Special issue of L2 journal: Critical Perspectives on Neoliberalism in Second/Foreign Language Education

08/06/2015 Susan Dawson Leave a comment

Critical Perspectives on Neoliberalism in Second/Foreign Language Education

With guest editors Katie A. Bernstein, Emily A. Hellmich, Noah Katznelson, Jaran Shin, and Kimberly Vinall

Accountability, competitiveness, efficiency, profit: While it is not surprising to hear these terms in corporate offices around the world, it is slightly alarming to hear these terms in reference to schools, teachers, and students. Second/foreign language education, like education more broadly, has not only been influenced by the language and logic of the market; it has been responsible for reproducing many of its discourses. The coercive impact of neoliberalism for second/foreign language education is readily observable at multiple levels:

Language as a technicized skill
Culture as a commodity
Language teachers as expendable and replaceable knowledge workers
Language learners as entrepreneurs and consumers
The creation of a global language teaching industry
The emergence of new linguistic markets: Global English

Yet, while language has become both a target and an instrument of neoliberalization, language education offers the possibility to develop the critical capacities of our students as they learn to read the world and to use language to shape and govern it. This special issue has two aims:

To contribute to the growing body of research within applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) that investigates neoliberalism’s impact on language education, seeking to denaturalize neoliberal processes and uncover their influences (i.e., Holborow, 2007; Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012).
To create a space for critical perspectives that situate second/foreign language education as a site of potential struggle against the naturalization of neoliberalism, thereby opening the possibility for resistance and change.