ABSTRACT
If one of the central aspects of colonial discourse has been to construct the native Other as backward, dirty, primitive, depraved, childlike, feminine, and so forth, the other side of this discourse has been the construction of the colonizers, their language, culture and political structures as advanced, superior, modern, civilized, masculine, mature and so on. Thus, as we saw in Chapter 2, for every construction of colonized people as indolent, native, feminized children, for example, there was a parallel construction of the colonizer as the severe schoolmaster, the knowledgeable and adult discipli-narian. As I argued in Chapter 1, this is part of the process of double reciprocation by which discourses construct each other and do so in relation to English. In this chapter I want to explore some of the implications of these cultural constructs of colonialism for how the English language has been understood and what sorts of implications this may have for language planning, language choice, and English language teaching.
