Resumen de Language policy and development aid: a critical analysis of an ELT project
This paper highlights the political and ideological entanglements of language policy and English language teaching with neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and development aid. It does so by examining the explicit and implicit goals and practices of an educational development aid project in Mindanao, Philippines. The US-funded Job Enabling English Proficiency (or JEEP) project claimed to improve the standard of English in the region through the introduction of imported educational materials and classroom configurations. However, we show how English-only policy, “native-speakerism,” and the use of repetition as a dominant language learning practice in the classroom are all implicated in the politics of neocolonialism in Mindanao. The paper makes a case for language policy as a lens through which the intricacies of development aid in neocolonial conditions may be tracked, critiqued, and transformed.
