One thing is certain, globally absolutely colossal sums are spent on both formal and informal language education (learning?). Many scholars (Heller, Duchene, and plenty more…) have written about how deeply various ideologies are embedded in both mandatory (government, national, economic,…) and non-mandatory (religious, social, political, economic,…) language teaching and educational technologies. When you add mountains of money to that mix, it is perhaps unsurprising that no one is really interested in finding ways for people to learn *efficiently* on their own (self-directed) using real-world language.

Thanks, Khan. “Lisa goes to London” sounds like pure magic. And I think that’s what the function of learning English has become in many contexts: the opium of the people. The lesson also reminds me of one observed by Nikolas Passasung in his ethnography of English language learning in a remote village on Sulawesi: the children there had to learn the word “vacuum cleaner” – the meaning of which was a huge mystery in a place without electricity …

Agree and it’s frustrating to see that mostly TESOL and all the promoters of global English as natural, neutral and beneficial get away with pretending that this is not so …