Abstract
This chapter examines how late modernity encourages new approaches to language education as a result of increased degrees of mobility, transnationalism, and neoliberalism. As many societies become detraditionalized, links between languages, cultures, and places are no longer in reciprocal relationships. Instead, the learning and teaching of languages is increasingly related to diasporic affiliations, intercultural identities, global cosmopolitanism, and translingual practices, all of which challenge modernist visions of language. Research reveals that language learners who are embedded in transnational and diasporic flows often invest in language practices that are not conventionally valued in the realm of education, including language associated with popular culture and truncated communicative repertoires, rather than national, standardized varieties of languages. Heritage language learners contest monolithic representations of their heritage languages as located in their parents’ or grandparents’ countries of origin, and learners of English as an international language who study in center nations challenge native-speaker norms. On the other hand, Indigenous language educators and learners express a strong attachment to place as a means of self-preservation and local epistemologies in the face of globalization. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of neoliberalism in language education, noting that despite the potential emancipatory nature of late modernity, flows are still characterized by inequities since they remain governed by the Global North and enacted in ways that perpetuate center-periphery disparities reminiscent of earlier periods of modernity.
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Higgins, C., Sharma, B.K. (2017). Language Education and Globalization. In: McCarty, T., May, S. (eds) Language Policy and Political Issues in Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02344-1_41
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