Global English, hegemony and education : lessons from Gramsci

Abstract

This chapter has attempted to bring an analysis of Gramsci’s approach to language politics to debates around ‘global English’ and teaching English as a foreign or additional language. My purpose is not to suggest that Gramsci has some authoritative or privileged approach to the term ‘hegemony’. Indeed, Gramsci’s entire method of using other thinkers’ concepts for his own purposes (Showstack Sassoon, 1990) rejects any such sanctimonious appeal. By addressing Gramsci’s own writings on common languages and language education, the author hoped to have provided some nuance to the understandings of Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’ so that it could be more useful within debates on ‘global English’. That Gramsci, in his own context, was in favour of specific means of creating a ‘common language’ and against others, reinforces the argument that context is crucially important (see all the contributions in Ricento, 2000; and Clayton, 1999). His notions of ‘spontaneous’ or ‘immanent’ grammar and ‘normative’ grammar could be very fruitful to scholars who, like Sonntag and Pennycook, consider both the structural elements of subordination and the possibilities of agency on the part of the oppressed. Gramsci provides some theoretical scaffolding to reinforce Sonntag and Pennycook’s insistence that we should neither presuppose that English is, in every context, inherently, an impediment to counter-hegemonic struggle nor should we presume that it is beneficial and an effective tool for individuals to better their conditions. As the author has shown, Gramsci developed the concepts of spontaneous and normative grammars in order to achieve precisely such an analysis of his language situation.