Neoliberalism has emerged as a keyword that captures some core features of global economic and educational reforms in recent years. This paper reports a linguistic ethnographic study of how a Chinese language teacher ...Neoliberalism has emerged as a keyword that captures some core features of global economic and educational reforms in recent years. This paper reports a linguistic ethnographic study of how a Chinese language teacher was engaged with neoliberal discourses on language education in and out of the classroom in a suburban public middle school in China, with an attempt to illuminate the complexity of language education in a neoliberal context. The analysis shows three general identity positions-as an opponent, a conformist, and a pragmatist-across the identification trajectory of the focal language teacher through the fieldwork period, in relation to neoliberal exam-oriented education and her various ways of engaging with exam discourses in her language classrooms. This inquiry argues for the perspective of unpredictability and complexity as an alternative that goes beyond the current "deterministic neoliberalism" in understanding the dynamics of neoliberalization in language education, language teaching, and teacher identity formation.展开更多
基金the support from the Key Research Project of Philosophy and Social Science of the Ministry of Education of China (MOE, Project No.: 15JZD048)the Chinese MOE Research Project of Humanities and Social Science (Project No.: 16JJD740006) conducted by the Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studiesthe Research Project Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (Project No.: GD18WXZ18)
文摘Neoliberalism has emerged as a keyword that captures some core features of global economic and educational reforms in recent years. This paper reports a linguistic ethnographic study of how a Chinese language teacher was engaged with neoliberal discourses on language education in and out of the classroom in a suburban public middle school in China, with an attempt to illuminate the complexity of language education in a neoliberal context. The analysis shows three general identity positions-as an opponent, a conformist, and a pragmatist-across the identification trajectory of the focal language teacher through the fieldwork period, in relation to neoliberal exam-oriented education and her various ways of engaging with exam discourses in her language classrooms. This inquiry argues for the perspective of unpredictability and complexity as an alternative that goes beyond the current "deterministic neoliberalism" in understanding the dynamics of neoliberalization in language education, language teaching, and teacher identity formation.
