Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

98 Part 2: Language and Society
around the world, this mother imagines ‘her children on a broader stage,
despite their likely lower status abroad’ (Park & Abelmann 2004: 654).
The concept of an imagined community is one that has not gone unnoticed
by ELT private schools. Evidence of this is the establishment of theme
villages that depict an imagined environment. Seargeant (2005), for example,
describes British Hills in Japan, a leisure language-learning complex
that seeks to simulate an ‘authentic’ English-speaking environment. In fact,
the sales slogan ‘boasts that the complex is “More English than England
itself”’ (Seargeant, 2005: 327). The village is staffed by native speakers
recruited from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In their job
description, they describe some of the duties of the staff as follows:
• Meeting buses arriving at British Hills with a friendly hello and lots
of waving.
• Being on the steps to wave goodbye to groups leaving British Hills.
• Taking the time to stop in the passages/in your department to CHAT
to the guests.
• Being sociable and friendly to all guests: whether on or off duty.
• Offering to take and star in hundreds of photographs.
• Basically just going the extra mile to make that personal connection
with as many guests as possible. (Seargeant, 2005: 340)
By hiring only native speakers and promoting native speaker competency,
the village promotes a reality that is far different from the multilingual/multicultural
Britain of today. In doing so,
The overall effect is to create an environment which is not necessarily
truthful to the original upon which it is purportedly based but is instead
an imagined idea with its own logic and reality. The authenticity upon
which British Hills prides itself is not a representation of Britishness as
it is currently constructed and enacted in mainstream British society.
Instead, it is an image drawn from aspects of the popular imagination
in Japan, from a tourist industry template . . . and also from local protocol
for foreign language education. (Seargeant, 2005: 341)
In this context, authenticity becomes not the genuine item but a fake
representation of a different reality. As Seargent (2005: 341) puts it, ‘simulation
replaces reality, becomes its own reality. A place like British Hills is
not merely representing Britishness but reconstructing it, thus presenting
itself as a detailed realistic image of something that actually exists only
within its own depiction. The use of the concept of authenticity is almost
an irony of the process . . .’. The theory underlying such villages is that
learning can be enhanced by students actually imagining themselves in
the role of a fl uent speaker in an ‘authentic’ environment.
We have then learned much about how imagined communities can further
reinforce Kachru’s idea of English competency as a kind of Aladdin’s