ABSTRACT
The contemporary surge in adopting languages of wider communication (predominantly English) as medium of instruction (MOI) – defined as the vehicle for teaching and learning – has become an important theme in the language policy and planning (LPP) literature. From a historical point of view, we can identify three MOI periods corresponding to different stages of modernity: early modern, modern and post-modern. The first period can be called ‘colonial MOI’ and can be located in European colonial regimes in Asia and Africa. Although the role of colonized communities in advancing or resisting Western education through colonial languages cannot be underestimated (Pennycook, 1994, 1998), the
colonial MOI can be described as a political imposition upon the natives aimed at facilitating and lengthening colonial rule (Hamid, 2009b). Far from being universal, education through colonial languages was elitist and targeted only the upper segments of the populace. The second period of MOI followed the official end of colonial rule and prioritized national languages as an expression of national identity and aspirations. This MOI marked postcolonial reactions to colonial education and language policies. Examples of polities switching to national languages as MOI at the end of colonial rule are many: Malaysia switched to Malay; Indonesia had already developed its own national language, Bahasa Indonesia; Pakistan decided to adopt Urdu as its national language to unite the two parts of the country, East and West Pakistan. The third period, which we are currently in, can be called ‘appropriated MOI’, which has seen the return of English, the colonial language – now as a global language – as a result of the local reappraisal of language-based nationalism, the sociolinguistic reality of English in a globalizing world and the discourses of English in the context of human capital development and national participation in a global economy1 (Lin & Martin, 2005; Rassool, 2007; Tsui & Tollefson, 2007).
