Belated Merry Christmas!
Over-reliance on English!?
With the expansion of English language programs,courses, schools and universities across Asia as apart of the drive to become international hubs of education, innovation and scholarship, the over-reliance on English is becoming even more alarming.
In certain settings, students start learning in English at a very young age. It is more common, however, that students stop learning and being taught in their local languages once they enter university.
Many students and academics do not know how to present a topic in their local language because they do not know the norms, genres, styles, concept, theories and vocabularies needed to perform such tasks. They become ‘illiterate’ and thus much less sophisticated in their own tongues.
One may also say that for many people in Asia, English is their native language and thus other localAsian languages are not necessarily their mother tongues and-or native languages; yet this group is still a tiny minority in the vast context of Asia.
This phenomenon has the potential to produce an unequal and somewhat superficial engagement with scholarship under the banner of internationalization that is largely driven by commercialization, the overindulgence of English in government policies as well as a nation-building agenda that tends to take many shortcuts to English while undermining local languages.
After all, the international role of English does not have to result in the impoverishment of knowledge and scholarship in other languages, and this needs to be realized in policy and practice of the internationalization of education and language policies across the Asian region.
Likewise, English is never going to entirely replace local languages. However, it will create a divide in local societies between those who use English and those who do not.
At the moment, the knowledge that circulates in the world of international education does so largely through the medium of the English language. It only indirectly touches those beyond the English language world.
Part of the rationale for the internationalization and globalization of education is to make the world more equitable- that is, to allow people everywhere to have access to the same body of knowledge.