Story
Stop Smiling
August 2008
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Inside its worn blue cover, the book Hollywood: All About Motion Pictures is a priceless bit of studio-era propaganda. Published in 1940, the pocket-sized book talks about “the materials for making a picture,” ranging from the grand studio lots to the need for a prop boy (the person who needs to “see that the cigarette is at hand when the lover needs it”). It’s part of an antiquated series of English language books meant to increase vocabulary and share “the discoveries by which the Earth has been made to seem smaller.”
Few things have conspired to make the world seem smaller than the emergence of English as the lingua franca, a common tongue for much of the global business world and the language of choice for Hollywood’s oversaturation of world media. For decades, this development has made language lessons a key source of income and opportunity for English-speaking expats. Explain obscure tenses, collocations, prepositions and idioms — and see the world. While the stereotype of expat instructors — recent college grads pursuing international exploits while learning pedagogy on the fly — can be true, the English as a Second Language (ESL) industry is both more grown up and expansive than you might expect.
“If you consider the fact that there are more people learning English in China than there are native English people in the world, it starts to put things into scope and perspective,” says Ben Ward, editor of ESL Magazine. “I’ve heard people say the ESL industry is second to the trade in narcotics. It’s a pretty big figure.”
It’s impossible to give an accurate estimate of the size and scope of an industry spread across the globe, but that’s exactly what it is, an interconnected field brimming with longtime professionals, conferences, publishers, certification courses and government regulations. Like any industry, it has its big players, such as Pearson, a British educational publisher that dominates the market, and small, simple exchanges, like conversation lessons in smoky cafes. Markets like South Korea and, increasingly, China are massive. According to a study by the British Council, a state-funded educational and cultural organization, two billion people could be learning English by 2010. In a globalized world, business English instruction is, not surprisingly, a sizable part of that pie. In some countries, billboards contain ads for the Wall Street Institute, a multinational franchise of schools acquired by the Carlyle Group. Though, if you want some real financial wisdom, you can use some of the branded textbooks that adapt material from The Economist or the Financial Times, which contain lessons on meeting etiquette or articles on topics ranging from Apple Computers to shipping jobs overseas. It seems sensible that Gordon Brown, the UK’s prime minister, recently gave a speech praising language instruction while committing to increased funding of educational programs, saying that “English is our heritage, but it is also becoming the common future of human commerce and communication.” The UK is certainly getting a nice return; another British Council study estimates that ESL instruction brings in roughly “1.3 billion pounds a year in invisible exports” to the English economy.
“I can’t believe how much the ESL world has exploded,” says Dave Sperling, who runs the ubiquitous Dave’s ESL Café website. He started it in 1995, and now the growth of the industry and ad revenue, especially from his expanding online job boards, allows him to work on the website full time. “When I started teaching, it wasn’t particularly common. When I did it in the Eighties, people didn’t understand it. It was incomprehensible. It’s now becoming widespread and accepted.”
While times and technologies have radically changed, the fundamental methods of teaching English have changed a bit less rapidly. George Orwell taught English during his time slumming through France in the Thirties, which would eventually be recounted in his book Down and Out in London and Paris (he, too, had students repeatedly cancel lessons). In 1959, the Voice of America started broadcasting news in Special English, a simplified and slowed-down delivery meant to spread news, language awareness and American culture. The program is still broadcast around the world today, but that then-edgy attempt at mass education has been supplanted by up-to-date textbooks filled with modern cultural references like Friends (“Joey” is universal) as well as specialized websites, podcasts and other high-tech teaching tools. You can access full lesson plans online; some sites deliver custom-made plans culled from current events. There’s even a movement to use virtual world websites like Second Life as a platform for language instruction. The Internet has brought so much more into play, according to Dr. Jeff McQuillan, a co-founder of the English as a Second Language Podcast who wrote a white paper for Apple about podcasting and language instruction.
“It’s like the long tail idea,” said McQuillan. “You can support so many niche interests. If I wanted to make a podcast about medical English, I could afford to do it, because distribution costs are so low.”
Technology has made education easier to access, but it’s far from replacing the human element. Opportunities vary from running preschool classes to teaching at high-powered consulting firms to giving mechanics lessons about English terms for car parts. Swapping stories, slang and idioms in the classroom with foreign students is a two-way cultural exchange. It’s especially illuminating when the slang they’re using was learned from a previous teacher from a different English-speaking country. Hearing Central Europeans recount Scottish curses, it’s hard to dispute that this is a much smaller world.