Shattering Ethnocentric and Eurocentric Subjectivities in foreign language teaching: A Critical Intercultural Perspective

Abstract

The complexity and essence of languages and cultures are unique. People live in culturally built niches based on beliefs, subjectivities, skills, and practices resulting from symbolic and material inheritances passed down from generation to generation. Throughout the qualitative, documentary, and hermeneutical research, it has been feasible to identify that postmodern society has reified the human being. People are considered a means of production and consumption. Besides, the dominant groups impose languages and cultures that they label as prestigious, ignoring that every person is unique and has ideas, values, principles, religions, languages, unrepeatable cultures. This article will describe the process of subjectivation and its relationship with 'technologies of power,' which enforce thoughts, self-concept, and behavior abstractly, subtly, and invisibly. The research results depict that some authors define the English language as dominant, imperialistic, and homogeneous. The article goes further than intellectual elaboration about English language teaching and proposes that educational institutions should be sites where students actively adopt an intercultural, analytical, and critical thinking approach. That way, students learn to discover their identities, value pluralism, research the causes and consequences of domination processes, and are open to diversity without acquiring ethnocentrism or xenophobic ideologies. The article contests neutrality and absolutism in education. It views schools as cultural and political arenas where teachers should support students to understand reality with arguments and reflection, building a more democratic and proactive society. Thinking about education from a humanistic and ethical approach and holding transformative social action in classrooms respond to the chaotic and uneven prevailing world.