Check out Elisabeth Barakos' Paper “Negotiating Multilingualism and Interculturality in an Elite Language Education Company“

9. Dezember 2022

Foto: Springer VS

This chapter explores an Austrian language education company that specialises in intercultural communication and language training. It critically examines the dimensions of multilingualism and interculturality as they play out in institutional stakeholder discourses and ideologies. Informed by critical sociolinguistics, this research explores the politics of language and culture training against the background of a neoliberal system of adult education that nurtures lifelong learning and language and intercultural skills as central for individual success. The study integrates examples from corporate discourse (the language company’s website) and interview data with company management and employees to make sense of the understandings of ‘multilingualism’, the ‘intercultural’, and ‘identity’ that underlie a linguistically diverse educational setting. The findings show the reproduction and perspective of monolingual and monocultural norms of speakerhood present amongst the managerial staff of the language company and essentialist ways of selling language and culture training, against an overt multilingual and diversity ethos. Elisabeth Barakos

“Negotiating Multilingualism and Interculturality in an Elite Language Education Company“ is part of the book "Multilingualism, Identity and Interculturality in Education", edited by Ruth Fielding. Click here to access the book online.