be their immediate political priority. For example, Rauner (1998) provides some evidence supporting this hypothesis with respect to social studies curricula.
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Cha, YK., Ham, SH. (2017). Educating Supranational Citizens: The Rise of English in Curricular Policies. In: Cha, YK., Gundara, J., Ham, SH., Lee, M. (eds) Multicultural Education in Glocal Perspectives. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_4
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