A Review of Part 3 of “After Whiteness”

Part 3 of After Whiteness by Gerald, Ramjattan & Stillar is now free to view on the Language Magazine website. It’s as bullshit-rich and content-poor as the first two parts; another mightily-righteous, mini-sermon which has the authors standing on the same flimsy pedestal (a rickety construction of parroted bits of Marxism, punitive moral dictums on racism and straw-man arguments) in order to preach to the choir. It’s about as edifying as a Chick tract. I’ll give a summary of the article and then comment.    

The article has 5 sections.

Introduction

Part 1 looked at pedagogical ways of challenging Whiteness. Part 2 “re-imagined” training and labor in English language teaching. Part 3 will look at ideas for “how the broader ELT industry could evolve” if “Whiteness” were “successfully decentered”.

Action Research as a Goal

A post-Whiteness ELT, we’re told, should be part of a post-Whiteness world in which ELT practitioners “strive for some micro- or meso-level changes in their contexts to combat Whiteness“. The only information offered about these new world “micro- or meso-level changes” is about pronunciation teaching, where in the post-Whiteness world, teachers would pay attention to “how their students’ racialization in society can shape external perceptions of their intelligibility and how these perceptions have material consequences”. One “material consequence” is alluded to:   

white “foreign-accented” job applicants are typically perceived as more intelligible/employable than their racialized counterparts, thereby suggesting that there are racial hierarchies when it comes to assessments of employability in relation to speech accent (Hosoda and Stone-Romero, 2010).  

To challenge these inequalities, “teachers need to use their pedagogy”.  For example,

teachers and students could engage in some sort of action research where they interrogate and challenge local employers’ aversion to hiring racialized “foreign-accented” applicants, which has the potential to substantively shift hiring policies in students’ communities.

“some sort of action research”? Really?

The Un-Canon of Lived Experience

This section suggests that “the canon” of ideas about English should be “removed, but not replaced”. This involves using “extensive student-generated input” to “dismantle linguistic and racialized hierarchies within the conceptualization of English”. Students can be asked to note how their neighbors and relatives use English and share the data with classmates as part of an “epistemological shift”, aimed at overcoming the idea of the “ownership of English”. Widdowson (1994) (sic) is cited to support the claim that standardized English is the property of White native speakers from the global North who shape the language as they see fit. Such a “White supremacist, capitalist notion of language” must be replaced by the view that English belongs to nobody: it is a community resource. This illuminating example is offered:

… when we see the word prepone, a word in so-called Indian English meaning to move an event ahead of schedule (Widdowson, 1994), it is important to remember that this is not a “made-up” word but rather a concise and useful antonym for postpone. If you were teaching students who needed to interact with Indian English users, why would you not want to teach such an innovative word?

That last sentence is the funniest example of a rhetorical question I’ve seen for quite some time!

Teaching the Perceiving Subjects

The section begins by redressing the deficit which results from “idealizing Whiteness and the ideologies that descend from it” (sic) through the imposition of standardized English. While teaching students different Englishes might help redress this deficit, the authors want to go much further. Why not, they ask, treat “minoritized varieties” as “the ideal”? They don’t explain what this radical proposal entails. What “minoritized varieties” would be included? How would these varieties form “the ideal”? What would it look like and sound like?

Moving quickly on, the authors ask the further question:

 “How might the White perceiving subject (Flores and Rosa, 2015) be taught to perceive more effectively?”

Again, they don’t explain what they’re talking about. What does the “White perceiving subject” refer to? Perhaps they assume that all readers are familiar with the Flores and Rosa (2015) article, or perhaps they’ve seen Flores’ helpful tweet:

The white listening subject is an ideological position that can be inhabited by any institutional actor regardless of their racial identity. It behooves all of us to be vigilant about how hegemonic modes of perception shape our interpretation of racialized language practices.

or perhaps they’ve read Rosa’s (2017) follow-up, where he explains that

the linguistic interpretations of white listening subjects are part of a broader, racialized semiotics of white perceiving subjects.

Anyway, let’s take it they mean that white subjects (whoever they are – noting that they’re not restricted to people with “white” features) should try to empathize with “racialized” people. Returning to the teaching of pronunciation, the authors suggest that teachers should be given time to practice listening to different Englishes so that they gain a certain level of experience with the population they might want to work with.  And this somehow demonstrates that until ELT practitioners are “freed from the monolingual cage they’re in”, so long as “raciolinguistic ideologies” are in place, the “racialized languagers” will always fail.

Conclusion

The authors admit that what they sketch out in their three articles is “something of a dream”, but they believe it can become reality “if we take the leap to a world that doesn’t yet exist”. Their ideas are born of love, not hatred. Their goal is to replace the “harmful, oppressive and, at heart, ineffective” practices which keep “racialized learners and languagers in their place below the dominant group”.

Discussion
What does this view of how the broader ELT industry could evolve if “Whiteness” were successfully “decentered” amount to?   

The first section on Action Research doesn’t make any sense. In a “post-Whiteness wold” where Whiteness has been swept away, surely there’s no longer any need for teachers to “strive for some micro- or meso-level changes in their contexts to combat Whiteness”, or to fight against job adverts that discriminate against NNSs. Apart from this incongruity, the only content in this section is the lame, undeveloped suggestion that teachers and students engage in “some sort of action research”, where the goal is to challenge employers’ prejudice against “foreign-accented” applicants.  

The “Un-Canon of Lived Experience” section proposes that the English language belongs to nobody: it’s a community resource. Apart from the bizarre example of promoting the use of the word “prepone”, this is little more than a motherhood statement until it’s properly developed. The authors assert that before we get to the hallowed post-Whiteness society, we must sweep away “Whiteness ideologies” which adopt a “White supremacist, capitalist notion of language”, and yet nowhere in their three-part series do they make any attempt to unpack the constructs of “ideology” or “capitalism” so as to explain what they mean when they say that language is a capitalist notion. Even less do they show any understanding of Marxism, or any other radical literature which makes coherent proposals for how capitalism can be overthrown and how that might lead to radical changes in education.

The “Teaching the Perceiving Subjects” section proposes that ELT should replace the teaching of standardized English with teaching English where “minoritized varieties” are used as “the ideal”. I’ve already suggested above that this is an empty proposal. Until the vague idea of making “minoritized varieties” form “the ideal” for English is properly outlined and incorporated into some minimum suggestions for new syllabuses, materials, pedagogic procedures and assessment tools, it’s no more than hand-waving rhetoric, typical of the lazy, faux academic posturing which pervades the “Against Whiteness” articles.

The re-education programme for “White perceiving subjects” doesn’t explain who the “subjects” are, and it doesn’t explain how they are to be re-educated; it sounds a bit scary to me, a bit too close to the views of Stalin, Mao and others determined to stamp out “wrong thinking”. Still, as usual, we’re not told what’s involved, except for the perfectly reasonable suggestion that teachers should be more aware of, and sympathetic to, different Englishes.

The 3-part series of articles Against Whiteness fails to present a coherent, evidence-supported argument. Students of instructed SLA will find absolutely nothing of interest here, unless they want to deconstruct the text so as to reveal the awful extent of its empty noise. Likewise, radical teachers looking for ways to challenge the commodification of education, fight racial discrimination, and move beyond the reactionary views of English and the offensive stereotyping which permeate ELT materials and practices, will find nothing of practical use here. They should look, instead, to the increasing number of radical ELT groups and blogs that offer much better-informed political analyses and far more helpful practical support. In stark contrast to Gerald, Ramjattan & Stillar, such groups and individuals not only produce clear, coherent and cohesive texts, they also DO things – practical things that make a difference and push change in the ELT industry. The SLB Cooperative; ELT Advocacy, Ireland; the Gorillas Workers Collective; the Hands Up Project; the Part & Parcel project; the Teachers as Workers group; the on-line blogs, social media engagement and published work of Steve Brown, Neil McMillan, Rose Bard, Jessica MacKay, Ljiljana Havran, Paul Walsh, Scott Thornbury, Cathy Doughty, David Block, Pau Bori, are just a few counter examples which highlight the feebleness of the dire, unedifying dross dished up in the After Whiteness articles.       

Re-visiting Krashen

The first 2021 issue of the Foreign Language Annals Journal has a special section devoted to a discussion of “Krashen forty years later”. The lead article by Lichten and Van Patten asks “Was Krashen right?” and concludes that yes, mostly he was.

Lichten and Van Patten look at 3 issues:

• The Acquisition‐Learning Distinction,
•  The Natural Order Hypothesis,
• The Input Hypothesis.

And they argue that “these ideas persist today as the following constructs:

• implicit versus explicit learning,
• ordered development,
• a central role for communicatively embedded input in all theories of second language acquisition”.

The following updates to Krashen’s work are offered:

1.  The Acquisition/learning distinction

The complex and abstract mental representation of language is mainly built up through implicit learning processes as learners attempt to comprehend messages directed to them in the language. Explicit learning plays a more minor role in the language acquisition process, contributing to metalinguistic knowledge rather than mental representation of language.

2. The Natural Order Hypothesis

This is replaced with the ‘Ordered Development Hypothesis’:

The evolution of the learner’s linguistic system occurs in ordered and predictable ways, and is largely impervious to outside influence such as instruction and explicit practice.

3 The Input Hypothesis

The principal data for the acquisition of language is found in the communicatively embedded comprehensible input that learners receive. Comprehension precedes production in the acquisition process.

Pedagogic Implications

Finally, the authors suggest 2 pedagogic implications:

1. Learners need exposure to communicatively embedded input in order for language to grow in their heads. …Leaners should be actively engaged in trying to comprehend language and interpret meaning from the outset.

2. The explicit teaching, learning, and testing of textbook grammar rules and grammatical forms should be minimized, as it does not lead directly or even indirectly to the development of mental representation that underlies language use. Instructors need to understand that the explicit learning of surface features and rules of language leads to explicit knowledge of the same, but that this explicit knowledge plays little to no role in language acquisition as normally defined.   

Discussion

Note the clear teaching implications, particularly this: the explicit learning of grammar rules leads to explicit knowledge which plays “little to no role” in language acquisition.

What reasons and evidence do the authors give to support their arguments? They draw on more than 50 years research into SLA by those who focus on the psychological process of language learning, of what goes on in the mind of a language learner. They demonstrate that we learn languages in a way that differs from the way we learn other subjects like geography or biology. The difference between declarative and procedural knowledge is fundamental to an understanding of language learning. The more we learn about the psychological process of language learning, the more we appreciate the distinction between learning about an L2,and learning how to use it for communicative purposes.

All the evidence of SLA research refutes the current approach to ELT which is based on the false assumption that learners need to have the L2 explained to them, bit by bit, before they can practice using it, bit by bit. All the evidence suggests that language is not a subject in the curriculum best treated as an object of study. Rather, learning an L2 is best done by engaging learners in using it, allowing learners to slowly work out for themselves, through implicit development of their interlanguages, how the L2 works, albeit with timely teacher interventions that can speed up the process.