In this chapter, I present research findings from a study on university lecturers' views towards English as a medium of instruction in a public university in Tunisia. Through semi-structured interviews with four university lecturers, this chapter highlights the tensions between the global status of English and the local requirements that reinforce the status of French in the Tunisian job market. Furthermore, the study finds that the lack of a coherent educational language policy can produce sentiments of professional anxiety among university lecturers who are concerned about the delivery of equitable education that prepares students for employment. The chapter concludes with recommendations for policy makers on the importance of developing a language policy in consultation with different stakeholders, including employers. It also emphasises the need to consider issues of language access, inequalities and epistemic injustice as part of any national efforts to develop educational language policies.

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Language educators in many parts of the world are torn between preparing language learners to pass language proficiency tests and trying to let their classrooms reflect the messiness of out-of-class communication. Because testing is “an activity which perhaps more than any other dictates what is taught” (Hall, 2014, p. 379), helping students to pass language proficiency tests seems to be a current top priority. Since globalisation “has destabilised the codes, norms, and conventions that FL [foreign language] educators relied upon to help learners be successful users of the language once they had left their classrooms” (Kramsch, 2014, p.296), the gap between what is taught in classrooms or measured in examination halls and what is used in real life situations has become much bigger. Testimonies from Study abroad students feed into this discussion. This article addresses the gap between being a language learner and a language user and the implications of this on learners’ perceptions of their language abilities, as illustrated by the story of Mahmoud, a study abroad student in the UK. It also features learner’s voice, exploring Mahmoud’s views of his previous formal language education and concludes with pedagogical implications for language educators.

The sociolinguistics of globalisation, as an emerging paradigm, focuses on the impact of mobility on the linguistic capital of mobile individuals. To understand this, Blommaert advocates a scalar approach to language arguing that some people’s repertoires “will allow mobility while others will not” (2010. The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 23) and proposing high scale, low scale orderings. In this paper we introduce an ecological orientation to sociolinguistic scale that challenges the fixity of a high/low scale distinction by conceptually drawing on the notions of flat ontology (Marston et al. 2005. Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(4). 416–432) and exchange value (Heller. 2010. The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology 39. 101–114). We do this in relation to Study Abroad (SA) contexts, which offer spaces for investigating how mobility influences the exchange value of individuals’ linguistic repertoires. The study speaks to a broader project in social research which emphasises the agency, subjectivity and criticality of the individual and stresses the complex and rhizomatic nature of social interaction. Drawing on moment analysis (Li. 2011. Moment Analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43. 1222–1235), we examine the experiences of two study abroad students in the UK. These include tellings of critical and reflective moments through which we interpret their experience of how the interplay of language, place and ecology of interaction results in constant, dynamic changes in the exchange value of their English repertoires. Our contribution is to show how an ecological orientation and a flat, rather than stratified, ontology enables insights into language use and globalisation in a way that empowers multilingual, mobile individuals.

Post-modern approaches to language policy have emphasised the role of agency in implementing and appropriating language policies (Ricento, 2000;Johnson and Johnson, 2015). While agency is often perceived in positive terms, Liddicoat (2019) calls on language policy researchers to investigate its problems and constraints. This article discusses the interplay of structure and agency in educational language policies in Tunisian higher education, a sector characterised by a 'benign neglect' (Piller, 2016) approach to language policy. While doing so, it responds to Fenton-Smith and Gurney's (2016) observation that higher education contexts remain largely underexplored in the language policy scholarship. The article uses data from 12 semistructured interviews from local higher education stakeholders in order to explore how their agency is exercised, rejected and contested. The study demonstrates that while agency creates room for flexibility and the ability to respond to changing local demands and aspirations, it can also cause problems such as inconsistency, uncertainty, and the reproduction of social inequalities.