Adrian Holliday is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Canterbury Christ Church University, where he supervises doctoral research in the critical sociology of language education and intercultural communication and is also the Head of the Graduate School. He got his MA and PhD at Lancaster University. He is author of Intercultural Communication, with Hyde and Kullman, Routledge, 2^nd edition, forthcoming, Doing and Writing Qualitative Research, 2^nd edition, Sage 2007, The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language, Oxford 2005, Appropriate Methodology and Social Context, Cambridge 1994.

Title: The cosmopolitan nature of culture and implications for creative autonomy English language education?

Abstract:

Culture is a fluid entity in which there are a lot of different types of things going on. Particular to nation there are social structures, cultural references and cultural products. People are influenced by and draw on these in different ways at different times. There are also underlying universal cultural processes which are shared across national boundaries. These form the basis of cultural life everywhere. They provide people with the basic tools to understand and operate in widely diverse cultural settings. Language also has these elements. In some ways it is particular to and the basis of national differences. In other ways it has the universal structures to relate to and take on widely diverse cultural realities.

This is all very different to the established theory – that people and their languages are encased and confined within national cultural systems. This established theory appears scientific, technical and neutral. In fact it is the product of ideology. It provides an excuse for a discourse of difference in which people in certain parts of the world are constructed to be less able than others. This has had an impact on images of English language teaching and learning. People who are ‘foreign’ to English and how to teach, learn and use it are constructed as deficient with steep hills to climb.

In fact, everyone has the potential to participate equally. We need to search for how to make this potential evident and acceptable.