Pathways to paradigm change: Critical examinations of prevailing discourses and ideologies of second language education

For at least four decades scholars have recognized and theorized the inherently broad communication landscapes we inhabit, accounting for the multimodal nature of communication, the multilingual subjectivities of learners, and the inextricable link between language and culture, and have repeatedly called on foreign language educational practices to move beyond a primary focus on oral communication anchored in the linguistic mode. While foreign language instructional practices reflecting these views of communication have emerged in isolated contexts, large-scale paradigm change in FL education has been slow. The eleven chapters in this volume seek to understand the reasons that large-scale paradigm change has not yet occurred, and departs from the perspective that the obstacles, by and large, are ideological rather than practical. Together the chapters explore discursive spaces in which traditional ideologies of communication and language learning prevail, as well as provide models for