Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 6; November 2001

Many feminist critics have noted that a flagrant example of language and social power is the English word man. What becomes taught along with this small pattern of language? It refers to 'a male person' and 'a human being', as we know. This certainly is the inclusion of man. Yet is that all there is to say?

In addition to inclusions, language is based on differences: man has an ability to signify something because as a signifier – as a sound or written word – it is different from fan, ban or woman, to mention but a few. Moreover, many cultural theorists - Stuart Hall being one of the most well-known - would argue that difference has to be seen also as a very general feature of language usage. A statement means something not only because it (or the speaker) includes something of the world, but it also excludes something. This notion is one of the central features of the theory of meaning that has been called "post-structuralist" (and sometimes a bit shortsightedly, "anti-humanistic").

Thus a question arises: whereas the word man is taught, is it implicitly proposed that the word woman, in turn, refers to something quite odd? Doesn't the referent of the latter, 'a woman', seem to be something, which differs and is excluded from 'a male and a human being'?

Usually these kind of categorisations go unnoticed, as a matter of routine. Yet of course the bond between 'a male person' and 'a human' implied in man is not a natural one. To borrow an example used by Deborah Cameron in her book Feminism and Linguistic Theory, what would have happened if Neil Armstrong had taken "one small step for a white, one giant leap for whitekind"? It would have created an outrage! Luckily for Armstrong, instead of white power, he happened to talk about man power, whilst his footsteps realised the dreams produced by his mostly male-governed culture, "mankind" (perhaps "patriarchy" would have been a more precise term). His declaration of the great step of "mankind" was normal but actually as unnatural as the "white" one would have been. It only seemed natural to represent the phallic dream of rockets and conquering as the dream of everybody – of men, women, and even those who at the time were in fact dreaming merely of a small portion of food.

Prevailing social conventions can make a politically saturated speech seem natural, if they prefer the state of affairs expressed in that speech. What is more, the state of affairs, the "natural" discourse and the "natural" subject (the speaker) of discourse, is not just expressed but also enhanced or produced, as Michel Foucault, the French social theorist, would have argued.

The reproduction of power relations does not have to happen in great moments of history (his-story?) or through famous words. Small words of discourse may be an even more effective way of reproducing power relations. That, which is everywhere, is noticed hardly ever, as Mikko Lehtonen mentions in his recent book Cultural Analysis of Texts. A good example is the generic and deep-seated usage of the pronoun he in English. Even if lately the generic pronouns one or s/he have sometimes been used instead, the generic masculine continues to produce the privileged cultural position of masculinity.

Changing these kinds of practices would not alone change the situation, yet feminists have rightly pointed out that the generic masculine is one of the sites where the prevailing conditions of social power can be made visible. Cameron, for example, uses she instead of he in her writing. This is a "strategy of visibility" or "positive language", which makes conventional language usage problematic.

It is of course difficult if not impossible to understand the "real" meaning of a word like man or woman in its actual usage, and perhaps the usage of a generic masculine does not necessarily imply that the speaker refuses to regard women as human beings, just as it is unlikely that a small child speaking of niggers (instead of Afro-Americans or instead of not focusing on such a thing at all) is a full-blooded racist. Yet although one does not know what goes on inside the heads of those human beings called pupils ('not-teachers'?), that is no excuse: one has to deal with language, which in any case is the job to be done. Even if people do not mean to exclude others, their language does. The repetition of exclusive language potentially teaches the users to relocate an excluded referent, 'a woman' for example, as if it were "outside". It does not become totally excluded, but is more or less rejected again and again.

My point is that an important way of humanising language teaching is to make acts of language visible. One example of those acts is exclusion. Another is the conventionality of language. Language is a contract which is confirmed every time it is performed. Language is not natural, not God-given law, nor is it from outer space. It is a very humane phenomenon, and as such it tends to be conventional.

That is to argue, teachers should not treat language as if it could belong to itself. It is not just an abstract collection of rules, lexicons and sentence constituents. After all, it is not an impersonal force! Treating it as if it were, is not just a matter of old-fashioned teaching but also a problematical theoretical issue: in the last analysis many post-structuralists (the more anti-humanistic ones) have implied the impersonality of language in claiming "the death of the subject".

Neither should one make the usual liberal-humanistic error (the one opposed by anti-humanism) of regarding language or any other act of a subject as a rational "choice" of an "individual". Language has its life in cultural dialogue, in which there are so many potential consequences and so many "I's" speaking with the same mouth as mine, that it is impossible to "choose rationally" between all of them. Even classroom or everyday misunderstandings, not to mention the Freudian slips, show that language is certainly not just "mine" and that "I" am not the absolute origin or master of "my" acts. Nor is it possible to be absolutely "individual", for we speak both in a dialogue with others and with a language internalised from – or rather, with – the previous dialogues.

Yet if language does not belong to itself or to its subject, then whose language is it? To say that it would be "their" language, for instance the language of patriarchy forced into the mouths of innocent victims, would turn the liberal view upside down, except in one respect: it would maintain that there is an absolute origin "behind" the act. There is plenty of reason to believe that in both cases this kind of monological determinism is a mistaken view, although sometimes it – that is, being the subject of or to a monological subject position – certainly is the actual experience.

One could say that as a general phenomenon, language belongs to everybody and no-one at the same time, for it is (has been and becomes) embedded in sociality and in the world. Language is something which is not transcendental, it is humane. This is the core of its inequalities but also of the possibility of change.

The anthropologist Brad Shore, among others, has summarised that language has its basis on different motivations, social as well as psychical, linguistic and environmental ones. In other words, language situates in the world with its users. They in turn use language as a way of situating themselves as its subjects, as a way of "coming into being". I am referring to the thinking of the Russian social theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, according to whom the relation between language and the speaker has to be considered as dialogical: it works in both ways.

The dialogical situatedness, I would like to say, is the humanity of language.

To speak on behalf of 'humanism' or 'humanising' (language teaching, drug policies, ways of production) is, if I have understood correctly, to claim that human beings need to be treated as ends in themselves. Yet the problem is, how does that happen: what is the human-like way of treating a human being?

The 'humanity' of George W. Bush is so different from mine that I would actually call him deeply anti-humanistic. Yet the common thing is, that both George W. and I do presuppose something characteristic to human beings. That action – presupposition – as such seems to be very humane. Even if George W. and I are very different, both of us are coloured by and live through our situatedness and the subject positions given by our situated languages, not outside these sites.

If you are situated as a language teacher, what would be your 'humanity', can you name it? I would like to propose, that in 'humanising' language teaching, teachers could make use of the most obvious 'humanity' they have: language. One way of humanising language teaching would be to pay attention to the characteristics of language itself.

There may be nothing new in all this, but it seems to me that the humanity of language lies especially in its dialogical situatedness. And even if it is far more easily said than done, I would like to see the dialogical situatedness both experienced and, at least sometimes, made visible in the classroom. For this purpose, I would encourage teachers to arrange learning situations taking into consideration the acts and all the motivations of language. It would also be useful to apply some feminist – and as I see them in the last analysis, very humanistic – strategies of visibility in paying attention to the ways in which every language is coloured by its life in the world, like human beings.