Neoliberal Ideology and Linguistic Entrepreneurship

Neoliberal impulses mediated through a series of apparatuses such as high stakes testing have hugely impacted the contours of language teacher professional development. Teachers often find themselves having to adopt new identities as service providers to student clients. This reduction of education to transactional terms has resulted in a deskilling of teachers. By situating our chapter against this contemporary neoliberally-inflected backdrop, we problematize how neoliberal ideologies have permeated education systems. Specifically, we draw on the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship to illustrate how students and teachers are influenced by an affective regime and moral obligation to develop multilingual individuals who can contribute to economic growth, in response to calls to globalize education systems in an increasingly competitive world. Through our exploration of the nexus of ideology, identity, and emotion, as well as drawing on a growing body of applied linguistic scholarship that centers teachers, we suggest ways to extend the language teacher identity research agenda within second language teacher education.