Social Class, Habitus, and Language Learning: The Case of Korean Early Study-Abroad Students

Abstract

In this article, I draw on Bourdieu’s (1984, 1991) notion of habitus in order to explore the relationship between social class, language learning, and language teaching in the context of the global economy. To illustrate my points, I use Early Study Abroad (ESA), the transnational educational migration that Korean middle-class families engage in in order to acquire valuable forms of global English capital. Through a discussion of the identities and language practices of Korean ESA students in Toronto, where they invested in a class-based consumption of Korean language and culture to contest the racial and linguistic stigmatization they experienced in the local context, and to index their global cosmopolitanism, I reveal how the concept of class privilege in actual practice is multilayered and sometimes contradictory; moreover, I posit that acquiring linguistic capital and leveraging it to gain class privilege are difficult and fraught ventures.