Chronotope, behavioral scripts, and personhood: Ideologies of language and language learning in language educational tourism

Travelling for language learning, or language educational tourism, has been gaining increasing popularity in recent years. This form of tourism involves short stay at a destination for the purpose of learning a foreign language as well as exploring the culture and history associated with the target language. As such, language educational tourism, as a form of immersion-based learning, raises important questions about the cultural politics of language learning under neoliberal globalization, including how destination image is constructed for language learning and tourist/student mobility, how language is conceptualized/commodified and how language learning proceeds in this niche market, and what language educational tourism means for language learners as social beings. This paper considers language educational tourism as a socially situated educational practice and discusses the underlying language ideologies that inform this practice. Through examining ethnographic data on language educational tours in China (Gao 2012, 2019), I identify three interrelated and sometimes paradoxical ideologies, including language learning as a temporal-spatial project, language learning as/through interaction, language learning as reflexive self development, that is, how language educational tourism is driven by the mapping of language onto certain place and how progress of language learning is conceptualized in relation to time, how interaction is linked to language learning, and how language learners as language users are subjected to particular language regimes. It is argued that these language ideologies work together to project and rationalize a favorable language learning environment while holding language learners responsible for their own learning progress and success as neoliberal subjects.