Neoliberal language policies and linguistic entrepreneurship in Higher Education

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.

Language Learning beyond English

“…Studies investigating motivation among dual linguistics (English and LOTE) in Europe tend to show higher motivation for English than LOTE (Henry, 2017;McEown et al, 2017), and, given the choice of learning English or LOTE, most would opt for English only (e.g. Dalmau, 2020;Dörnyei & Németh, 2006;Ushioda & Dörnyei, 2017). The preoccupation with English has been accompanied by a focus on pragmatic and instrumental rationales and motivations for language learning per se (Ushioda, 2017).…”