ABSTRACT
Foreign language education today is positioned between national and global world orders. Globalization has taken center stage in discussions of Foreign Language (FL) education. The old grammar translation method, associated with the literate culture of national elites, has given way to the communicative, interactional, or intercultural approach associated with the oral culture of everyday encounters across cultures and their avowedly democratic turns at talk. The concept of decolonization has been rendered inordinately more complex by globalization. There are no longer any clear-cut distinctions between colonizers and colonized, but various spheres of influence that require critical dialogue and political engagement. Decolonizing FL education requires more than ever the ethical and political capacity to engage in dialogue with speakers from other educational cultures on their own terms, and the willingness to enter the slow and difficult process of linguistic and cultural translation.
