TEACHING ENGLISH IN POST-SOVIET UZBEKISTAN

In an uncharacteristic outburst, our head of
department flounced out of a classroom where she had been teaching, brushing roughly, even
more uncharacteristically past me without so much as a nod. I followed close on her heels
and entered the room where 100 students were sitting open-mouthed. On the board the
letters AD were written, with their meaning in even bolder capitals: "AFTER
DEATH!" scrawled underneath. I remembered a conversation I had had with a group of
students earlier that day over the meaning of the acronym. They had never heard of Anno
Domini and promised to check my version with the ultimate authority in the department. I
could tell the outcome had not been good. The old guard at my university has always viewed
me with the utmost suspicion. I think deep down they invited native speakers to prove that
they had been right all along. The English don’t know grammar and don’t know how
to speak, claimed the head of my department. She summoned the entire faculty together to
announce that true English is spoken only in her department.

I was the first and only native English speaker that anyone in the academic sphere in
my city had ever met when I arrived after independence in 1992. It was logical I suppose
that I was considered an anomaly and students were advised to avoid me socially.
Fortunately students ignored the pleas, but this only served to increase the tension in
the department. It also caused a problem during exams when students who had been brushing
up on real English in their spare time had to revert to Soviet-style-speak to pass.
Friction increased when students started travelling overseas and returned with American
accents that seemed to be even harder to decipher than mine. But still the old guard were
unyielding. Soviet textbooks had not been revised since the ‘50’s and were full
of outdated grammar and colloquialisms. Foreign literature was always of the politically
correct genre from the 19th or early 20th century.

A terrible fear was beginning to grip those who had learned English under Communism. No
longer were they deemed experts in their field and our presence in their department
reinforced this. Students began to question their infallibility. They began to get hold of
and understand news from outside. They could speak to foreigners and understand them.
Revision of textbooks should have been a priority but the departmental intransigence was
palpable. So rigid had the professors’ own education been that every single lesson
they had given or would ever give had been memorized while at college using those very
same mothballed textbooks. Central planning had created a Union-wide stranglehold on
standards and diversion from it could not be tolerated.

The arrival of native speakers ruined the smooth running of a system that had locked
itself into perpetual motion. Not only did we import new-fangled English, we were also
blind to an economy and a pecking order which turns a blind eye to the success of someone
rich enough to pay his way and staff corrupt and badly paid enough to allow it. But
progress and change are inevitable. The shy, unquestioning, long-haired, long-skirted
Muslim girls I taught eight years ago are now teachers. They have dared to cut their hair
raise their skirts and even wear trousers. They dare to question and themselves allow
dissent and debate in their ranks. As the old guard retires, exhausted and worn from a
system that did them no favors, a new generation is emerging to challenge the status quo.

Jennifer Balfour, Long-term Educator in former Soviet Central Asia