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Article published In: Language, Culture and Society
Vol. 2:2 (2020) ► pp.174–196

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Neoliberal language policies and linguistic entrepreneurship in Higher Education

Lecturers’ perspectives

 | Universitat de Lleida
Published online: 4 December 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.19018.dal
Abstract
This paper analyzes English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) lecturers’ ambivalent orientations towards neoliberal language policies and linguistic entrepreneurship. The data includes interviews with six case-study lecturers’ biographic narratives, audiologs and video/audio-recorded observations, collected in a market-oriented Catalan university. I show that lecturers problematize Englishization policies but operationalize them by presenting themselves as leading actors in the deployment of EMI. Following “managerialism” logics, they envision English as an economically-convertible “career skill”, imperative to meet new employability/workplace demands. They carve advantaged professional ethos linked to their self-attained English-language resources. They devalue their “non-native” accent but present themselves as content and English-language lecturers, distinguishing themselves from “ordinary” colleagues who teach in local languages, in narratives of “competitiveness” whereby they naturalize a socioeconomically-stratifying system of meritocracy/revenue grounded on the marketization of English. This contributes to understand neoliberal-governance regimes which impose language-based mechanisms for lecturers’ profiling based on views of education as the corporatized “making” of productive workers-to-be.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Neoliberal governance, language policies and entrepreneurialism in the EHEA
  • 2.The study
    • 2.1Aims and theoretical considerations
    • 2.2Methods, data and informants
  • 3.Context: Englishization in catalonia
    • 3.1EMI at UdL
  • 4.Analysis and findings
    • 4.1Neoliberal entrepreneurship orientations towards EMI: Leadership in teaching English as a “career skill”
    • 4.2Neoliberal entrepreneurship identities: (De)skilling the English-speaking self-in-the-making
  • 5.Concluding thoughts
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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