IDEOLOGY AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING: RELATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Abstract

Under the assertion that all discourse has political essence, being ideological by nature, in this paper we discuss concepts of ideology and its relation to English language (EL) teaching. For language is the mediator of ideologies, there is no way to see language teaching as a neutral exercise, rather as a politicized practice. In this article, the concept of ideology and its relationship to language and discourse are initially elucidated. For this, we make use of Bakhtin, Foucault and Fairclough’s theoretical contributions. Secondly, we dedicated to trace a brief historical background of EL expansion until it reaches its current status of lingua franca and we used as theoretical support Crystal and McKay’s studies, among others. Agreeing with Rajagopalan, Siqueira and Kumaravadivelu’s research, we laid eyes on the intrinsic relationship of ideology and EL teaching to finally identify the possible pedagogical implications arisen from this relationship.

Keywords

• Ideology
• EL teaching.
• Discourse