L2: Volume 07 Issue 3

Introduction to Special Issue: Critical Perspectives on Neoliberalism in Second / Foreign Language Education

This special issue, Critical perspectives on neoliberalism in second / foreign language education, has arisen from our collective, lived experiences as language teachers, as researchers, and as early career scholars. In particular, it comes from changes we have observed …

Mapping Conceptual Change: The Ideological Struggle for the Meaning of EFL in Uruguayan Education

Neoliberal ideology attempts to make all spheres of social life play by the rules of the market (Gray, 2000), and foreign language teaching is not an exception. The hegemonic role of English in the neoliberal project breeds it as a commodity that can satisfy non-native speakers’ need to access the globalized world. In the 1990s, neoliberalism …

Language Learning as a Struggle for Distinction in Today’s Corporate Recruitment Culture: An Ethnographic Study of English Study Abroad Practices among South Korean Undergraduates

Young adults in South Korea are encouraged to constantly develop their skills and qualifications to meet the challenges posed by the job market in the country’s neoliberal post-IMF crisis economy. This paper examines the ways in which changes in South Korea’s labor market and corporate recruitment culture have affected …

Space and Language Learning under the Neoliberal Economy

Neoliberalism, as an ideology that valorizes and institutionalizes market-based freedom and individual entrepreneurship, derives from the logic of highly advanced capitalism, and thus must be understood in relation to the material conditions of our capitalist economy. One such material condition is space. However, the intersection of space and neoliberalism …

Neoliberal Discourses and the Local Policy Implementation of an English Literacy and Civics Education Program

The issue of language, specifically access to English, has emerged as a key concern for both U.S. policy-makers and immigrant communities alike. Many of these debates are framed by neoliberal and human capital perspectives, which view English as a set of skills and linguistic capital that are inextricably tied to …

The Coloniality of Neoliberal English: The Enduring Structures of American Colonial English Instruction in the Philippines and Puerto Rico

This article highlights two relationships in regards to neoliberalism and second language. First, it examines the connection between English and neoliberalism. It focuses on the idea of English as a global language and the linguistic instrumentalism (Kubota, 2011; Wee, 2003) of English as a necessary tool for economic viability in the globalized market. Second, …

Neoliberalism, Universities and the Discourse of Crisis

Neoliberal ideology has enjoyed tremendous success over the past thirty-five years by discursively suppressing structural dissent among working and middle class citizens of industrialized countries. The general decline in economic conditions faced by contemporary workers, coupled with the 2008 global financial crisis, forced neoliberal advocates to …