Of EFL teachers, conscience, and cowardice

Abstract

The central purpose of this paper is to plead for an urgent review of a currently fashionable rhetoric, according to which the spread of English is endangering many regional languages and their corresponding cultures. The unmistakable implication of this opinion is that the spread of EFL ‘has a nefariously aggressive and imperialistic dimension to it’. I contend that the guilt complex which is likely to arise among EFL teachers in particular from a suspicion of complicity in this gigantic enterprise of neo-colonialism is totally misguided. In my view, the whole thesis is based on premises that no longer hold good in a world marked by cultural intermixing and growing multilingualsm at a hitherto unprecedented level, leading to unstable identities and shifting conceptual contours.