Capital, Commodity, and English Language Teaching

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.