Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This study presents a possible view on the notion of cultural reconfiguration that may occur within the mind of an ESL learner when faced with the prospect of learning a language that has socio-political and economic currency, such as English. For second language learners the prospect of being culturally imbibed is a consequence of learning English, yet learners face this with a potential ontological discursivity. In order to explore how ESL leaners in Pakistan dealt with balancing Western cultural discursivity, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted in a university in Lahore where the results revealed the presence of what can only be described as ‘critical ontological discursivity’. The results show active participatory attempts by ESL learners exhibiting signs of critical awareness that transcend the notion of being just ‘aware’, instead it is clear that Pakistani ESL learners that are culturally imbibed recalibrate their ideological position in order to evaluate the impact of learning English.