Challenging the Master Narratives of the Market and of English in L2 Pedagogy: Striving for a Reorientation

Abstract

In today’s world, the neoliberal dynamics of the free market permeates our ways of life and shapes the symbolic and discursive understanding we have of social reality—a perspective that in turn sustains the Western hegemonic vision of socioeconomic development associated exclusively with capital accumulation, industrialization and competitiveness (Sen, A., Development as freedom. The globalization and development reader: Perspectives on development and global change. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2014). One field in which we can see how neoliberal dynamics operate is that of second language teaching, often focused on the supposed economic benefits brought by the mastery of a second language (Soto, C., & Pérez-Milans, M., Language and Intercultural Communication 18:490–506, 2018). Examples of this are the widespread notion of English as a business language and the implementation, in many countries such as Colombia, of public language policies in which its teaching is privileged under the premise that knowing English is a direct path to socioeconomic development (Mohanty, A., Multilingualisms and development. British Council, 2017). Considering the above, this chapter critically discusses the mercantilist vision of L2 education and proposes a space for reflection to think about other more critical pedagogical possibilities. Thus, in the first section, from the theoretical apparatus of post-development and drawing on recent research in the Colombian context, we question the centrality of the market and the instrumentalist visions that guide the teaching and learning of second languages. In the second section, we discuss the alternative and more critical possibilities to address the instrumentalist and mercantilist vision that characterizes language teaching and learning. We conclude with a reflection on the relevance of these alternative understandings of second language pedagogy vis-à-vis the urgencies and challenges of current neoliberal times.