One important aspect of linguicism is the teaching of English as a foreign and second language and its maintenance as a “national” language in communities whose mother tongue is something other than English. Attempts to make English a global language have both a complex economic and political history, Phillipson and his followers would like to change the state of affairs as they see them, they point out the cultural, social, and psychological damage which can be inflicted by the fallacies of the English language teaching profession.. They speculate that the main problem is the monolingual emphasis with which English is often taught. There are definite disadvantages to teaching any language in this fashion. Language is often considered to be a sensitive indicator of the relationship between an individual and any given social group. It is an integral part of ourselves, it permeates our very thinking, the way we view the world, morality and social behaviour. For this very reason it becomes clear that language teaching is a matter which should be handled sensitively.

A question put forward by Canagarajah (1999) questions the very motives of those who purvey monolingual language teaching as ”beneficial” for the people to whom it is taught, he asks “does English offer Third world countries a resource that will help them in their development, as Western governments and development agencies would claim or is it a “Trojan Horse” (Cooke 1988), whose effect is to perpetuate their dependence?”. It would seem that his somewhat cynical perspective may have a ring of truth; decision making elites in developing countries have usually been persuaded to share the interests of their neo-colonial patrons. Sir Anthony Parsons, former Foreign Policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher, once stated this policy without disguise in a rare moment of brutal honesty thinly veiled as national pride, and was quoted by the British Council in a recruitment brochure in 1988: “It is really dazzlingly obvious. If you are thoroughly familiar with someone else’s language and literature, if you know and love the country, the arts, the people, you will be instinctively disposed to buy goods from them rather than a less well known source, to support them actively when you consider them to be right and to avoid criticizing them too fiercely when you regard them as being in the wrong.” One could say this makes the massive annual enlistment of international students by British Universities seem a much less disinterested and beneficent process than their prospectuses could intimate.