Take a student who arrives in October with a conditional offer and a language test score, and who reads every set text twice in the first term because the first pass does not hold. Three years later that student writes the academic English their department expects. Nobody taught it to them in any organised way. It arrived through feedback in the margins and through watching what the people around them did.
That student is a composite. We have not followed anybody through three years, and it would be dishonest to open with a picture and then call it a finding. What the picture stands for is the claim our whole position rests on. International students learn academic English one way or another. They just do not do it as quickly as they possibly could.
We believe that rather than having measured it, and it is doing a great deal of work in the paragraphs below. It is a claim about time rather than about capability. We are not conferring English on anybody. Nothing in our product is the source of a student's ability to write, because that ability was going to arrive without us. What we are offering to sell is a reduction in what it costs to get there: the term spent re-reading, and the first-year marks awarded while the reading was still slow.
That is a modest claim, and the modesty is the point. It is the hardest thing in our position to attack, which is exactly why it should be the thing we lead with. It is also the least impressive thing we could say about ourselves, and we should be honest that this costs us something in a sales meeting. A tool that makes an inevitable process faster is worth less than a tool that makes an impossible thing possible, and the second is the pitch almost everyone in this market would rather make. We are not making it, and we would rather be held to the small version.
Phillipson, and the sentence we are not printing
None of that engages with where the arrangement came from, so it is worth setting out the argument that says the arrangement is not innocent. Robert Phillipson's Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 1992) argues that the global spread of English was policy rather than weather. It was promoted by institutions, including the ones that trained English teachers, and it served British and American interests.
He is worth taking seriously partly because of where he stood when he wrote it, having spent nine years working for the British Council between 1964 and 1973. The line he later used as an epigraph comes from the British Council's annual report for 1987 to 1988, quoted in his 1994 article in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, volume 107. It describes English as Britain's real black gold, worth more than North Sea oil.
Asked what we made of that, our answer was that it might well have been. We have not found a reason since to change it. The history is not something we need to contest, because our claim does not depend on the arrangement having been fair or accidental.
What we said next is the problem. It was a version of: the world sits the way it sits, and you play the board in front of you. That sentence is not going into print, and we want to be clear that we are removing it on purpose rather than because it sounds bad. Phillipson's argument is precisely that an arrangement built by people gets treated as a natural fact, and that the treating is part of how it holds together. Repeating the sentence would be a demonstration of his thesis rather than a reply to it.
What the replies to Phillipson do not settle
What survives is narrower, and it does not require the arrangement to be natural. Joseph Bisong answered Phillipson in ELT Journal in 1995, volume 49, issue 2, pages 122 to 131, writing from Nigeria. Nigerians who choose English are choosing pragmatically, out of a repertoire that already holds several languages, and reading that choice as false consciousness is condescending toward the people it claims to be defending.
Janina Brutt-Griffler makes a structural version of the same objection in World English (2002). Her term is macroacquisition, language spread understood as second-language acquisition by whole speech communities rather than as something done to them, and she points out that colonial authorities frequently restricted access to English rather than pushing it, which is awkward for a pure imposition story. Suresh Canagarajah (1999) accepts the structural picture and rejects the passivity in it, on the basis of ethnographic work in Tamil Sri Lanka.
We are not going to claim that any of this refutes Phillipson at the level he is arguing at. He and Bisong are working on different clocks. Phillipson is describing an arrangement assembled over generations, which people made and could in principle unmake. Bisong is describing a person deciding what to do this year. Nothing in the second relieves anything in the first. What we would say is only that a refusal to teach the student is not a blow struck against the arrangement, because the arrangement will not be unmade inside the three years of somebody's degree, and the person with a seminar next Tuesday is not helped by anybody's principled abstention.
Where the reciprocity argument fails
There is one argument of ours that needs its reply attached, because we have made it and we will probably reach for it again. It goes: if we went to China to study, we would be expected to learn Chinese, and we would not think that unreasonable. As far as it goes, it holds. Studying inside a country's own institutions means working in the language those institutions run on, and for the narrow case of a degree taken abroad the expectation really is symmetric.
It fails as a general claim, and we would rather know that before saying it in a room than after. English is also the condition of academic participation inside Chinese universities. It is what a great deal of publication requires, and it is often the working language of conferences held in China. Chinese is the condition of nothing in Britain. So the exchange is not an exchange. That is our own reading and not a finding we can cite. The asymmetry is the ordinary subject of work on English as a lingua franca in academic settings, where Jennifer Jenkins and Anna Mauranen are the names, and we have read too little of either to quote them at anybody. The reciprocity point covers one case and says nothing about the arrangement that produced the case.
Inside the arrangement we are describing
That leaves our own position in the thing, which we would rather write down than have read back to us. We are a British company selling English improvement into a system substantially funded by international student fees. Asked how we felt about that, our honest answer at the time was that we felt fine about it, and that the university pays rather than the student. The second half is true and it does not move the money.
The sharpest version of the objection comes from inside EAP rather than from outside it. Joan Turner, in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes in 2004, described a "quick fix attitude" in pre-sessional courses that perpetuates a philosophy of "maximum throughput of students with minimum attainment levels in the language in the shortest possible time". Alex Ding and Ian Campion quoted the passage in 2016 in a critique of what EAP inherited from ESP. Turner was describing the field's own provision rather than a product like ours, which is worse for us rather than better, because the description reaches us anyway. What we are selling is time. Whoever signs the contract, the money that arrives came out of a fee set where it is set partly because the person paying it is not British. We are inside the arrangement Phillipson described, and an essay does not move us out of it.
There is a worse admission attached to that one. When we sat down with a business adviser to work out why a university would buy this, the first thing on his list of what the product was worth to an institution was helping it attract and retain international students. The retention half we can defend without much difficulty, since a student not dropping out is a student interest that happens to coincide with an institutional one. The attraction half is recruitment, and recruitment is the end of the business the throughput line is about. We have not settled what we intend to do about it.
Worse again, and this is the part we are least comfortable with. Asked directly what we would have to give up in order to make that suspicion wrong, we said we would not have to give up anything, and that it was a question of positioning. That answer does not survive contact with our own list. The things we have since half-agreed to are changes to the product or to who we sell it to rather than changes to the wording: a licence for a whole cohort instead of a licence for the international students inside it, and a written commitment, discussed and not yet made, that learning data never reaches admissions or recruitment. Until something on that list is built, the page is positioning and the suspicion is correct.
Basil Bernstein's The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse (Routledge, 1990) names what is wrong with that order. Recontextualisation is what happens to knowledge as it moves between contexts, from a curriculum into materials and from materials into a room, and the move is never neutral. What gets selected carries values with it, whether or not anybody writes them down. Values built into a tool outlast whatever the copy says about them. We noticed the order we had it in, and noticing is not the same as fixing it.
The claim that survives, and the evidence we do not have
So the claim we are prepared to defend is the small one. Students learn academic English anyway, and the most we claim for ourselves is that we shorten the road. It is worth noting how much that gives up. It concedes that a student who never hears of us is not failing at anything, which means we should not write copy that implies otherwise, and it puts a ceiling on what we are entitled to say we are worth.
The trouble is that time is the thing we cannot currently measure. Nobody has used UniFluent for a hundred hours. The two written accounts we have from students describe about two days of use each, and one of them is more useful for what it says about flashcards than for anything it says about time. There is no efficacy data. The shape of a study that would produce it is not obvious to us either, because the quantity we would need is how long a particular student would have taken without us, and that version of their degree does not exist. Comparing two cohorts gives an average, and an average hides the students for whom nothing happened.
Underneath that sits a question we have not settled at all. Suppose three years is how long it takes for a reason. Some of what a student ends up with may come from the slow business of getting things wrong in front of other people and adjusting, in which case compressing the timeline could remove the part that was doing the work rather than the part that was wasting it. We assume it does not. The assumption is doing a lot of load-bearing here, and we hold it because it seems plausible to us, which is not a reason.
