Author(s): John Cleary
E-mail: john.cleary@ed.ac.uk
Phillipson's 1992 claims concerning the hidden agendas of the world-wide spread of English and English language teaching have been criticised for a lack of empirical testing. This paper raises the question of how Phillipson's arguments can be operationalised into testable hypotheses, and seeks to locate them within an empirical analysis of a language contact situation in which English plays a continuing ambiguous role, that of Malaysia. It is suggested that one method of operationalising Phillipson's arguments is to measure the degree to which students feel obliged to learn a language for instrumental purposes, but exhibit no evidence of affective orientation towards it. Working on the hypothesis that English in Malaysia represents two quite distinct phenomena, the instrument of international communication and the nativised domestic variety, a survey into language use and attitudes among Malay-L1 university students (N=153) was carried out. The survey results will be presented, related to a previous attitude study, and examined for the light they cast upon the extent to which English is perceived as threatening to, or forming an integral part of, Malaysian culture.
Paper: Postscript (376977 bytes)