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Pérez Andrade, Gonzalo (2024) “British English is much more prestigious, everybody knows that!”: reproducing and resisting hegemonic language ideologies in Chilean English teacher education. In: English as a lingua franca in Latin American education. Developments in English as a Lingua Franca [DELF] (17). De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, pp. 41-66. ISBN 9783110750966 (e-book), 9783110750881 (hardcover)
In Chile, a country where English has no official status or colonial history, English Language Teaching (ELT) programmes are responsible for providing prospective teachers of English with the linguistic and methodological tools that they need to become competent English language practitioners and users. As prospective teachers usually spend four to five years in training, teacher educators play a crucial role in the formation and transformation of their trainees’ beliefs about English language use and users (Gimenez et al, 2018). Since prospective English teachers in Chile are expected to achieve a C1 level of proficiency at the end of their training (Ministerio Secretaría General de la Presidencia, 2014), they are inevitably exposed to ideas of what counts as correct and desirable English. As such ideas are directly connected with social structures, it is therefore expected that the beliefs about English - or language ideologies - that circulate in these programmes have profound implications for the practices of future English teachers, which may result in the preference and promotion of certain ways of speaking English and the stigmatisation of others. This is particularly relevant for the English language teaching profession due to the large number of teachers who are non-native speakers of the language, since these ideologies have the power to influence ideas regarding (self-)efficacy, employability, and even discrimination (Holliday, 2015).
The purpose of this chapter is to explore how teacher trainers at teacher education programmes in Chile conceptualise the English they speak, teach, and expect their students to acquire. Since the focus of the study reported here is on how English language professionals (co)construct their notion of English use(s) and users, this paper will focus on data that was collected through semi-structured interviews. 27 teacher trainers from three universities from Santiago, the capital of Chile, took part in this research which was part of a broader multiple case study. Using Irvine and Gal’s (2009) framework of linguistic differentiation – iconisation, fractal recursivity and erasure – as an interpretive tool in the analysis of the interview data, I investigated the extent to which and how language ideologies regarding English operate in a group of Chilean ELT programmes.
Findings from this study revealed the existence and promotion of opposing language ideologies that coexist within and across the teacher education programmes under scrutiny. On the one hand, a considerable number of teachers associated an idealised notion of “British English” with deeply-rooted ideas of tradition and prestige in ELT, and therefore, perceived it as a desirable way of speaking to acquire for prospective English teachers. Consequently, forms of speaking English that are evidently influenced by (Chilean) Spanish tended to be perceived as undesirable and unprofessional (iconisation), supporting the idea that the efficacy of a teacher lies on how close to an idealised model their English is. Furthermore, the data analysis provides evidence of the existence of a false duality regarding the models of English that trainees are expected to follow and consistently develop in their training (fractal recursivity). As a result, variations from these normative models are usually overlooked (erasure). On the other hand, this paper presents evidence of a growing discourse of resistance among some of these teacher educators that reveals an awareness of and opposition to hegemonic language ideologies in the English language teaching profession in Chile. Finally, this chapter argues that increased awareness of language ideologies can help practitioners and other stakeholders tackle implicit issues of inequality and discrimination that operate in ELT contexts.
References
Gimenez, T., Salles El Kadri, M., and Cabrini Simões Calvo, L. (eds) (2018). English as a Lingua Franca in Teacher Education, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Holliday A. (2015) Native-speakerism: Taking the Concept Forward and Achieving Cultural Belief. In: Swan A., Aboshiha P., Holliday A. (eds) (En)Countering Native-speakerism. Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Irvine, J. and Gal, S. (2009) 'Language ideology and linguistic differentiation', in Duranti, A (ed.) Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Ministerio Secretaría General de la Presidencia, Ministerio de Educación, Ministerio de Economía, Fomento y Turismo (2014). National English Strategy 2014 – 2030. Available: http:// www.economia.gob.cl/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/140307- Documento-Estrategia-Nacional-de-Ingl%C3%A9s-2014-2030.pdf
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