Record Detail

The growing emphasis on accountability, competitiveness,
efficiency, and profit demonstrates how language
education has been impacted by neoliberalism. To
bring out the implications of neoliberalism on language
education, we explore how language learning is increasingly
constructed as a form of linguistic entrepreneurship,
or an act of aligning with the moral imperative to strategically
exploit language-related resources for enhancing
one’s worth in the world. To critically examine the political
conditions that promote such an ethical regime, we focus
on how linguistic entrepreneurship can be indexed through
two distinct aspects, the motivation for and the mode of
language learning. We then discuss under what circumstances
the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship might be
invoked and what kind of contradictions this entails. We
conclude by considering the implications for language
policy and language education