BOOK REVIEW The Cultural Politics of English as （书评的文化政治英语）.pdf

NOTE: The article below is mirrored from the JALT Teacher Education SIG website. Teacher Talking to Teacher: Vol. III, No. 3, Oct. 1995, (pp. 21-23). BOOK REVIEW The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language by Alastair Pennycook (1994) Harlow, Essex, UK: Longman Group Limited This book is about the cultural and political implications of the spread of English across the globe over the last four centuries. It raises fundamental questions about the nature of education, language, and culture. Pennycook challenges the traditional views of English language teaching and applied linguistics has nothing to do with politics. He underscores how language is always taught in a political context. Teachers who assert theyre only teaching language will find it hard to accept many of the ideas in this book. Throughout this book Pennycook exhorts readers to critically reevaluate existing concepts, particularly those claiming to somehow be universal. Pennycook insists that any academic discipline should be evaluated in terms of the vested interests supporting it and the historical contexts in which it arose Many of Pennycook’s statements are a variation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. However, he criticizes Whorf for being too structuralist in his approach and for failing to explore the concept of social class. Pennycook feels the most fruitful way to consider language is as a locus of a political struggle. He uses the term political struggle in a Freireian sense: as an endeavor to ascertain contending values and to establish a personal worth. Envisioning culture as an active process by which people make meaning of their lives (p. 61), the author portrays cultural politics as a struggle over different meanings (p. 66). He disputes the Marxist tendency to view culture as a sup