When Alberto Bruzos Moro, the director of the Spanish Language Program at Princeton University, and his colleagues Yulia Komska and Roberto Rey Agudo wrote about the state of language teaching for the Boston Review they attracted quite a bit of attention, articulating clearly various pressures on the industry. Alberto agreed to talk to Teachers as Workers about these pressures, specifically how they relate to ELT. The interview is released over two posts.
The language teaching profession is characterised nowadays by precarity, even though the demand for language learning is growing. How did we get here?
First, it is important to see the precarity of language teachers in the broader context of labor casualization since the late 1970s. This is a period marked by increasing flexibilization, subcontracting, and generalization of short-term and part-time work. The precarization of labor not only serves the interests of capital, but also, as Isabell Lorey argues, “it has become a political and economic instrument of governing.” Precarity is no longer confined to the margins of society. Because of the withdrawal of the state from most areas of social provision, the privatization of social services, and the deregulation of the labor market, precarity affects now larger portions of the middle class and is a defining feature of most jobs in the service sector.
In fact, the emergence of the language teaching profession as we know it is part of the expansion of the service sector in the same period. As the proportion of industrial labor in most Western national economies was reduced, there was an increase in the production and consumption of services that had previously remained outside of the commodity sphere or had been restricted to elite consumption, such as tourism, care, beauty, and leisure. The commodification of language teaching required the development of a whole industry comprising multiple actors: teachers, schools, publishing companies, national institutions such as the British Council, the Alliance Française, the Instituto Cervantes, and the Goethe-Institut, and supra-national guidelines such as the Common European Framework of Reference. The increasing importance of language certificates and language testing regimes is also part of this history.
Within this industry, language teaching has often been portrayed as an undemanding and occasional occupation for young individuals who teach their native language as they travel the world. In Spain, for instance, after the 2008 crisis there was a campaign to promote the language teaching profession as a way to absorb numbers of jobless university graduates who would “recycle” themselves into Spanish language teachers abroad. In reality, the growth and active institutional promotion of “language tourism” in recent years has resulted in an over-saturated market where different language schools and university centers often compete by lowering prices and blending language learning with an array of leisure activities such as surf, golf, yoga, cuisine. This business strategy relies on the deskilling and exploitation of teachers, whose salaries are kept low and who, in many cases, are employed on flexible terms, being fired and rehired as needed and in a regime of low-hours contracts and bogus self-employment, thus bearing the cost of their own benefits and having no rights to paid vacations. Because of these conditions, there is a high turnover and a heterogeneous workforce comprised of teachers with very diverse aspirations and preferences (some appreciate the flexibility of short-term, part-time and seasonal work, while others would prefer more security and stability), which makes it difficult to organize language teachers into unions or professional associations.
In sum, the precarity of language teachers is at the intersection of different forms of precarity: precarity of labor in language industries (customer service representatives, translators, copy editors); precarity of feminized labor; precarity of youth employment; expansion of the gig economy; precarization of education jobs; labor precarization as a political and economic instrument of governing.
Neoliberalism takes a particular view of language learning – what is this view and how compatible is it with what we know about how languages are learned?
Neoliberalism primarily views language as a skill. This conveniently fits the tenets of neoliberal doctrine, which promotes an ideal institutional framework based on strong property rights, free markets, and free trade, and a view of individuals as homo oeconomicus who compete with each other by capitalizing on inherited or acquired skills.
So, in parallel with the development of the neoliberal project and the emergence of skills as a dominant discourse in contemporary education, language learning has been conceptualized as the acquisition of a set of discrete, teachable, assessable, and measurable sets of skills. This new conceptualization of language, which Norman Fairclough identified already in the early 1990s, informs (and is put into practice by) supranational standardization projects such as the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) developed by the Council of Europe between 1989 and 1996, and other similar projects of language governance such as, in the US, the ACTFL (American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Proficiency Guidelines (1982-1986) and the Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century (1996).
If we consider the normative status enjoyed in our field by instruments of standardization and “skillification” such as the CEFR in Europe and the ACTFL guidelines, which are the common idiom articulated by textbooks, proficiency tests, and language program offerings, we can safely say that, at present, neoliberal ideology pervades the language teaching profession. Although the history of this transformation has often been told in terms of professionalization and development, the influence gained by proficiency guidelines and language testing from the 1980s onward could also be told as the relocation of language teaching from university departments to a wider domain or marketplace inflected by discourses of tourism and managerialism. This implied a shift from teaching methods based on philological engagement with literary texts (grammar-translation) to methods more suitable for the development of measurable communication skills.
Notwithstanding the promise of communicative language teaching, the focus on instrumental and transactional skills entailed downplaying other important dimensions of language that resisted psychometric measurement: aesthetic, affective, creative, artistic, ethical, critical, cultural, civic, political, etc. As Yuliya Komska, Roberto Rey Agudo and I argued in our recent article in the Boston Review, it has also resulted in a linear and predictable understanding of language learning that paved the way for products like Duolingo, in which self-directed language learning is gamified so you level up skills and gain crowns as you complete levels. In a world where Duolingo is being touted as “the best new way to learn a language”, it is no surprise that language teachers (or, tellingly, “language instructors”) have been also displaced from academia and reimagined as hybrid figures combining the ethos of education, coaching, and entertainment.
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