Pennycook, “English is an unfair language”.

This is what Alastair Pennycook says about the situation of the English language in our society:

-It acts as a gatekeeper for education, jobs and social mobility, favouring a monolingual élite, both in the Centre and in the Periphery.

-It makes certain domains inaccessible to many people.

- It is causing many minority languages to disappear and prevents many people from identifying with their mother tongue.

- It hinders literacy in the mother tongue for speakers of minority languages.

- It is not receptive to the needs of many people.

- It privileges the figure of NS in the ELT profession, together with many other fallacies.

- The prevailing, barely communicative, pedagogical orientation of EFL education in Spain tended to silence & marginalize learners (even though those coming from advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds).

It is true that we have been told since we were kids that English is a really important language and that it is essential for our formation and education but until what point is this true? We live in a globalized world where you have the possibility of connecting with a person that leaves thousands of kilometers away from you only by using a mobile phone or a computer and in order to be able to stablish this communication, you or the person you are talking too, need to know the same language. We have been studying english since primary school or before and the truth is that considering they have been studying it for at least 10 years, the level of English our students when they finish "Secundaria" is not what it should be. This is probably because they don't think English is an interesting language or that it can be useful for them. They study it because they are "forced" to, without giving them the oportunity to discover for themselves how English is.

I agree with what Pennycook says, English can sometimes be an imperialist language because it oppreses other languages because we are told that English is the most important language and we have to be able to speak it if we want to succed in life. It is true that as Pennycook says, English can open many doors because it is spoken in a huge variety of countries but as a teachers, our job is to show or to help students discover what can English do for them. This way they will see English as a friend, not as an obstacle on their way to graduation.