"Langues étrangères appliquées" (LEA) – often translated as "Applied Foreign Languages" – is a popular Bachelor and Master's degree programme in the French university system which involves studying multiple languages as well as courses in business-related disciplines such as economics, marketing and accounting. After graduation, many students go on to work in positions of responsibility in international and multilingual businesses and institutions, or at least this is the promise upon which these courses are promoted. In this respect, LEA might be considered as a vector of "elite multilingualism" (Barakos & Selleck 2019: 5) in that it "imbues social and/or material capital, prestige, excellence, privilege, and access to linguistic resources in certain groups of speakers". While some may indeed benefit from this state of affairs, elite multilingualism is also a "terrain for exclusion" (Barakos & Selleck 2019: 5) in that it legitimises only a select collection of language practices.
In this presentation, I draw upon my own experience as a researcher in critical sociolinguistics who has, over the past six years, also taught on a wide variety of L2 English LEA courses at both BA and MA levels. I aim to explore how theoretical and methodological tools from my main research discipline(s) might be integrated into LEA teaching in a bid to counter the exclusive nature of the elite multilingualism that these courses otherwise propagate. More specifically, I report on how I adapt, present and practically integrate certain key concepts – such as "language ideology" (Woolard 2020), "linguistic marketplace" (Bourdieu 1982), "commodification" (Heller 2010) – into L2 English teaching/learning in an attempt to raise awareness of ideologies of elite multilingualism and their potential repercussions.
Following this, I highlight some of the challenges involved in creating this applied critical sociolinguistic approach to LEA before exploring how, if successful, such an approach could not only help empower students themselves but also encourage them to reflect on their own role in the spread and (re)production of potentially harmful language ideologies.
As an invitation for further discussion, I conclude my presentation with some suggestions for other ways in which critical sociolinguistics might dovetail with L2 teaching in disciplines such as LEA, thus promoting social justice in the L2 language courses of those who might one day be at the helm of language management in a wide range of contexts.
References
Barakos, E. & Selleck, C. (2019). Elite multilingualism: discourses, practices, and debates, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 40(5), 361-374.
Bourdieu, P. (1982). Ce que parler veut dire : l'économie des échanges. Fayard.
Heller, M. (2010). The Commodification of Language, Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 101-114.
Woolard, K. (2020). Language ideology. In Stanlaw, J. (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell.
