Appropriating English: Innovation in the Global Business of English Language Teaching

English seems to be becoming the global language as a result of the massive socio-economic, cultural, and technological changes that have been struggled over since the 1950s. For teachers of English to speakers of other languages and for those involved in the education of such teachers, trying to understand the changes brought by the globalization, commodification, and technologization of English language teaching (ELT) is a major challenge in itself. Given the acceleration in language extinction and knowledge death, developing principled responses to these changes is ridden with significant complications and dangers. Appropriating English explores challenging possibilities for teachers and teacher educators in the transnational ELT market, providing a basis for informing and mobilizing innovations in the business of teaching English language and literacy to speakers of other languages. While the demand for English grows, its effects on other peoples, their languages, and their knowledge are not always positive. Appropriating English adds to the calls for a paradigmatic innovation in the ELT industry. Michael Singh, Peter Kell, and Ambigapathy Pandian offer a new perspective for reinventing the project of globalizing English that situates it within a framework of risk analysis and provides workpoints for making use of multivocal, hybridized Englishes and new digital technologies to help sustain the linguistic diversity of humanity.