The Guilt Complex of Teaching English Abroad

After a few months of teaching English in rural Costa Rica, a couple teachers and I admitted that we felt slightly uneasy about participating in the development of an English only high school. Although it’s fairly undeniable that globalization and Costa Rica's increasing popularity as a tourist destination was creating a higher demand for English and English teaching, we weren’t certain that we wanted to be a part of perpetuating the town’s reliance on Western dollars.

Nevertheless, it had been our host community’s decision to jump on the ESL (English as a Second Language) bandwagon. Our students’ parents repeatedly expressed that they saw English as a gateway to more lucrative jobs off the coffee farms. This was especially true for becoming an official tour guide, one of the few job options close to home, where fluency in English was required by law. In another instance, governmental advocacy for bilingualism in Costa Rica led the principal of the local elementary school to request ESL classes from us. Like anywhere else, learning a second language would give our students a competitive advantage in the job market, and as English has become the de facto lingua franca of the world, it was an obvious place to start.

But given the politics that made all these truths a reality, we couldn’t completely shake the idea that we were participating in some odd neo-imperialism scheme. We even happened to be working for missionaries, which gave our school an even closer resemblance to colonialist era attempts to “civilize” non-European societies. Were we too adding to uneven global power structures and cultural hegemony? How much of our values were we pressing on our students by teaching them English anyways?

Turns out our concerns weren’t all that uncommon, and this has been a topic of lively debate within applied linguistics since the early 1990s. Especially in response to Robert Phillipson’s Linguistic Imperialism, academics have been asking just what a global acceptance of English as THE international language means. Phillipson argues that globalization of English symbolizes the political, economic, and even cultural dominance of Anglophone countries. This has led some to romantically mourn the aspects of culture and language lost by popularization of English, and created a guilt complex (much like the one my fellow teachers and I experienced) among some English language learning professionals. Critics, however, say that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen something of the sort (Spanish in the New World, French in Middle Age England) and that to believe we are forcing other countries to learn English is to assume they are incapable of making their own decisions.

Phillipson argues that globalization of English symbolizes the political, economic, and even cultural dominance of Anglophone countries.

Furthermore, the English phenomenon is particularly fascinating because it has come to represent an international community and culture unique to the technology age. ESL classes undoubtedly teach students something or another about America, the UK, and the rest of the English speaking world, yet I’ve found that many textbooks use non-Anglophone names for fictional characters (like Carlos or Fatima), and emphasize topics of a global nature (like comparing business customs or immigration). In fact, when I breached the subject with peers and friends who speak English as their second or third language, most didn’t totally understand the my sentiments of guilt. Rather, they tended to optimistically view English as a medium through which to travel and interact with ease in an international context.

So given the debate, is the guilt complex of English language learning professionals still justifiable? I’d now say, probably not. English has been accepted enough globally to allow students access to any culture, at least in part, and not just those which predominately speak English. And better yet, as English teachers we have the creative power to design lessons that expose our students to an international culture in addition to (or instead of) the ones we come from. After all, if English is a means of entering an international community and expanding cultural understandings, why can’t our classrooms be as well?