I Came, I Saw, I Taught - Mary Bouley, université de Bourgogne

The vision of a lingua franca:  the yearning goes back at least as far as Condorcet’s eighteenth-century dream of a universal language.  Few would deny that in today’s internet- and social media-saturated world, that language is English.

Yet English is most certainly not that universal language permitting “equal knowledge of necessary truths” envisioned by Condorcet.  It is a language colored by the colonial past of the British Empire and the present-day economic, military and cultural power (some would use the term “imperialism”) of the United States, two influential nations in which the language is spoken.  How one tallies the costs and benefits of English as the world’s dominant lingua franca will depend, in part, on how one looks at language:  as a tool for international and intercultural communication, as a marker of identity, as an instrument of power, a tool for democracy, a commodity on the professional and cultural market, a human achievement.

It is in this complex context that my remarks take root, and more specifically in the environment of education in France, a country resolute in its protection of the national language.  What empowerment is offered by the international adoption of English as a shared language?  What risks for national, local and regional languages and for the speakers of those languages?  How does the neoliberal reframing of educational objectives toward a market model in higher education influence our teaching (specifically the teaching of language and teaching in the English medium) and thus our students’ learning?  What, in addition, are the dangers posed by the global spread of English for native speakers of the language?

I will explore these questions through the prism that is mine: a native speaker of American English, a longtime educator in France at various levels and contexts of instruction and, more recently, the director of the Language Center at the University of Burgundy.  My exploration will be experience-based, necessarily narrow-angled and anecdotal but, I hope, enlightening in its way.