Alastair Pennycook

Alastair Pennycook is a professor of Language in Education at UTS (University of Technology Sydney). Furthermore, he has been involved in language education for over 30 years in lots of countries. Through his book "The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language", he explains some unfair situations of the English language.

First, on the one hand, I agree with him because a language is usually taught depending on its political context and lately it is really normal that politicians are not agreed about anything so it is unfair for English and for every language in the world. In my opinion, the needs of society should prevail, not political interests. Thus, this is a reason why some minority languages are also disappearing and this situation prevents many people from identifying with their mother tongue because politicians are giving more importance to English than any other language as Pennycook says in his book. I think this is a very unfair situation because it is true that English is important, but every language is too! Of course, we can acquire as many languages as we want but without underestimate the rest. Besides, as the author comments, it, English, hinders literacy in the mother tongue for speakers of minority languages. The reason for the previous statement is what I told before, we just focus on learning English as the main language and we have to focus on our mother tongue too. We need to acquire a good level in our first language and after, we can learn other languages. Finally, Pennycook says that English is not receptive to the needs of many people and here I totally disagree. I believe that each person can adapt each language to his or her necessities and for that, we need to know very carefully which our goals, learning this language are. 

Therefore, what do you think about Pennycook statements? Do you agree or not?