The ideology of native-speakerism is one in which the West is seen as the centre of power in ELT, and legitimizes this authority through a number of different practices. Canagarajah (1999b) argues that "dominant groups are always involved in building consent to their power by influencing the culture and knowledge of subordinate groups" (p.31), and this is certainly true in the ELT industry. By presenting Western so-called 'native speakers' as the ideal users and owners of the English language, other varieties and speakers of English are implicitly de-legitimised, and this can be more clearly seen when we examine the ways in which culture is presented in the ELT classroom. Guest (2002) claims that in teaching materials and teacher training courses the ELT industry presents "a taxonomy of differences between familiar and exotic cultures" (p.154), based on what Kubota (1999) refers to as static "essences", as if these cultures were monolithic entities, and not
40 always in a state of negotiation and flux. This allows students to feel, when they are learning about culture in the classroom as if "they are travelling from one enclosed cultural block to another" (Holliday, 2005, p. 107), which in turn leads to self-Othering, as the students are encouraged to reduce their own cultures to simplistic interpretive elements, or to adopt what Paige et al. (2003) and Yuen (2011) call a 'tourist perspective' on culture. By encouraging students and teachers to 'Other' themselves and their culture, the ELT industry implicitly reinforces and strengthens the power of the West, and perpetuates its role as the political center of the ELT industry. Holliday (2005) refers to this as 'culturism', and to native-speakerism as a "chauvinistic professional discourse" (Holliday & Aboshiha, 2009, p. 671) which 'Others' non-Western cultures in order to uphold the power of the West. Holliday (2013) defines Othering as “reducing a group of people to a negative stereotype” (p.13), however within the context of native-speakerism Othering must also be connected to power relations between the Centre and the Periphery. Jensen (2011) argues that Othering describes a situation in which “subordinate people are offered, and at the same time relegated to, subject positions as others in discourse. In these processes, it is the Centre that has the power to describe, and the Other is constructed as inferior” (p.65). This is the sense in which I use the term regarding native-speakerism; the Other of the non-Western colleague or student is constructed as inferior through the discourses produced by the Western ELT establishment.
As well as creating and categorizing crude cultural differences in materials and in the rhetoric of the industry, the ELT profession also builds essentialized models of students from different cultural backgrounds, and offers these models to teachers with the professed aim of helping them to work through cultural differences in their host country and their classroom while working overseas (Holliday, 2005). However, such advice and materials serve to Other students by constructing them as deficient, using words such as "collectivist", which is defined in opposition to the more positively inflected "individualist" cultures of the West (Holliday, 2005). It is through processes
41 like these that the Western ELT industry promotes its own power at the expense of other non-Western users and students of the language.
This process imbues the West with 'cultural capital' (Bourdieu, Thompson, & Raymond, 2003). Sullivan (2001) argues that “Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital is not clearly defined, and it is not particularly surprising that it has been operationalised in various different ways by subsequent researchers” (p.896), however I use the term here in the sense described by Block (2014), to mean “social validation, legitimation, and recognition conferred onto those who have the right educational qualifications or taste in art or other forms of cultural expression” (p.53). The cultural capital of the Western ELT establishment makes it an aspirational target for teachers and learners of English, who believe that they can access this cultural capital by gaining access to the institutions of the West through language education or through language education teacher training programs, an example of consent building to the benefit of the dominant powers in ELT. Canagarajah (2012) makes this point when he described his own experiences of attempting to gain cultural (and perhaps even professional) capital from entering a Western institution:
I approached my senior colleagues and asked them how I could obtain the knowledge that would make me more authoritative in my teaching. Where did the experts get their superior knowledge that gave them the power to treat my teaching as laughable? My colleagues divulged the secret that orthodox knowledge is embodied in the scholarship and research that came to us from the United States. (p.259)
Based on this understanding, Canagarajah travelled to the West to undertake training that would furnish him with the cultural capital he desired:
42 I resolved to travel to what appeared to me then as the center of TESOL expertise -
a U.S. university - to become professionalized. I decided that undergoing an institutionalized form of training, with a certificate to show at the end, would establish my credentials in my profession. After such training, I told myself, no TESOL expert would laugh at my methods and I wouldn’t be lost for an answer the next time they challenged me to give an account of my teaching practice. (p.266)
Canagarajah provides here a clear example of a TESOL professional who sees the West and its institutions as a key to gaining cultural capital and professional recognition within the ELT field. As I have argued, such an attitude is not unexpected given the ways in which the ELT industry promotes the West as the only legitimate authority on English use and teaching. In other words, there is a strong connection between native-speakerism and notions of authenticity, in which 'native speakers' of English are considered to be the only authentic bearers and users of the language, and this authenticity can only be gained by those ELT professionals who are not 'native speakers' if they are willing or able to seek professional training and enlightenment in the West (Lowe & Pinner, 2016). This observation lies at the heart of native-speakerism - an ideology which 'Others' speakers and users of English from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds through a process that Holliday (2005) refers to as 'cultural disbelief', defined as “a disbelief in the ability of teachers labelled as ‘non-native speakers’ to teach English with ‘active’ oral expression, initiation, self-direction and students working in groups and pairs” (Holliday, 2015). This ‘cultural disbelief’ functions to promote the power of the West and imbue it with legitimacy and cultural capital.
43