(Language, Society and Political Economy)
by William Simpson (Author)
Capital, Commodity, and English Language Teaching
illustrates how the drive for profit in commercial ELT affects the
manner in which language is taught. The book looks at education as a
form of production, and asks how lessons are produced, and how the
production of profit in addition to the production of the lesson affects
the operation of educational institutions and their stakeholders.
Simpson
delivers a theoretically rigorous conception of capital and builds from
this an investigation into how the circulation of capital for profit
interrelates with the teaching of language. Simpson discusses ELT at
both a global level, in discussion of the ELT industry in the UK, the
US, Ireland, Canada, Japan, Spain, and transnationally online, as well
as at a more local level, where finer detailed descriptions of the
work-lives of those within the Japanese eikaiwa ELT industry are given.
Drawing on a synthesis of Marxist and Bourdieusian theory, the book
outlines a dialectical approach to understanding capital, and to
understanding how the drive for profit and language education
interrelate with one another. Simpson concludes by showing how such an
approach might open up areas for further research in a number of
contexts across the globe, as well as in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Providing a model for addressing global issues of
ELT, this book is of interest to advanced students, scholars and
professionals within applied linguistics, TESOL, sociolinguistics, and
linguistic anthropology, language economics and related areas.
