ABSTRACT
In his book, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (1994), Alastair Pennycook charted the colonial background underlying the contemporary place of English as the world’s primary international language. His 1998 book, English and the Discourses of Colonialism, starts with the British departure from Hong Kong in 1997, which, in theory, signalled the ending of mainstream British colonialism. Pennycook discusses in his 1998 book, however, the extent to which he believes colonialism still permeates both British discourses and those of the postcolonial territories. In the following extract, he looks critically at some of the arguments that are oen put forward to justify why the English language ‘deserves’ its place as the global lingua franca. And as with the arguments put forward by Bisong (1995) and Phillipson (1996) in C1 above, those critiqued by Pennycook in the extract that follows are still widely expressed nearly two decades later.
