“Is English a foreign language” in Greece?

What is a ‘foreign language’?

Before I attempt to answer whether English is a foreign language in Greece, it seems useful to on what a ‘foreign language’ actually means. In language education, we sometimes distinguish between Second Languages (SL) and Foreign Languages (FL).

Second language education usually refers to teaching and learning a language within a community where most people already speak this language natively. For instance, students who travel to England to improve their English, or immigrants learning Greek in order to integrate in Greek society are learning a Second Language.

By contrast, foreign language education refers to teaching and learning a language within one’s native community (often as part of one’s formal schooling), so that one might communicate with tourists, trade partners and other speakers of the target language. By this definition, pupils learning English or French in a Greek school are engaging in Foreign Language learning.

The following table summarises the most important differences between second and foreign language education:

Second language education	Foreign language education
Takes place in the community where the language is natively used	Takes place outside the community where the language is natively used
Opportunities to engage with the the target language outside the classroom	The language classroom is likely the only place where students engage with the target language.
Learners are immersed in the culture of the target language community	The culture of the target language community is hard to access (possibly undesirable?)
Learners normally come from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds	Learners normally share a linguistic and cultural background
Teachers are most commonly members of the target language community	Teachers are likely (but not always) members of the local community
Teacher education emphasises pedagogical skills	In addition to pedagogical skills, teacher education must foster linguistic skills and provide cultural information

Rethinking the ‘second’ / ‘foreign language’ dichotomy

Analytical distinctions, such as the one above, are often helpful when it comes to clarifying our thinking. However, there is often a danger of getting trapped in false dichotomies. So, what I will now do is attempt to critically approach the second / foreign language distinction, and examine if it is still useful. Before reading on, however, you might want to go back to the table outlining the differences between FL and SL education and reflect on how easy it is to place Greece in either category.

It seems to me that language educators in Greece have to tackle with two important questions:

• To what extent is the distinction between English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) still relevant in a globalised world?
• If the distinction is indeed meaningful, does it still make sense to view Greece as an EFL setting?

A global rejection of EFL as a category

Regarding the first question, I think it is very difficult to argue for a continued distinction between EFL and ESL. If this is the case, English language education in Greece is closer to the ‘second language’ paradigm, whereas the ‘foreign language paradigm’ is no longer meaningful.

The defining feature of EFL education is that English is functionally confined to the language classroom. It presupposes that the local langugage, whatever that is, is used exclusively in all domains of social life. As a result, learners can only find English language input and opportunities to communicate in a language classroom. Such insular communities are becoming increasingly harder to find in a globalised world.

English as a lingua franca

It seems increasingly hard to thinking of the world as being divided into English ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ , where ESL and EFL are respectively practiced. Rahter, it might make more sense to conceptualise the English-using world as a geographically distributed community where English functions as a shared linguistic resource. In fact, some linguists have already began using terms such as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), English as an International Language (EIL) or English as an International Communication (EIC) to describe the linguistic resources that members of this community share.

The linguistic status of ELF is still the subject of some debate, as are questions of legitimacy (e.g., Is the English of an Indian university professor equally ‘good’ as that of a Glasgow cabbie?). But from a pedagogical perspective, I think that replacing EFL with ELF is both more descriptively accurate and more empowering. An ELF perspective acknowledges that a language may be dominant in a community, but that English can also be very salient. It recognises that aspects of the local culture can be legitimately conveyed through English, and that cultural artefacts from the Anglophone West are both easy and useful to access. This perspective rejects the assumption that English can only be ‘properly’ taught by native speakers of the language. It also questions whether the literary and cultural tradition of the British Isles and North America has a privileged connection to a global language.

A qualified rejection of EFL

Even if one is not ready to abandon the EFL construct entirely, I believe tha it is still problematic to view English as a ‘foreign’ language in Greece.

As early as 1985, Braj Kachru pointed out that a number of countries and states exist where English is the native language of most people, but nevertheless it seems to enjoy a privileged status. For instance, in many post-colonial settings, English is the a language of schooling, trade or administration, in parallel with, or to the exclusion of local languages. Although Kachru seemed to distinguish rather rigidly between post-colonial settings and the rest of the English-using world, his observation seems to undermine the strength of the dichotomous distinction between ESL and EFL.

The core of Kachru’s argument seems to be that if English is very salient in the linguistic ecology of a community, then it must be more than just a ‘foreign’ language.

The status of English in Greece

Although English is not an official language in Greece, I want to put forward the claim that its position in the local linguistic ecology is more prominent than that of other foreign languages, and that this qualitative difference has important pedagogical implications.

One can list several examples of how English usage in everyday communication in Greece, but I will just refer to naming practices, which have important identity implications. If marketing practices are any indication, English is at least as prominent in trade as Greek is. Two of the largest banks are named Eurobank and Alpha Bank (two more, Emporiki Bank and Geniki Bank², merge a Latin transliteration of their name with the English word Bank), and large retail stores such as Public, the Golden Hall and The Mall use English names.

The semiotic predominance of the English language appears to have spread in government as well, judging by initiatives such as OpenGov, or changes in the ways government entities refer to themselves. For instance, the Ministry of Education website recently changed its domain name from from www.ypepth.gr (a transliteration into the Latin alphabet of the initials that made up the Greek name of the ministry) to the Orwellian www.minedu.gov.gr .

Taken together, these examples indicate that corporate and government bodies in Greece appear to view themselves as bilingual entities operating in a context where English is readily understood, i.e., a context where English is not ‘foreign’.

What does it mean for language teaching if English is not a ‘foreign’ language?

Whether one adopts a global or a qualified rejection of the English as a Foreign Language construct, it must be clear from the preceding discussion that English is qualitatively different from foreign languages, and this has important implications for curriculum design and for teacher education.

With regard to language pedagogy, it is likely that the methods and techniques used to foster English language proficiency have more in common with the practices used in native language education than they have with foreign language education. It also means that the privileged position English Language specialists enjoyed, as sole providers of linguistic and cultural input, is less tenable. Taken together, these observations suggest that we need to re-appraise the policy of using English Language specialists in teaching posts where teachers with stronger pedagogical credentials would be a better fit.

As regards teacher education, the rejection of the EFL construct calls into question the bizarre ministerial decision³ to merge Departments of English, French, German, Spanish and Italian Studies into integrated departments that ‘Foreign Language’ Departments. The academic absurdity of such a decision aside, it is clear that such departments would produce English Language teachers who would not be suitable to engaging with the particularities of English in the Greek context.

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Notes

1. Back in the early 2010s, when this post was written, Twitter was intellectually engaging like that. ↩︎
2. Both these banks were eventually merged into others since the post was originally written. ↩︎
3. This was a cost-cutting plan by the Greek Ministry of Education, which never actually materialised. Note that, in Greece, universities have limited autonomy and most structural decisions are made by the Ministry. ↩︎

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