Teaching English as culture : paradigm shifts in postcolonial discourse

The teaching of an 'imperialist' language like English in a postcolonial era presents not only unprecedented difficulties to the teacher, it also raises disconcerting questions about the paradigms underlying the concepts of language, language teaching, and culture. This new perspective makes inadequate, on the one hand, the pedalinguistic categories of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language), and, on the other, the postcolonial critique in general of hegemonic languages. Another category needs to be recognized, to which the author gives the acronym TUE (Teaching Unbroken English). For the purposes of analysis, the author focuses on his experience teaching English in Hong Kong before and after 1997, during the end of the colonial and the beginning of the postcolonial era.