David Block

ICREA & University Pompeu Fabra · Departament d'Humanitats

Academic capitalism is about how progressively more academic activity is valued according to its capacity to accumulate human, financial and corporate capital. It is on the increase in Higher Education (HE) worldwide and in this article we examine its implantation in Catalan universities. We begin with an exploration of the bigger picture, focussin...

The analysis and understanding of multilingualism, and its relationship to identity in the face of globalization, migration and the increasing dominance of English as a lingua franca, makes it a complex and challenging problem that requires insights from a range of disciplines. With reference to a variety of languages and contexts, this book offers...

Language policy and planning (LPP) has always drawn on research and scholarship in education as well as the social sciences in general (in particular sociology). Social theory has also figured as an important source of ideas and concepts, and critical LPP has arisen as a distinct strand of inquiry since the 1980s (Tollefson, in Planning language, p...

In the original article the affiliation for author David Block was incorrectly published. The author’s correct affiliation is provided with this Correction.

The neoliberalisation of higher education (HE), which began in earnest about three decades ago, and the global spread of English, which began earlier, together have motivated an exponential increase in the number of universities worldwide offering English-medium instruction (EMI) as a key part of their internationalisation policies. EMI in HE is by...

In this short paper, I begin by providing background for inquiry into the division of labour across occupations, examined from an economics of language perspective. I then critically discuss the four papers that compose this special issue on the topic, before closing with three suggestions for factors to bear in mind in future research.

This entry takes on the task of discussing linguistic anthropology research on language and class in education. After briefly clarifying what we might mean by class, it focuses on three foundational figures who have either directly or indirectly influenced later research. It then discusses four key studies carried out between the 1970s and the 2000...

In this response to Anna Kristina Hultgren’s paper, ‘Global English: From “Tyrannosaurus Rex” to “Red Herring”’, I begin by aligning myself with the general thrust of Hultgren’s argument, namely that if Applied Linguists really want to help combat social injustice in the world, they will have to abandon the notion that language must be at the centr...

This paper examines the emergent identities of three STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) lecturers, focusing especially on how they construct themselves with regard to their disciplines and how researchers construct them as potential English language teachers. It begins with essential background information before discussing ide...

In recent years, a discourse of Spanish exceptionalism has arisen, whereby Spain has managed to integrate over five million immigrants in a very short period of time without the kind of social upheaval witnessed in other European countries over the past several decades. Overtly racist and xenophobic discourses have generally been, with notable exce...

This paper explores how three Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) lecturers working in English-medium instruction (EMI) grapple with the prospect of self-positioning as English-languageteachers (ELTs), drawing on interviews in which they explicitly deny acting in this way. It begins with essential background, first discussing ke...

In the shift to English-medium instruction (EMI) in European higher education, policy often runs ahead of research and curricular decisions are taken independent of evidence regarding their suitability for achieving broader educational goals, which may range from internationalisation as a general strategy to English language learning as a more spec...

This chapter begins with an extended discussion of key background concepts, such as the manufacture of consent, political communication and discourse, and the interrelated notions of corruption, discourses of corruption and corrupt discourses. It also provides a short history of the Spanish conservative party, the Partido Popular, which is the focu...

After a brief summary of the contents of Chapters 1– 3, this chapter links together a series of relatively discrete issues not covered in those chapters. It takes on the notion of bourgeois pessimism that may be seen to permeate the book, before moving to a discussion of what is known as the ‘dirtbag left’ in the United States. The chapter then con...

This chapter is a critical reflection on post-truth and related terms. It starts with a consideration of what truth might be taken to mean and then moves to a discussion of epistemology and agnotology, which is the deliberate propagation of ignorance to satisfy the biases of powerful economic interests in favour of a particular status quo. A case e...

In this book David Block draws on analytical techniques from Critical Discourse Studies to critically investigate truth, truths, the propagation of ignorance and post-truth. Focusing on corrupt discourses and agnotology, he explores the role of anti-intellectualism, emotion and social media in the cultural creation, legitimisation and dissemination...

This article begins with an examination of phenomena such as the market, homo economicus and entrepreneurialism, which have become salient in discussions of neoliberalism in recent years and which are central to the contributions to this special issue. In the second half of the article, the focus shifts to the author’s personal take on these phenom...

This article problematizes the politics of language education research with regard to social injustice, which is not only cultural, but also material. Its starting position is that most language education research today is, following Nancy Fraser, recognition oriented, in that it takes on culture- and identity-based injustices such as racism, gende...

This paper is about Marxist political economy and Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) as a field of inquiry. It begins with a discussion of the traditional role of Marxist political economy in CDS, arguing that for the most part it has been limited and partial. It then considers an example of a serious attempt to carry out a Marxist political economy...

In this paper‚ I suggest that we take an approach to life-story interviews which moves beyond an exclusively micro level analysis (examining, for example, the minutest of features of spoken language, such as pronoun use or accent) or an exclusively content-based analysis (which, in essence, plays the story told in the interview back to the reader)....

Social class has always been a key mediating factor for access to and performance in education, even if the attention it has received has varied: in some cases, it has been minimal, and in other cases, the construct has suffered a kind of erasure (i.e., it has disappeared from the lexicon of researchers). The trend toward the latter has been partic...

The topic of this paper is an ongoing discursive conflict which has arisen in Spain around home repossession and home evictions, understood here as part of a more general class warfare waged by the financial elites on the popular classes. Firmly grounded in political economy and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), it examines attempts by the governi...

This state-of-the-art review is based on the fundamental idea that political economy should be adopted as a frame for research and discussion in applied linguistics as part of a general social turn which has taken hold in the field over the past three decades. It starts with Susan Gal's (1989) early call for such a move in sociolinguistics and ling...

Traditionally, research and scholarship on foreign language teaching and learning (i.e. the teaching and learning of languages other than English around the world) has tended to be very much nation-state-based and the focus has tended to be on curricular issues, such as decisions about content (culture, lexis and grammar) and classroom practices, a...

Social class has always been a key mediating factor for access to and performance in education, even if the attention it has received has varied: in some cases, it has been minimal, and in other cases, the construct has suffered a kind of erasure (i.e., it has disappeared from the lexicon of researchers). The trend toward the latter has been partic...

Over the past three decades, identity has become a key construct in applied linguistics and there has been a great deal of research focussing on language learner identities. Meanwhile, less research has been devoted to language teacher identities, although there has been an increase in recent years. This paper makes a modest contribution to this gr...

The marketization of education in countries like the UK may be seen as part and parcel of the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant shaper of policy and practice in many societies from the late twentieth century onwards. This paper explores how marketization has impacted on two initial teacher preparation programmes and focuses on the Cambridge Eng...

Social class is a curious construct. In the discipline where it has traditionally been most at home, sociology, there has been a constant flow of commentary on its demise and, indeed, its death over the years. In applied linguistics, the situation is somewhat different in that there has been a degree of social class denial, but more importantly, th...

This paper argues that language, culture and identity researchers need to take the intersectionality of identity inscriptions seriously and, further to this, that an intersectional approach which emanates from an interest in social class provides a productive way to examine the lives and experience of individuals living in multicultural societies....

UK-produced English language teaching textbooks aimed at the global market are core products in a multi-million-pound Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TE SOL) industry that includes language teaching and testing, teacher education, academic publishing, and educational consultancy work and quality assurance for ministries of educatio...

Against a backdrop of rapid global transformations, the ever-increasing migration of people across nation-state borders and a wide array of language practices, applied linguists, and language and intercultural communication researchers in particular, often include identity as a key construct in their work. Most adopt a broadly poststructuralist app...

This book explores neoliberalism-a view of the world that puts the market at its centre-from the perspective of applied linguistics.

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.... Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as...

Identity has become a key construct in applied linguistics over the past 30 years, as more and more researchers have heeded Norton Peirce's (1995: 12) call for 'a comprehensive theory of social identity that integrates the language learner and the language learning context'. In this article, my aim is to discuss what I see as issues arising in iden...

This article explores how class might be brought to the fore as an identity inscription in studies of second language learning, alongside other identity inscriptions such as gender, ethnicity and national identity, which have been the focus of rather more research. It begins by clarifying what is meant by class through a brief discussion of the wor...

This paper discusses issues related to language beliefs held by teachers and students of English in China; namely, the status of English, the learners’ expectations of English and the focus of English teaching and learning in China. These beliefs are examined in the context of globalization and China’s ever-deepening integration into the global eco...

This paper is a very personal attempt to explore the problematics of portraying migrants in Applied Linguistics research. I begin with a discussion of identity, in particular what we might mean when we use the term, and from there I go on to explore its fundamental imprecision through an analysis of a census question about ethnicity. I then conside...

Selves and identities in narrative and discourse. Michael Bamberg, Anna de Fina and Deborah Schiffrin (eds) (2007) Studies in Narrative 9. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. x + 355. ISBN 978 90 272 2649 5

In recent years, the number of Spanish-speaking Latinos in Britain and London has grown considerably. Estimates from different sources put the population in London as high as 300,000. Unfortunately, this growing ethnolinguistic group is an underresearched minority, and information of any kind is hard to come by. In this article, my aim is to remedy...

Although Firth and Wagner (1997) did not explicitly discuss the issue of identity in second language acquisition (SLA) research, their article was symptomatic of a general trend to open up SLA to social theory and sociological and sociolinguistic research, which in turn led some researchers to explore links between second language (L2) learning and...

David Block is a Reader in education at the Institute of Education, University of London, London, England. His interests include migration, the impact of globalization on language practices, and second language identities.

Embedded in ongoing debates about multiculturalism in nation-states such as the UK are frequent references to bilingualism. These references range from negative assessments of the phenomenon to more positive views. In this paper, I present and critique four assumptions that are often made about bilinguals and bilingualism, not only by the lay publi...

This article begins by introducing the concept of meta-pedagogical awareness The term has its roots in several disciplines, in particular teacher development, language awareness, applied linguistics and educational research into self-directed/regulated learning. The article then presents two case studies of EFL learners describing and evaluating th...

Some ten years ago, Ben Rampton (1997) wrote about ‘retuning’ applied linguistics, moving the field in the direction of more multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of language-related problems in the real world. In making such a suggestion, Rampton was following Del Hymes, who proposed a reformulation of sociolinguistics so...

In Chapters 1–3, I discussed key conceptual frameworks and issues such as globalization, migration, multiculturalism and identity, as well as London as a global city and its history as the home of migrant groups from all over the world. These chapters set the scene for Chapters 5–8, in which the stories told by individuals representing four migrant...

These quotes are taken from interviews with four French nationals living and working in London as secondary school teachers of French as a foreign language. When these statements were made, all four women had been living in London for several years. The comments range from Chantalle’s rejection of a future in France, as she has developed a more ful...

Carlos, a Colombian man in his early 40s, is responding to a question posed about the existence of a Spanish-speaking Latino (hereafter SSL) community in London. What he says here is consistent with what I have observed since I first moved to London in autumn 1996. Whether it is riding on the bus or a tube train, or simply walking on Tottenham Cour...

In this chapter and the next two, my aim is to introduce some of the key concepts and background information necessary to the presentation and discussion of the different London stories in Chapters 5–8. Here, I begin by defining globalization before going on to discuss the main issues and options related to it. I then move to talk about one particu...

In this chapter, my aim is to situate the reader as regards the precise sociohistorical and geographical context of the stories told in Chapters 5–8. I do this by expanding on the two main themes discussed in Chapter 1, that is globalization and migration. With the discussion of globalization as a backdrop, I begin with an examination of the phenom...

In the first three chapters of this book, I presented a theoretical framework for the stories told in Chapters 5–8. I discussed globalization, migration, multiculturalism, identity, London as a global city and the history of migration and multilingualism in Britain and London. My argument was that in order to understand micro-level individual stori...

The discussion in the previous chapter was about globalization and the global phenomenon of migration. In this chapter, my aim is to examine ways of qualifying the flesh and blood of people who are migrants. I begin with a consideration of the all-important concepts of culture, multiculturalism and community. From there, I move to a lengthy treatme...

It is widely believed that linguistic theories and information technology have considerably influenced foreign language education. However, the collaboration of these three domains has not brought about new scientific results. It it thus, our attempt to realize an integration of theoretical and applied linguistics on the basis of computer sciences,...

This paper sets the scene for the research presented in the rest of this IJMS issue. It begins with a discussion of Globalization in which the phenomenon of the Internet is located. The argument is that, no matter how disputed aspects of Globalization may be, greater interaction is indisputable, with inevitable consequences for language practice. T...

IntroductionThe Rise of CLT /TBLTCLT /TBLT as a Globalized PhenomenonThe Global TEIL Textbook andCommodifi ed IdentitiesConclusion References

I begin this review with some general comments about the author, Michel Thomas, his background and the 1997 BBC documentary about his approach to language teaching. I then go on to critique his Spanish course, citing specific examples of explanations of the language learning process and pronunciation and grammar teaching. I conclude that despite it...

In this paper I discuss some of the competing and conflicting discourses of language education that exist at present in England. I begin by focussing on two of these discourses, one emanating from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), via the National Curriculum, and the other, put forth by foreign language specialists at British universi...

I begin this paper by identifying a phenomenon worthy of research, that is the increasing proportion of foreign nationals on PGCE modern languages courses across Britain. I make the point that while it is interesting to explore how these teachers develop professionally, what is needed is an in-depth study of how their sense of self-identity develop...

This paper is a reflection on the gap between SLA researchers and language teachers. It begins with a brief look at how SLA publications are often about issues which are not of particular interest to language teachers. It then explores why there is a gap between SLA researchers and language teachers touching on differences in status, different stan...

Publications about questionnaires tend to focus on technical issues such as item wording, overall format and the construction of scales. Only a few authors such as Low (1988, Evaluation and Research in Education 2, 69–79; 1996, Applied Linguistics 17(7), 1–37) and Alderson (1992, Working paper 15, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK) have researche...

In this article I present data collected from an adult language learner attending an EFL course at a large language school in Barcelona. I contrast the breadth, depth and content of his comments, as well as his manifested ambivalence, with an end-of-course, pen-and-paper, evaluation form. In doing so, I contrast two very different ways of capturing...

I begin this paper by describing my personal version of the action research cycle. I then describe two of my own research experiences to make the point that when we carry out research which involves listening to language learners, we can learn in two very different but equally important ways. First we learn something about the research question we...

This paper is meant to be a response to claims made by several prominent applied linguists in recent articles about second language acquisition (SLA) research These claims are as follows (1) The existence of multiple theories in SLA research is problematic (Beretta 1991), and the field should be united around a single theory or a few theories (Long...

In this paper I shall present data and analysis from an extensive study carried out in Barcelona in Spring, 1992. Specifically, I shall examine one day in the life of an English class for MBA candidates. A total of 14 points of view are presented: that of the classroom teacher, that of an outside observer and those of the 12 learners present in cla...

Materials design is an area of ELT training which is sometimes neglected in methodology texts and teacher-training programmes. In this paper, I shall first discuss reasons often given against teacher-generated materials. From there, I shall move on to consider the opposite view, offering three arguments in favour of DIY (‘Do it Yourself’) materials...

In this paper I suggest that cognitive science, a multi-disciplinary field which draws on research in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and computer science, might provide us with better explanations of student behavior in the classroom than mainstream SLA (second language acquisition) research.I begin with a brief criticism of mainstream SLA...