Countering commodification in EAP


Kaplan, who provide a range of for profit educational services, had an eye-watering revenue of $1.5 billion in 2016 and others such as INTO also generate huge sums of money (INTO University Partnerships Ltd., 2016). These avaricious, profit-seeking multinational companies are now firmly entrenched in the provision of EAP globally, often providing buildings for universities and a guaranteed stream of international fee-paying students. Universities can dispense with some or many of their (costly) EAP practitioners who may then be re-employed by the private provider without the same rights and opportunities as their university colleagues. English for Academic Purposes, alongside catering, accommodation, cleaning and IT services is now ripe for privatisation and outsourcing. Against this backdrop, remarkably, the status of EAP practitioners has been, until very recently, a very marginal feature in EAP research and publications. Indeed, the practitioner has, historically, been marginalised within the discipline of EAP. As early as 1981, Johns warned about the marginal status of ESP/EAP practitioners within the university and Robinson (1991) urged practitioners to ‘take a tougher attitude towards their conditions of employment’ (p. 83). These concerns about practitioner status and identity have appeared intermittently in the literature (cf. Hall, 2013; Hyland, 2012; Strauss, 2012) without ever being a central or urgent concern. However, there are clear signs that the practitioner is now occupying a more central role in the literature. Hadley’s landmark 2015 publication, exploring neoliberalism and EAP managers, documented the emergence of the commodification of EAP where the focus is ‘upon production,


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processing, quality, and the cost-effective delivery of knowledge content to student consumers’ (Hadley, 2015, p. 39) and the emergence of an EAP managerial class with loyalties and allegiances who ‘with a more entrepreneurial spirit saw life in the Center of Praxis as a place where new opportunities could abound’ (p. 43). We (Ding & Bruce, 2017) have also explored the marginal position of the practitioner, as well as offering indications of how to begin to overcome this. Challenges to practitioner identity and agency within neoliberal universities was a significant theme of this book and has received further treatment in Ding (2019). The education, socialisation and development of practitioners has also received some critical attention in Ding and Campion (2016) and Campion (2016), among others, has investigated the complex transition into teaching EAP. A telling account of practitioners attempts to publish, highlighting obstacles including lack of time, heavy teaching loads and the restructuring of EAP units resulting in de-professionalisation and, more perniciously, practitioners ‘may face pressure not to publish, or at least discouragement from publishing in their workplace’ (ibid, p. 82) from some EAP managers, which has been researched by Davis (2019).


A more global overview of issues of power and the practitioner by Flowerdew (2019) highlights the impact of profit- seeking centres: where teaching loads increase at the expense of resources and time for research and materials development; where more generic EAP courses are promoted to ensure larger numbers of students sign up (generating greater profits); where less qualified/experienced (and more precarious and cheaper) teachers are employed to teach these courses (cost


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