Title:
“Countering Linguistic Entrepreneurship: The Role of Critical Multilingual Language Awareness and Affect in the Teacher Education Decolonial Project”

Abstract: Through the notion of linguistic entrepreneurship, my colleagues and I (De Costa, Park & Wee, 2016, 2019, 2021) have emphasized the affective, cultural, and moral dimensions of neoliberalism in language education. Through this construct, which we define as “the act of aligning with the moral imperative to strategically exploit language-related resources for enhancing one’s worth in the world” (De Costa et al., 2016, p. 697), we have illustrated how language learners and organizations often come to internalize the ideology of neoliberalism through the mediation of language. In a separate and parallel body of work on language teacher emotions, I have explored how the emotion labor (Benesch, 2012, 2017) that teachers generally have to bear as a result of neoliberal demands placed upon them (De Costa, Rawal & Li, 2019; Lee & De Costa, 2022). Building on these lines of inquiry – linguistic entrepreneurship and emotion labor – I explore how the teacher education decolonial project can be recast through a focus on developing critical multilingual language awareness and a foregrounding of affect, with a particular emphasis on hope and refusal.

Bio:  Peter I. De Costa is a professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages and Cultures and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University, where he directs the master’s in TESOL program in the College of Arts and Letters. He is also the English as a Second Language (ESL) graduate director in the College of Education.  As a critical applied linguist, his research areas include emotions, identity, ideology and ethics in language learning, language teaching, and language policy. He is the co-editor of  TESOL Quarterly and the immediate president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics.