Language planning, English language education and development aid in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

The increased status of English as the language of international communication and business has meant that development aid has increasingly been used to finance language planning initiatives aimed at improving and/or expanding English language education. The intended outcome of this aid is often to provide expanded economic returns and opportunities for those who learn the language. But is it really the case that they receive these benefits? In this paper I attempt to form a deeper understanding of the relationship between English language skills and economic value by providing a meta-analysis and critical evaluation of 11 research studies. By critically evaluating this research using Sen’s capabilities approach [1999. Development as freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press], I find that while English language skills might enhance opportunities for individuals, they also appear to reinforcing embedded inequalities and therefore not necessarily contributing to the well-being of societies. English language education may have limited impact without sufficient political and economic stability. Moreover, there are ongoing and significant needs to develop literacy and numeracy in local and national languages. Equipped with this more nuanced understanding of the value of English, I argue that development aid and language planning initiatives can make more significant contributions to holistic development and social justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Language planning
• English language education
• development aid
• Bangladesh
• capability approach
• inequality

Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to Naz Rassool, who has spent her career contributing to education and development – including my own – in many ways. Some ideas presented in the paper were generated by research undertaken for the British Council (Erling, 2014), and I am grateful to the institution – and Alison Barratt in particular – for supporting this work. I would also like to thank “English in Action,” The Open University, BBC Janala, and the UK Department for International Development for supporting the Bangladesh-based studies synthesised in this paper, and for making project-related research openly available. Regarding the qualitative study, I remain indebted to the participants in Bangladesh who generously shared their stories and time with us; the researchers who undertook the data collection, Qumrul Hasan and Sayeedur Rahman; and my collaborators in the project, Philip Seargeant and Mike Solly. Final thanks go to two anonymous reviewers, Tom Bartlett, and Carol Benson and Kerry Taylor-Leech for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. All remaining oversights and errors are of course my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Elizabeth J. Erling is Senior Lecturer in English Language Teaching, International Development and Teacher Education at The Open University, UK. She is also currently teaching at the University of Vienna. Her research interests are in language policy, English Medium Instruction and World Englishes. She is particularly interested in English and ideologies of value.

Additional information

Funding

I thank the British Council English Language Teaching Research Partnerships for funding the qualitative research project reported on in this study (Erling et al., 2012).