ELT, Gender and International Development

Myths of Progress in a Neocolonial World

By (author) Roslyn Appleby

Publication date:

03 August 2010

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

210x148mm
6x8"

ISBN-13: 9781847693044

For believers in the power of English, language as aid can deliver the promise of a brighter future; but in a neocolonial world of international development, a gulf exists between belief and reality. Rich with echoes of an earlier colonial era, this book draws on the candid narratives of white women teachers, and situates classroom practices within a broad reading of the West and the Rest. What happens when white Western men and women come in to rebuild former colonies in Asia? How do English language lessons translate, or disintegrate, in a radically different world? How is English teaching linked to ideas of progress? This book presents the paradoxes of language aid in the twenty-first century in a way that will challenge your views of English and its power to improve the lives of people in the developing world.

Introduction: This is Where it Crashed and Burned

Part I Understanding English Language Teaching in Development

1 Models of Development and English Language Teaching

2 Time and Space in English Language Teaching, Gender and Development

3 Spatial Context: East Timor, Indonesia and Australia

Part II Teachers’ Narrative Accounts

4 Being There: Teachers’ Spatial Engagements with Development Contexts

5 It’s a Bubble: English Language Teaching Practices in Development

6 Doing the Washing Up: Teaching and Gender in Development

Conclusion: Spatial Practices in the Contact Zone

The book's focus on gender relations in development contexts, its superb deconstruction of aid agencies in situ, the gendered space of ELT classrooms and the voices of ELT teachers working in development contexts is unique. This book should be read not only by sociolinguists, sociologists, critical theorists and theorists of development working in the academy but also NGOs and aid agencies working in post-trauma societies. There is much to be learned here.