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Beneficiary voices in ELT development aid: ethics, epistemology and politics

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Abstract

As global language policy, English language teaching (ELT) development aid is as old as the field of language policy and planning. Contemporary discourses of ELT aid management acknowledge voices of project beneficiaries such as teachers. Beneficiary testimonials may satisfy the neoliberal demand for accountability, efficiency and evidence of impact. While this consideration of beneficiary engagement posed practical challenges in the past, new technological platforms such as websites and social media have eased the process of harnessing beneficiary voices. However, there has been limited research on beneficiary participation on the virtual space—specifically, on the discursive position from which beneficiaries speak, how they represent project interventions, and what implications their representations may have. This article examines beneficiary voices on the official website and social media spaces of a UKaid-funded project called English in Action (2009–2018) in Bangladesh. We problematise beneficiary voices and their representation of the project from the perspectives of ethics, epistemology and politics. We argue that, with their “post-truth” characteristics, beneficiary testimonials contributed to the project’s “self-branding” and to the evidence of its impact, regardless of how the storied success corresponded to the degree of change that may have been achieved on the ground.

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Notes

  1. Cambridge Education is a Mott MacDonald concern, which is a global engineering, management and development consultancy (https://www.mottmac.com). It has no connection with the University of Cambridge. The two NGOs are: Under-privileged Children’s Education Programme Bangladesh (http://www.ucepbd.org/) and Friends in Village Development in Bangladesh (http://www.fivdb.net/).

  2. The EIA Facebook is located at https://www.facebook.com/EnglishInActionBangladesh/.

  3. These codes are used to number the stories together with the year of publication on the website.

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  1. School of Education, The University of Queensland, Social Sciences Building 24, Brisbane, 4072, Australia

    M. Obaidul Hamid & Iffat Jahan

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  1. M. Obaidul Hamid
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Hamid, M.O., Jahan, I. Beneficiary voices in ELT development aid: ethics, epistemology and politics. Lang Policy 20, 551–576 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-020-09559-9

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