All Middle Class Now? Evolving Representations of the Working Class in the Neoliberal Era: The Case of ELT Textbooks

John Gray · David Block

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EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning Critical and Liberation Pedagogy Social and Cultural Dynamics

Abstract

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 education globally. The growth of this industry coincides largely with the birth of the neoliberal era, dating more or less from the late 1970s. This is a period which has been characterized not only by the deregulation of financial markets, the abolition of trade barriers, and the imposition of structural readjustment programmes on developing world countries, but also by an ideology that promotes and celebrates individualism over class-based and other collective identity inscriptions. Elsewhere in our work (Block, 2010; Gray, 2010a, 2010b, 2012), we have argued that UK-produced textbooks frequently reproduce and legitimize neoliberal ideology, and in this chapter we turn our attention specifically to representations of the working class. The chapter begins with a short discussion of the supposed demise of the working class before moving on to a discussion of what class means in the highly complex world we live in today. This is followed by quantitative and qualitative analysis of a set of textbooks dating from the 1970s to the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The analysis reveals a largely superficial treatment of class in general and a progressive editing out of working class characters and issues relating to working class life from these textbooks. We conclude by arguing that this writing out of the working class from language learning materials can be seen as both a failure to educate students (by providing them with a very skewed view of the world) and a simultaneous betrayal of working class language learners, who are denied recognition.

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