ABSTRACT
The linguistics program, I was to discover soon, was not about linguistics, but about training us to become English language teachers. “English” in our program was projected unproblematically as a language best spoken by the British (and, for some, the Americans) and our job was to learn about this language-including the phonology of received pronunciation-with the eventual goal of teaching this language to our students. The problem of teaching a foreign accent and grammatical patterns alien to the context of the students was never questioned. In addition, not only was the appropriacy of adopting western methods in a Pakistani context never discussed, but there was also an underlying hint of contempt of local teachers and traditional teaching practices. So, here again, I was frustrated by a lack of recognition or discussion of the local. I did not fi nd my colleagues’ or my identities refl ected in
the program. I found little, if any, sympathy in my discussions with my colleagues or lecturers on the nature of language or language variation and how language(s) were used, taught, and learnt in our contexts. While some of the lecturers were interested in these issues on a personal level, it was not refl ected in their lectures.
