Globalisation, English for all and sustainable development: Policy discourses and schooling reality in Bangladesh

Globalisation has created a structural demand for developing nations to introduce English earlier and for everyone in their education systems. This mass introduction of the global language is rationalised as an investment in human capital development to strengthen national capacity for participation in the global economy. Focusing on the Bangladesh context, this chapter illustrates how “English for all” plays out in schooling and what implications it has for human capital and national economic development. Drawing on Bourdieu’s “thinking tools”, we report interview and classroom data from a larger qualitative case study, which investigated English and human capital development in Bangladeshi secondary education. Our findings illustrated that English learning processes were very different in the two schools under examination. Located in different socioeconomic contexts, the schools helped us to appreciate how “English for all” may fail due to differential pedagogical processes leading to social reproduction. The chapter contributes to our understanding of English language education in developing societies in relation to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4), which concerns quality and equity in education and educational outcomes.