Neoliberal transformation of self, learning, and teaching constructs individuals as bundles of skills (or human capital) and subordinates learning to skill production characterized by an ethic of entrepreneurial self-management [Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2010. “Neoliberal Education: Preparing the Student for the New Workplace.” In Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, edited by Carol Greenhouse, 162–176. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press]. As such, language in the neoliberal discourse is constructed as a set of flexible skills, acquired by the entrepreneurial self in the market [Park, Joseph Sung-Yul. 2010. “Naturalization of Competence and the Neoliberal Subject: Success Stories of English Language Learning in the Korean Conservative Press.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20 (1): 22–38; “The Promise of English: Linguistic Capital and the Neoliberal Worker in the South Korean Job Market.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 14 (4): 443–455]. This paper examines ways in which English language education is restructured to fit such neoliberal imaginary through the case of the South Korean jogi yuhak (pre-college-aged study abroad) industry. The analyses highlight ways in which the language learning industry not only interplays with but also actively shapes the ideologies of neoliberalism, by developing and selling packaged products that make the projects of self-management seem more achievable and desirable. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications of the Korean case for the study of language and social inequality in education.

This special issue aims to develop a research agenda that brings language to the centre of our inquiry and critique of neoliberalism. Based on empirical case studies from across diverse contexts in Europe, North America, and East Asia, contributors to this special issue address two issues: (1) What can be said about the nature of neoliberalism when we approach it from the perspective of language as social and political process? (2) How does language learning and teaching, increasingly subject to the logic of the market, not only reflect neoliberal social transformations but also reinforce them? Together, the contributions to the special issue suggest new directions of research that will help establish language as an important key for understanding the shifting political economy of our time.

In this article, I draw on Bourdieu’s (1984, 1991) notion of habitus in order to explore the relationship between social class, language learning, and language teaching in the context of the global economy. To illustrate my points, I use Early Study Abroad (ESA), the transnational educational migration that Korean middle-class families engage in in order to acquire valuable forms of global English capital. Through a discussion of the identities and language practices of Korean ESA students in Toronto, where they invested in a class-based consumption of Korean language and culture to contest the racial and linguistic stigmatization they experienced in the local context, and to index their global cosmopolitanism, I reveal how the concept of class privilege in actual practice is multilayered and sometimes contradictory; moreover, I posit that acquiring linguistic capital and leveraging it to gain class privilege are difficult and fraught ventures.

Drawing from a 2.4-year ethnography with Korean Early Study Abroad (ESA, pre-college-aged study abroad) students in Toronto high schools, I examine the intersections among race, class, language, culture and citizenship (including immigrant status) in the identity construction and language learning of these students. Conceptualising race as a social construct and racism as systemic and institutionalised, I employ sociolinguistic analysis of the data to link issues of race and class together and point out how the ESA students adopt class-based consumption of Korean language and products as a strategy for dealing with the racial and linguistic marginalisation they experienced in Canadian contexts as well as its consequences in their language learning. The paper concludes with the story's implications for discussing race and alternative ways of talking about privilege among racial minorities regarding transformation of the value of the linguistic capital across different linguistic markets in today's world of globalisation.