5. Language Work Aboard the Low-cost Airline

This paper examines how a peripheral English‐speaking country is constructed as a legitimate language learning space in the global English language teaching (ELT) industry by investigating South Koreans’ recent engagement in Philippine English education. It focuses on a short‐term English study abroad program, in which the Philippines serves as a transit place prior to students’ moving to a Western English‐speaking country. Drawing data from ethnographic research on South Korean youth studying English abroad, the article analyzes why Korean students seek Philippine English education in spite of their apparent pursuit of authentic English, and how they evaluate their learning experience in the Philippines. This paper finds that the Philippines holds a niche market in the global ELT industry by separating a space for English learning from other public and everyday spaces of English use and offering pedagogically intensive but emotionally supportive environments to English learners.

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legitimating the Philippines as a language learning space: Transnational Korean youth's experiences and evaluations

Jang

2018

“…Stubbe, ), engaging more broadly with the way workers regard the food they are producing/preparing—for example, its quality, its purposes, and perhaps the people who will be eating it . This kind of commodity chain analysis would similarly require something more “holistic” than the language‐focused study of flight attendants by Piller and Takahashi (), relying on something more akin to Hochschild’s () richly ethnographic observations of the on‐the‐ground disciplining of flight attendants’ ways of being, feeling, and speaking (cf. also Cameron, ).…”

Section: Towards a Discourse‐centred Commodity Chain Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Expanding our sociolinguistic horizons? Geographical thinking and the articulatory potential of commodity chain analysis

Thurlow

2019

Conceptual linearity and analytic parochialism (aka focus) can make it more difficult for sociolinguists or discourse analysts to apprehend the far‐reaching, exploitative ways inequality is nowadays produced. A suitably material‐cum‐materialist class critique certainly entails empirical and phenomenological worlds flagged by, for example, multi‐sited ethnographies but otherwise side‐lined as merely “extra‐situational” in much talk/text‐directed scholarship. I propose we think more geographically by properly engaging spatiality à la Harvey (1990) and especially the radical politics of simultaneity (Massey, 2005)—the literal, “right‐now” connectedness of places and people. To this end, and allied with deepening interest in political economy, I combine the principles of articulation theory with the procedures of commodity chain analysis for picking apart an epitomic, contemporary manifestation of extreme privilege: the business‐class meal. The proposed discourse‐centred commodity chain analysis offers an ecumenical but systematic framework for tracking how commodity fetishism is actually and discursively accomplished (or not) across dispersed voices, stories, and social meanings.

“…This has created new economic value for different ways of speaking and writing (cf. Cameron ; Heller , , ; Piller and Takahashi ; Thurlow and Jaworski , ). In tourism, the range of communicative events and textual objects that mediate as well as constitute part of the tourist consumption of various destinations and attractions is vast and always multimodal (Coupland and Coupland this issue; Jaworski and Thurlow ; Thurlow and Jaworski , this issue).…”

Section: Language And/in Tourismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Sociolinguistics and tourism – mobilities, markets, multilingualism

Heller

Jaworski

Thurlow

2014

In the introduction to this special issue on Sociolinguistics and Tourism, we focus on language in tourism as an important window into contemporary forms of economic, political, and social change. Our aim is twofold: (1) to establish and extend ‘sociolinguistics and tourism’ as another social and applied domain of sociolinguistic research; and (2) to use tourism as a lens for a broader discussion of the sociolinguistics of late modernity. To this end, we outline the contours of language and tourism research to date; we consider the (re)conceptualization of key thematics or notions in sociolinguistic research – such as ‘community’, ‘identity’, and ‘language’ itself – as particularly germane to the study of tourism's fleeting encounters; we examine the inevitable tensions between commodification and authenticity; and we explore the links between performances of ‘self’ and ‘other’, and the contestation of different identity positions with regard to social actors’ multilingual repertoires. We illustrate these issues with data examples from several tourist sites, where multilingual resources are deployed for identification, authentication and commodification. Finally, we briefly introduce the papers in this special issue and conclude by commenting on some sociolinguistic consequences of the study of language/s in tourism.