Learners Need 'Natives' to Guide not Dictate

[Stephen Jones]

My problem is that he takes so many pages to say this thing, uses overly pedantic academic language,

I don't find Said's language in the least pedantic. Quite the contrary it appears a model of clarity.

says it in a way that implies westerners are somehow uniquely blinkered, and gives no sensible guidance (as far as I can remember) as to how history, therefore, ought to be written.

I see no evidence whatsoever for his saying Westerners are uniquely blinkered, and suggesting that history shouldn't be written from a viewpoint that marks the historian as either culturally superior to his subject matter or a protagonist in it, seems perfectly sensible guidance.

Follow him, and you will end up like Dr.Deans at SOAS, claiming we need a new approach to write about every culture/nation we deal with. Since west, east and other groups have no clear boundaries, that's clear nonsense.

Wherever do you get that idea from? What Said is suggesting is that we should not look at the Orient only in terms of how it is opposed to the Occident.

[fluffyhamster]

I've just read the article by Hill. ... Amongst the total rubbish it is full of is that "global English is a pidgin" and we should be aware if this when we teach it. If it's a pidgin for God's sake why do we need to teach it in the first place.

Yes, there isn't any one pidgin, although there may be what could loosely be described as a collection of pidgins (differing ultimately individually - that is, from person to person in group to group -according to differing L1s, differing textbooks used, differing backgrounds and expertise of present and previous non-native teachers, differing nationalities of native speaker teachers when and if they are involved...which hopefully they will be at some point in the process!). Teaching a national (native) standard should help and is about all we can do (and let's face it, the differences between most national varieties aren't so huge as to yet affect intelligibilty).

To have it published in ELT Japan is not surprising. It is the Japanese, or to be more precise a collection of British teachers in Japan with some kind of peculiar hang-up about Empire, who are proposing something called "Asian English", which presumably means that Indains, Chinese, Thais and Malayasians should try and learn a version of English impregnated with Japanese L1 interference.

I'm not sure what the Japanese are up to half the time in their efforts to learn English (at least, not those who lack the last degree of polish and EASE in using "their" English - haven't quite made it an integral part of their being yet, due to whatever personal hang-ups, inhibitions or blocks they might have), but it does sometimes seem as if they are doing their utmost to learn a type of English that nobody speaks (not even native speakers), and it's pretty much the same story in other asian countries. One of the biggest reasons for this kind of problem must surely be that the focus is on formal written English, with all the pedantry that invariably ends up involving.

The obvious solution, as I've implied, is to seriously look at any one (or several) native varieties, especially their speech, and base the teaching upon that (and I don't mean students should be studying loads of silly idioms). Unfortunately, there are traditions, reasons and therefore pressure in many asian countries to not teach a natural and practical spoken variety of English (as the basis for more advanced study of, again, more authentic written English, written for a purpose other than to teach the "grammar" of "English"), with the result that it is all (made) much harder than it really needs to be (to "test" people), and English teachers who sit back and accept a load of rubbish as constituting an "essay" are colluding in frustrating the serious asian learners of halfway-decent English (that being said, many western teachers are just assistants and the like, but it really doesn't help if they start talking about a general hazy "international" variety of English that excuses all errors, all ignorance and incompetence).

It might sound like I am changing my tune a little - I've written elsewhere about trying to discover through huge future internationalistic corpora what "every" user beyond a certain mimimum/functional level of competence has in common, has come to "understand" as being English; however, such a project is probably impractical, and in the meantime, there is a wealth of information that many "communicative" teachers will ignore for (m)any reason(s), including "I couldn't possibly prescribe what will mostly be my national variety of English on this poor innocent learner struggling with their interlanguage and the shackles of imperialism, even though is indeed what I am speaking right now and all the time".

[Stephen Jones]

Latin was the lingua franca of western europe for over a thousand years and people still referred to native speakers such as Cicero, Horace, Virgil and Caesar to learn it, and not the burblings of an Iraqi spice seller or a Norewegian javelin thrower.

[woodcutter]

Stephen Jones, you are engaged in a war on two fronts. The German high command will be very upset with you.

Your answer implies that westerners have only ever looked at eastern history in opposition to western. That other cultures have better historians, less influenced by their own cultural norms. Not so, though it is probably an unfortunately strong trend. Your answer implies that westerners are not a very important protagonist in eastern history. Not so.

You may find Said a model of clarity. For myself, I find humanities departments academics at the top of their little worlds usually come out with books which anyone intelligent might read. Second rate, unknown academics (as was Said at the time) are more likely to write in the ponderous, too many unnecessary intellectual references, crank up the pseudo-science and the jargon, grind out the obvious - and dear god banish any light touches or humour - university top-grade winning style.

[Stephen Jones]

Second rate, unknown academics (as was Said at the time)

Said was obviously unknown before he wrote his first book - mot academics are. I certainly challenge your claim that he was ever second-rate.

Your answer implies that westerners have only ever looked at eastern history in opposition to western.

No but Said gives copious evidence that most Orientalists have a mindset that can lead to gross misinterpretations.

That other cultures have better historians, less influenced by their own cultural norms. Not so, though it is probably an unfortunately strong trend.

I never said that, nor did Said. Indeed often historians suffer because they are too close to the culture they are describing and/or are distorted by political ends. Nevertheless an Arab describing Arab culture is likely to avoid the most egregious mistakes an outsider may fall for.

Your answer implies that westerners are not a very important protagonist in eastern history. Not so.

Alas, if only that were so. Unfortunately Asia has had to suffer rather too much protagonism from the West. particularly in matters of pillage and subjugation.

[woodcutter]

Yes, the west has certainly done many terrible things in Asia. The well fed, well clothed, well equipped and essentially part time workers in the history department here (great grandsons of semi-slave peasants) often complain about it.

They are also a model of how people can also distort their own history worse than any outsider. 5000 years of Korean history, anyone?

[Stephen Jones]

Local historians often write worse history than westerners because history is used as a buttress for politics. The same thing happens in the UK. Look at the attempts by the Conservative party to ensure students learn a sanitized history that makes Blackadder seem rigourous.

In the case of India there is an atttempt by the RSS and BJP to completely rewrite chunks of Indian history to support Hindutva. however, that doesn't mean there are not a large number of valiant historians trying to find out the truth as objectively as they can, and most of them are in India.

What I find objectionable is when Eton decides to put on an exhibition commemmorating the Raj, and their history teacher says it had a 'few warts'. Like the death of tens of millions in famines, which deaths never ocurred before or after British rule, or the decimatiion of the Sri Lankan hill population in the Uva district after the rebellion of 1818-1819. If they wanted to popularize history they could have a competition with Harrow to see which school could build the biggest mountain of skulls outside the school gates, Eton's for all those dead under Curzon when he was viceroy and Harrow's for all those dead when Churchill was PM in the Bengal famine in 1942-1943. I doubt it; they'll probably have photos of old etonians playing cricket and them claim that one of the advantages of the Raj was the support it gave to Indian cricket - balderdash, as it not only gave no support at all but actively sabotaged it, refusing to give the Indians anywhere to play in Mumbai for years and then insisting that their cricket green be churned up by a dozen army officers playing polo on it every week.

[woodcutter]

Yes, history, most times, most places, has not been permitted to be neutral. You think that Said's Arab historians will be generally free to criticize what they wish to - to potray Islamic heroes battling the west in a bad light? In India a historian's house was recently attacked by an angry mob, as I recall.

This is not the place for a discussion of the merits of empire, though I must say that crude skull counts are a bit worthless without reflection on the situation would have been if the offending power had not been present. We should only note that such a debate is possible in western historiography. So, we should read Arab historians (though not too much if they are blatant political tools) but get on with telling the truth as best we can, from the only viewpoint we have, our own.