Preliminaries

There's a debate surrounding English language teaching in India and how it should be transformed to meet the demand for English. Should it start in Class I? Should the focus be on developing basic skills in the student's L1 and than transferring them to L2? But-- and this has to be my question-- whose expertise is being valorized within this debate and whose is being marginalized?

English has become a pan-Indian symbol condensing mobility, hope, aspiration, and salvation. While emphasizing this important and new social fact, I can't afford to let it erase historical and recent forms of differentiation within the Indian sociolinguistic field. This means distinguishing amongst a wide range of ideologies and milieux that would complicate any sense that English has a self-evident status at the top of some equally self-evident hierarchy of languages. A denatured version of Bourdieu's "language market" concept could be helpful here in focusing attention on how multilingualism (including multiliteracy), linguistic agency and language ideology varies across specific settings or contexts? (Of course, using the concept in this way entails recognizing and overcoming the limitations in Bourdieu's own formulation: his identification of the market with national borders, his inattention to the constitutive role of ideologies, etc.)

As Tharu writes, "English is no longer some powerful but remote mystery lying hidden in the world of textbooks and examinations . . it lives in sizeable tracts of urban India." To what extent does the setting of the English teaching classroom reflect this shift? What kinds of ideas about English seem to inform or shape pedagogy and classroom interaction? For instance, how is English thought of as accessible (is it remote or intimate?) or as potent (does it makes one confident? intelligent?)

Prior to globalization, the most important language markets (such as the national and state examinations systems) cultivated written performance in English, but now spoken language skills are being emphasized and sought after. (Where does phonology, which, as ELT scholar Tharu writes, was always a focus of pedogical attention, fit into this shift?) In many settings, displaying proficiency or expertise in spoken or "communicative" English often takes a phatic form and while the primacy of engaging with the language in the written mode is being reconfigured, it is not clear that it is being displaced.