Higher Education Policy, English Language Learning and Language Policy: An Ethnography of Brazilian Stem Scholarship Students in Canada

Abstract

This ethnographic case study explores the language learning experiences of several student members of one cohort of Brazils Cincia sem Fronteiras scholarship mobility programme in Canada, in order to gain a deeper understanding of language policy processes in higher education and the subjectivities that they (aim to) produce. It draws on a wide selection of empirical materials including: national and institutional policy documents; media reports and social media commentary; regularly scheduled and impromptu interviews and observations in the language classroom of the focal group of participants; and also interviews with several language instructors and other key stakeholders and administrators. Using Foucaults concepts of governmentality and technologies of the self (1988, 2007), this study considers not only the ways in which these participants were conducted by the language policies embedded within a larger higher education policy assemblage, but also the ways in which these students conducted themselves. A key finding reveals pervasive instrumentalist perspectives and views of language as a conduit for other knowledge playing a dominant role in the programme design and implementation for this particular cohort. However, while these students appeared to be largely sympathetic to skills-based and market-oriented discourses of English language learning, some rejected an exclusively instrumentalist approach and also cultivated more personal or social and/or intercultural perspectives on the relevance of their language learning and flourishing bilingualism, forging their own paths and coming to value the programme on their own terms, within the scant wiggle room permitted by the larger transnational education policy assemblage and its gatekeeping measures.

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