Neoliberalism and ELT Policy in México: Analysis and implications from a Political Economy stance (original) (raw)
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Political economy in applied linguistics research
Language Teaching
This state-of-the-art review is based on the fundamental idea that political economy should be adopted as a frame for research and discussion in applied linguistics as part of a general social turn which has taken hold in the field over the past three decades. It starts with Susan Gal's (1989) early call for such a move in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, that is, for ‘investigations of the links among language structure, language use, and political economy’ (Gal 1989: 346), and moves from a consideration of theoretical bases to the discussion and critique of concrete examples of research. Thus, after a fairly detailed discussion of political economy and the key constructs neoliberalism and social class, the paper moves to a review of research in three broad areas. First, it focuses on how issues and constructs from political economy have been incorporated into discussions of education, work and leisure by a growing number of sociolinguists. This is followed by a re...
Political economy in applied linguistics research (2017)
This state-of-the-art review is based on the fundamental idea that political economy should be adopted as a frame for research and discussion in applied linguistics as part of a general social turn which has taken hold in the field over the past three decades. It starts with Susan Gal's (1989) early call for such a move in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, that is, for 'investigations of the links among language structure, language use, and political economy' (Gal 1989: 346), and moves from a consideration of theoretical bases to the discussion and critique of concrete examples of research. Thus, after a fairly detailed discussion of political economy and the key constructs neoliberalism and social class, the paper moves to a review of research in three broad areas. First, it focuses on how issues and constructs from political economy have been incorporated into discussions of education, work and leisure by a growing number of sociolinguists. This is followed by a review of research which has focused specifically on social class as a central organising construct and then a third section on political economy in language teaching and learning research. The review ends with a consideration of the future of political economy in applied linguistics research.
Neoliberalism, Applied Linguistics and the PNLD
Based on the book Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics (Block, Gray & Holborow, 2012a), this paper aims at discussing the relationship between these two concepts. Ater a general discussion on the subject, the paper will deal with the use of celebrities in English language textbooks as an element of identiication and as a means to advance neoliberal values. A second aspect refers to the promotion of social and cultural diversity and pluralism in a way that may be also attending to the market's interests. hese aspects will inally be analysed in the series Links (Santos & Marques, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c), of the National Textbook Program (PNLD) for primary education. Whereas the textbooks use celebrities and present other neoliberal tendencies, they also propose activities that seek to promote citizenship and inclusion, probably in order to fulil the Ministry of Education's demands through PNLD. his ambiguity may be related to the fact that the PNLD is a state-run program for public education that relies on the commercial editorial market to produce and sell the textbooks.
2016
This special section constitutes an effort to span the divide between linguistic anthropological approaches to political economy and sociocultural anthropological approaches to contemporary capitalism. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the publication of several key works in anthropology forged a critical approach to language in social action that was attentive to questions of power, inequality, difference, and domination. More than twenty-five years have passed since this articulation of language and political economy as a framework for scholarly investigation and critique. In this time period, research in linguistic anthropology has continued to elaborate how language use and language ideologies (re)produce forms of social difference and inequality within and across interactions. At the same time, critical work in sociocultural anthropology on political economy has become focused on neoliberalism—an ongoing redistribution of social risk, entitlement and responsibility—as a global condition. Research in this vein, however, has on the whole remained relatively unconcerned with language. Inspired by the twenty-fifth anniversary of Susan Gal’s classic essay “Language and political economy,” the essays collected here take seriously the challenge raised in studies of neoliberalism, namely, that political economies, in the empirical and analytic sense, have shifted post-1989. In doing so, they chart new pathways for a cross-fertilization between research in linguistic anthropology and scholarship on neoliberalism and contemporary political economy. Specifically, the papers: (1) identify impasses in the Foucault-inspired analyses of power as governmentality, (2) elaborate how emergent political economic forms compel a retheorization of “institutions” as a category of social analysis, (3) complicate understandings of the place of language in commodification processes, and (4) engage and theorize the specialized forms of reflexivity that often accompany neoliberalizing logics. Keywords: language, political economy, capitalism, governmentality, institutions, commodification, reflexivity
This paper is a much-abbreviated version of the plenary I gave at the ASOCOPI (Asociación Colombiana de Profesores de Inglés) conference in Cali in October 2017 entitled ‘Neoliberal rationalities, the co-opting of cosmopolitanism and the neoliberal citizen in English language teaching materials’. In it, I first provide some theoretical background on neoliberalism and what I call the neoliberal citizen, before drawing on this background in the analysis of a popular ELT textbook. On the one hand, my point is that we need to examine how neoliberalism has infiltrated so many aspects of our lives, language education being one of them. On the other hand, I wish to make a call for English language teachers to adopt a critical attitude towards the commercial materials that they use, lest they end up being complicit with the neoliberal norms and values imbuing these materials.