English Hegemony And China's English Education

It is a well admitted language fact that English, especially American English, is being more widely used than ever before in history in today's international and intercultural communication. Around the world, English is widely accepted as a de facto international language or world language: it is the most important working language of many international organizations like the United Nations and the European Economic Community; it has infiltrated into almost every aspect of social life, from education to scientific research, from economic affairs to mass media. In a word, English is everywhere, and it is the only currency of communication for people of every continent.Against such a background many developed countries like the United States of America, Britain and Japan spare no efforts in promoting English around the world. As a result, some developing countries are forced to accept and use English, and now about 1/3 of the countries in the world use English as the official language. Although China does not legitimate English's official language position, it goes to extremes in its foreign language policy making by overemphasizing the function of English for the sake of economic development. In fact, the Chinese people are fervent or crazy about the English language. This paper attempts to examine this English hegemony and craze from a critical perspective and call on everyone related with English to reflect upon China's English education.In the first part, the author enumerates a large number of facts of English hegemony under the powerful promotion of developed countries like America, Japan and England, etc. Although America is called "a melting pot" wherepeople of different ethnic groups live together, only the English language is considered and used as the factual official language there. Prince Charles once said to the British Council " we must act now to ensure that English maintains its position as the world language well into the next century"(Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1995:section 1, p.4). In Japan, Takao Suzuki wrote an article entitled "Eigo ga Nippon wo sukuu (English will save Japan)" (Ronza, Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 1999. ppl2-27). In Japanese's eyes, English is closely related to economic recovery from the recession.In the second part, the author expatiates over Habermas' Critical Theory and extended theories based on it by Muller and Tsuda. Since the 1960's, with the appearance of critical theory school represented by Jugen Habermas, some linguists began to touch upon this language problem of English hegemony, among whom Tsuda Yukio in Japan, Braj B. Kachru in India, Phillipson in Netherlands and David Crystal in Britain are the most influential representatives.Critical Theory is a self-critical system applied in various fields for provoking thoughts of people on social reality. Habermas thinks that humans lack freedom in modern society. Language hegemony is one of the crises caused by language communication in international and intercultural background. He thinks that it is necessary to reach rationality in the ideal situation of communication by establishing laws or institutions, and thus change and emancipate the oppressive systems and humans.According to Habermas, language is a medium of communication that serves understanding (Habermas, 1984, p101). Communicative action making full use of it relates objective, social and subjective worlds of two levels:lifeworld and system world. Communicative actions are independent of any ideology or any situation; they are free and undistorted. Lifeworld means the shared common understanding of values, beliefs and norms that develop through face to face contacts over time in various social groups and identities; while system consists of management design, policies and rules that provide a framework for people to engage in the practice of activities. Though language is the dominant medium in the lifeworld, the system colonizes the lifeworld, which usually goes unnoticed and causes many social problems. Habermas attempts to provide particular guidelines t...