A new wave of interest in immersion education is currently sweeping Europe, responding to gaps in the EFL market for experiential learning “packages”. No longer simply a practice of affluent Spanish families, these new, highly customizable immersion experiences (re)create social inequality, which we will critically analyse from an ethnographic perspective.
A new wave of interest in immersion education is currently sweeping across Europe. No longer a product of national language policy or mainstream education (e.g. Catalan schooling), these new contexts are linked to EFL experiential learning “packages”. For the past 30 years, affluent Spanish families have been investing in summer trips to the UK and Ireland, where young adults would take residence with host families to learn English. Today, however, the types of immersion experience products have diversified significantly to meet current gaps in the private EFL market and the needs of a changing clientele. No longer simply a practice of affluent Spanish families, the current popularity of the EFL ‘immersion’ model emerges as a reaction to the acute economic crisis of 2008, as linguistic capitalisation is seen as a way to guarantee young people’s successful insertion into the global and the local labour and education markets. The dissatisfaction with EFL is chronic in Spain. EFL lessons are largely seen as ‘ineffective’ and ‘boring’. Despite initial excitement at CLIL, the results have largely not met parents’ expectations. The new ‘immersion’ experiences offer the possibility to simultaneously acquire the language while pursuing a desired hobby, are tailored to a much younger audience (from 8 onwards), and come at wide variety of price points. Through the use of ethnographic data, diary entries, and semi-structured interviews with various stakeholders, we will discuss the disparity between who is consuming which immersion products and the value logic behind their investments. By taking a critical sociolinguistic stance, we will attempt to show how these new immersion products reproduce contexts of social inequality through (a) distinct, class-based forms of selection and access to specific spaces; (b) disparate expectations about achievement and outcome; (c) unequal possibilities for continuing language investment at home; (d) emerging forms of social distinction.
