Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an East-West Gaze

6: Heteroglossia and Linguistic Neocolonialism: English Teaching in Post-1989 Poland

126 six Heteroglossia and Linguistic Neocolonialism English Teaching in Post-1989 Poland Bill Johnston For the length and breadth of the former communist bloc, from the Czech Republic to Kazakhstan and from Estonia to Armenia, a largely unreported yet vitally important battle has been lost and won over the last dozen years: the struggle over what is to be the dominant foreign language for the new East. The loser in this battle is Russian; the victor, without a shadow of a doubt, is English. All across the old Soviet empire and its satellites, the English language is ousting Russian from its place as the primary foreign language. Massive reforms in the public sector aimed at introducing English in public schools are accompanied by the opening of countless private language schools. Agencies such as the British Council and the United States Information Agency (USIA) have expanded their operations in virtually every country in the region and are promoting the use of English whenever and wherever possible. English has come to be regarded as a sine qua non for those with serious ambitions in business. And anyone who owns a computer or visits the movies is confronted with English at every step. This essay examines the rise of English in Poland, where possibly of all the post-communist1 countries it has taken root most firmly, and it proposes a way in which the spread of English can be theorized. Finally, it shows how traces of Heteroglossia and Linguistic Neocolonialism 127 this process can be found in the ways teachers of English in Poland discursively construct their lives and their professional work. The Spread of English in the New Poland Under communism, Russian was the dominant foreign language in Poland , as in other countries of the East.2 Every schoolchild was exposed to up to eight years of compulsory Russian classes in primary and secondary school. Other foreign languages such as English and German were increasingly in evidence after the 1960s, but Russian continued to dominate. Fisiak (1994) estimates that in 1989 (when the linguistic grip of Russian had already weakened considerably compared to previous decades), there were 8,000 Russian teachers in the Polish educational system, compared to only 1,700 teachers of English, the second most common language. This situation changed rapidly after 1989. To begin with, immediately after the fall of the communist regime, educationalists and the new ministers in the Ministry of National Education began work on a radical reform of foreign-language teaching in Poland. The overall goal, in line with Council of Europe guidelines, was to have in place by the year 2000 a system in which every primary school student would have instruction in one foreign language and every secondary school student would be taught in two foreign languages (Ministry of National Education 1991). These languages were to be predominantly Western ones; English first, followed by German and French, then Russian (Komorowska n.d.). To meet the huge need for language teachers, seventy language-teachertraining colleges were set up across the country, both in major cities and in smaller towns. The ambitious goal of these colleges was to produce 20,000 new teachers of English and proportionate numbers of teachers of other languages by the end of the decade (Ministry of National Education, Department of Teacher Training 1992; Komorowska 1991). Yet still the demand for English teaching in the public schools far outstrips the supply. As a result, at the elementary level in particular there are considerable numbers of underqualified teachers who have been pressed into service. One interesting development is that rather than designing a Polish national examination for English teachers, the Ministry of National Education initially decreed that a pass in the University of Cambridge First Certificate in English examination qualifies a teacher to teach in the elementary schools, while a pass in the Certificate of Proficiency in English entitles one to work in a public high school.3 Alongside the public sector, private language teaching has exploded onto the Polish scene. Private tuition in English was popular long before 1989. From the mid-1980s on, private schools began to appear; this process accelerated after 1989, and at the time the research for this essay was con- Bill Johnston 128 ducted, in the fall of 1994, there was no sign that the great demand for classes was dropping. Along with the rise of private language schools, publishers...