Generating alternatives to dominant ideology of English language position in Malaysia: a colonial vision or postcolonial revision?

By taking Malaysia as a case in point, this paper explores ideological constructions regarding the position of the English language that are created as a result of collisions between prioritizing nationalist and realizing globalization agendas. Through a discourse analysis of newspaper texts across two of Malaysia’s press, The Star and New Straits Times, the discussion will show how these newspaper items represent certain world-views on ‘measures’ of the standardization of the English language. It is argued that they illuminate some of the many issues that stage dialogues between local/global continuities and disjunctures on how English language ‘should’ be positioned within the changing and challenging landscape of multilingualism and ‘global English.’ This article also attempts to extend the debate further to show examples of postcolonial ‘revisions’ to displace these points, highlighting alternative voices to articulate colonial ‘visions’ of the globalization of English.