ELT education, as a commodity, takes many forms in countries all over the world. This book questions how the benefits of international English language education projects are distributed. The critical issues of language rights and linguistic diversity are pivotal in the book’s examination of domination and subordination in international language education projects. The author’s description of the role and teaching of English is based on her experience of working in ELT aid and development and fee-based projects, and through it she unmasks the interests and intentions of aid and fee-based language education projects. The two case studies that form the basis of this book recount a version of ELT marketing and project implementation that will resonate with experiences of aid recipients and university-led private sector fee-payers in many different ELT contexts.
ELT education, as a commodity, takes many forms in countries all over the world. This book questions how the benefits of international English language education projects are distributed. The critical issues of language rights and linguistic diversity are pivotal in the book’s examination of domination and subordination in international language education projects. The author’s description of the role and teaching of English is based on her experience of working in ELT aid and development and fee-based projects, and through it she unmasks the interests and intentions of aid and fee-based language education projects. The two case studies that form the basis of this book recount a version of ELT marketing and project implementation that will resonate with experiences of aid recipients and university-led private sector fee-payers in many different ELT contexts.
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Overview
ELT education, as a commodity, takes many forms in countries all over the world. This book questions how the benefits of international English language education projects are distributed. The critical issues of language rights and linguistic diversity are pivotal in the book’s examination of domination and subordination in international language education projects. The author’s description of the role and teaching of English is based on her experience of working in ELT aid and development and fee-based projects, and through it she unmasks the interests and intentions of aid and fee-based language education projects. The two case studies that form the basis of this book recount a version of ELT marketing and project implementation that will resonate with experiences of aid recipients and university-led private sector fee-payers in many different ELT contexts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847694843 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2010 |
| Series: | Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights , #8 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 537 KB |
About the Author
Jacqueline Widin has extensive experience and expertise in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) and in teaching and research of tertiary-led pre- and in-service teacher training programs in Australia and in countries outside of Australia. She has a particular interest in the relationship between language and human rights and the sociopolitical dynamics of the English language teaching field. She is currently a senior lecturer with the University of Technology Sydney and manages the TESOL and Linguistics Education programs.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Setting the Scene: The International Context of English Language Education
This is a story about the internationalisation of education. In particular, it is a story about the struggles within international English language education projects (IELEPs) and the increasing commodification and corporatisation of English. The story is set in South East Asia, East Asia and Australia and the actors include students, teachers, university and aid organisation staff and government officials. A central theme is the exportation of English language education by so-called English-speaking countries such as Australia to countries, often poor, which are linguistically and culturally diverse, with few English first language speakers. Specifically I am concerned with offshore English language education projects, the role of Australian universities in the export of English language education and the seeming necessity for 'global inequality in the commercial market in international education' (Marginson, 2004: 23). In my exploration of these concerns I am driven to ask: who benefits from the international spread of English language education? Will the economic success of English language teaching (ELT) continue to grow? Will English continue to hold the position of power and domination?
In my thinking about this book my motivation was to problematise the position of the 'beneficiary'. I began by working within the binary framework between the donor/provider and the beneficiary. I was concerned with how the particular interests of the beneficiary could be more effectively negotiated and represented. However, during one of my first interviews with a key stakeholder, Murray, in a fee-for-service project in Japan my thinking was completely turned around. In his interview, he spoke candidly about the many different interests and different beneficiaries in the project and how at different times in a project's life particular interests may be paramount. In the extract below he succinctly outlined Australia's 'grand interests':
The purpose of this particular project is not to deliver great, you know, English language teaching methodology into this country's teaching system. Actually by doing that we put many Australians out of a job ... I mean ... in fifteen years time if great English is being taught here then we're, you know, Australians out of business.
But ... it is to demonstrate Australia's ability to operate in an area that this country is not accustomed to and not expecting in higher education. It is to enhance our reputation as a provider of education and training ... the Agency is after enhancing Australia's interest in Australia's and this country's relationship. So I couldn't care less whether this country wants it, or needs it, or likes it, at the end of the day it's not the judgement of the teachers, it is a decision we've made against the background of what would enhance Australia's interest. (Murray P1AM1)
Looking back now this is axiomatic of the dynamics of the international English language education project (hereafter referred to as IELEP) field, but in that initial period of my exploration my assumptions were still fairly naively based in the binary relations in the ELT project field.
The notion of 'interest' is pivotal in any discussion about international English language teaching projects. So I must declare my interest in writing about IELEPs in the way I do. I work with an Australian university and I have been involved in a number of IELEPs in a variety of roles. It was through my involvement in projects as teacher, project adviser, project proposal writer and project implementer that I became aware, quite belatedly I suppose, that all was not as it seemed. I felt a growing unease that we were not all working to the same goals. While I and other colleagues ostensibly took on the onerous work of the project objectives or tasks, others did not seem to be working towards what I assumed were the principal aims of the project. At the same time I came across the growing body of literature, of articles, books and conference discussions addressing 'the problem of international education projects'. What the literature suggests is that international education projects fail, and not only do they fail, they cause damage and destruction to the areas they are located in, not just in the provision of services, or lack of, but to the individuals (or at least some) working in the projects. A number of researchers describe the project staff as the 'scrapnel' left in the wake of the ravages of the international language education project (Abdul-Raheem, 2000; Griffin, 1991; Magrath, 2001; Morris, 1991; Murphy, 1999; Pottier, 1993; Swales, 1980). Swales (1980: 62) describes a scenario which reflects current dilemmas of project work.
Expatriate staff of projects often ignore the real needs of the beneficiaries and appear in the 'busy work' mode to pursue their own interests and produce materials satisfactory to their own standards independent of local interests. They then achieve a validity which was internal to the expatriate world of the project; but they failed to achieve external validity, in the terms of the host institution.
Such criticisms may seem harsh but experience in the field of IELEP projects at least in part supports them and has provided me with the opportunities to investigate the struggles and power lines that delineate the field. Initially, the struggles were ones that as an academic I easily recognised; they were 'naturally' over what are considered the valuable resources in the field. A most obvious one is the struggle for Australian universities to win bids for aid projects. Another critical one is to attract international students. A third one is over language, firstly 'which language?'. In the case of ELT projects it is English. Related questions are how Australia keeps ownership of English and wins the struggle to keep the 'so-called' native speaker of English dominant.
Struggles emerged that contested and challenged embedded notions of the 'normality' of work practices and social life held by the academy. 'Culture' emerged as a most complicated concept. With respect to struggles around work practices questions emerged such as who occupies the dominant position? Which language dominates in the workplace? How are the language rights of the host-country participants recognised or not recognised? How are these struggle carried out? What forms of symbolic violence and abuse are taking place?
The question of who benefits contests the conventional assumption of recipients as beneficiaries. One of my main interests in the problematising of the beneficiary took the form of examining the position given to the first language (L1) in English language teacher training projects located in non-English-speaking countries. Although project stakeholders represented both the recipient countries and the donor countries, all meetings were conducted in English, all project documentation was in English and general communication was in English. This situation, which potentially disenfranchises recipient stakeholders from the project process, prompted me to look more deeply into the impact of language education projects in terms of the relationships they set up between the language/s of the recipient and that of the donor and/or the provider. The notion of the beneficiary became more problematic as I became aware that there were differing views about who would, or rather should, benefit from the project.
My growing awareness of the complications in the project field is not reflected in the specific ELT project literature analysing and describing this field. The beneficiary is usually depicted as an easily identified singular group or community (AusAID, 2001; Davis, 1991; Marsden & Oakley, 1990; World Bank, 1998), yet this literature identifies the multitude of problems integral to the running of international language education projects and the apparent failure of many projects to meet their objectives. Why such consistent and systematic failure? As the struggles in the project field became more pronounced and the notion of the beneficiary became more problematic, I turned to examine the overall picture of the planning and implementation of university-led IELEPs both in the aid and in the fee-for-service context.
I owe much to Pierre Bourdieu in the telling of this story. In order to understand the dynamics of the international language education field I used Bourdieu's conceptual framework and his explanatory devices of field, capital and habitus. These allowed for a multi-layered investigation into both the field of the IELEPs and the broader social context, the field of power (Bourdieu, 1984, 1989, 1990a, 1990b, 1998, 1999). Any analysis of the international field of education must account for two distinctive elements (Marginson, 2008). One element is cross-border flows of people, ideas, knowledge, technologies and economic resources. This element is relatively visible. The other less tangible and one most relevant to this study is the flow of differences and delineations. These include differences in languages, pedagogies, work practices, inclusion and exclusion. Bourdieu provides the tools to investigate the unequal distribution of resources and power. The field of power in this instance is represented by the powerful institutions at national and international levels. Institutions such as Australian aid agencies, Australian foreign relations organisations, international aid and finance organisations, Australian universities and universities in the countries other than Australia are located in the field of power. Although Bourdieu's research was carried out previous to the intense and volatile globalisation of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and in some eyes is nation-bound (Marginson, 2008), it offers much to my study of domination and subjugation in the international field. Bourdieu's framework allowed me to examine the relationships between the different agents, the positions they occupied in the field, the capital (the stakes or resources: linguistic, economic, cultural and social) which they accumulated and the dispositions (habitus: life experiences, expectations, education, knowledge, skills, age, gender and tastes) they brought to the field. The ways in which the agents carried out their practice of project implementation is what Bourdieu refers to as a 'feel for the game'. An agent or actor's habitus is not deterministic but can influence how well one 'plays the game'. Bourdieu speaks eloquently about habitus below:
social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside agents and when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it finds itself 'as a fish in water', it does not feel the weight of the water, and takes the world and itself for granted. (Bourdieu in Wacquant, 1989: 43)
Bourdieu's (1988,1998) work encouraged me to make visible the invisible relations of power, to unearth those 'naturally' occurring regularities that become known as 'the norm'. And so my declared interests in this story are to uncover the invisible webs of power which cause the practices to be carried out in a certain way. Given that the field of international language education projects is wrought with difficulties and stories of 'failure', I want to understand how such a wide-ranging and repetitive venture is overlaid with this burden of failure. This means that an analysis of the field will have to make apparent and unravel those taken-for-granted understandings of, in particular, power relations. It will have to identify the resources or stakes (capital) that are sought after by the agents in the field and the strategies employed by agents in the field; these are informed by their position, capital and habitus.
The remainder of this chapter familiarises the reader with the specific project sites and the agents (or actors) involved in the projects. It also gives a brief overview of issues such as: the internationalisation of English, the position of the first language in each site and the concept of the project and culture. The chapter concludes with an outline of the book chapters. The countries central to this story are named but I have changed the details of the participants to protect their identity.
The Sites
The stories in this book are drawn from the experiences of participants in two projects. Project 1 is an aid-funded English language teacher training project located in Laos, a small land-locked country in South East Asia. This project was tendered for and won through a collaboration between an Australian project management company and a large metropolitan Australian tertiary institution. The relationship with the host-country Ministry of Education (MOE) and other relevant government representatives was formed according to the rhetoric of 'bilateral aid projects' within the Australian Government aid programme. Project 2 is a university fee-for-service project developed by a consortium of Australian universities - the consortium's goal is to provide for the multi-level professional development of English language (EL) teachers in Japan. The project was developed under the auspice of an Australian Government Agency (AGA) located in the host country. The government organisation liaised with the host-country MOE and other key language teaching organisations. The consortium of universities was to present a national image of Australian higher education.
There are similarities and differences between the projects: they were both purporting to introduce a new ELT approach for use with secondary school students and both had a component of English language development for the teacher participants. However, there are key differences, some of which include the role of English in the two countries, the conditions under which the Australian team members participated in the projects and the time frames of the projects. One significant difference is the way in which each project was conceived. Project 1 (P1) was funded by Australia's international aid programme and was jointly managed by a university and a private project management company. Project 2 (P2) was more explicitly an entrepreneurial venture developed under the auspice of an AGA which provided some seeding funding. In spite of these essential differences the goals of the projects were very similar, the main one being to enhance the teaching and provision of English language education in the host countries.
The projects were located in two countries distinguished from each other by their historical, social and material conditions. Laos had emerged from a long history of colonial and quasi-colonial relations with a number of different international powers (Arnst, 1997). In Laos the teaching of foreign languages has been driven by the particular colonial power of the time. Project 2, located in Japan, an industrialised economy, is marked by very different struggles around the role of foreign languages. The post-Second World War focus on ELT was driven by a number of complex international relations.
The ELT goals of Project 1 as expressed in the project documents were based on the notion of 'capacity building'. They assumed that the 'building up' of the ELT sector would lead to improved social and economic growth. The documents go on further to illuminate the way that improved teaching and learning of English will strengthen the country's capacity to develop and sustain the type of English language provision initiated by the project. The proposal document for Project 2 differs in that the goal was not to enhance social or economic development as the host country was already one of the most industrially developed countries in the world. Rather, the inference was that the English language teaching and learning approaches in this host country were deficient and that improvement in these areas would enhance the country's involvement in the international arena.
This story clearly draws on the experiences of participants within two IELEPs; while the particularity of these experiences is important, the analysis and findings can be applied to a broader context. Throughout this book I refer to and weave in stories from education projects around the world; projects based in East Timor, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hungary and countries in Africa are all echoes of the story I am about to tell you.
Australian Universities and the Project Field
Australian universities have a principal role in this story. They are key players in the international English language field in the Asia-Pacific region. The international role of these institutions has changed dramatically over the last three decades. In 1988 the Australian Government phased out international education programmes premised on foreign aid objectives (e.g. the Colombo Plan); it then confirmed the full-fee market as the dominant framework for cross-border education (Marginson, 2004; Meiras, 2004). This major change in focus began in the mid-1980s when Australia shifted its orientation towards the Asia-Pacific region from its previous ties with countries in the British Commonwealth. During the late 1980s and 1990s the Asia-Pacific region became a lucrative market for recruiting fee-paying students. International students were no longer regarded as an 'elite group'; instead they were recognised as a mass market. The recruitment of these students became an export industry and was based upon an analysis of cost-benefit ratio and profit margins.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Illegitimate Practices"
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Copyright © 2010 Jacqueline Widin.
Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Setting the Scene: The International Context of English Language Education
Chapter 2 Naming the Game: Positions and Interest in the IELEP Field
Chapter 3 Struggles in the Game of the IELEP
Chapter 4 Practices in the Project Field: ELT and Project Work
Chapter 5 Talk in the Field: The 'English Only' IELEP
Chapter 6 Cultural Practices: The Project Field
Chapter 7 The IELEP: An Illegitimate Field