Study Abroad Otherwise

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue that German language educators and learners often reelect monolingualism (Gramling 2019) despite the lived multilingual realities of language learners in study abroad (SA). By bringing together analyses of a number of interactions and oral reflections collected across two SA contexts—a short-term summer program and yearlong program—I show that the participants harness three ideological structures (i.e., of nativespeakerism, raciolinguicism, and neoliberalism) when negotiating talk about language choice abroad and being addressed in English vs. German in SA. The results demonstrate that talk about German language learning in SA is steeped in these ideological structures, something that allows participants to reproduce structural monolingualism even though they themselves are plurilingual subjects. This project lends strong support to scholarship that examines the ways in which foreign language education and German Studies are steeped in the recirculation of Whiteness, “or the ‘oneness’ without which otherness could not exist” (Reagan and Osborn 2019, p. 94; Weber 2016) and proposes that we reorient to German language education and SA as an experience that disturbs and unsettles prevailing discourses about language, culture, and race.