Bilingual call centers in El Paso, Texas, an extensively bilingual US-Mexico border setting, provide a valuable opportunity to examine empirically what occurs with respect to language shift reversal of Spanish in the context of new information economy. Interviews were conducted with thirty-nine call center operators and managers, and twelve translators and interpreters. Call centers provide an important occupational performance of and recognition to the Spanish language. Nevertheless, bilingual call centers mainly rely on uncompensated, socially provided language skills in Spanish, a freely available “heritage language” in the border setting. Spanish is not valued as a technical competency, worth specific attention to training, management of language features, and extra compensation. Bilingualism is used in the labor market as a sign of cheap and flexible labor, rather than as economically and socially valued “skill,” even though in the new information workplace it serves the latter role. (Call centers, new economy, language and workplace, bilingualism, Spanish, borders)*

This article explores how an economic ideology—neoliberalism—serves as a covert language policy mechanism pushing the global spread of English. Our analysis builds on a case study of the spread of English as a medium of instruction (MoI) in South Korean higher education. The Asian financial crisis of 1997/98 was the catalyst for a set of socioeconomic transformations that led to the imposition of “competitiveness” as a core value. Competition is heavily structured through a host of testing, assessment, and ranking mechanisms, many of which explicitly privilege English as a terrain where individual and societal worth are established. University rankings are one such mechanism structuring competition and constituting a covert form of language policy. One ranking criterion—internationalization—is particularly easy to manipulate and strongly favors English MoI. We conclude by reflecting on the social costs of elevating competitiveness to a core value enacted on the terrain of language choice. (English as a global language, globalization, higher education, medium of instruction (MoI), neoliberalism, South Korea, university rankings)*

Police-suspect interviews in England and Wales are a multi-audience, multi-purpose, transcontextual mode of discourse. They are conducted as part of the initial investigation into a crime, but are subsequently recontextualized through the judicial process, ultimately being presented in court as evidence against the interviewee. The communicative challenges posed by multiple future audiences are investigated by applying Bell's (1984) audience design model to the police interview, and the resulting “poor fit” demonstrates why this context is discursively counterintuitive to participants. Further, data analysis indicates that interviewer and interviewee, although ostensibly addressing each other, may orientate to different audiences, with potentially serious consequences. As well as providing new insight into police-suspect interview interaction, this article seeks to extend understanding of the influence of audience on interaction at the discourse level, and to contribute to the development of theoretical models for contexts with multiple or asynchronous audiences. (Audience design, audience orientation, police interviews, forensic linguistics)*

Theoretical and applied research in the field of institutional discourse analysis calls for an increasing awareness of the constitutive nature of discourse in the representation and the assessment of social identities (Sarangi & Roberts 1999; Blommaert 2010; Eades 2010). The staunchly textualist accounts surviving institutional practice, however, tend to obscure complex multidiscursive and language ideologically anchored processes that mold procedural outcomes. On the basis of first-hand ethnographic data collected across legal-administrative procedures in Belgium, this article aims at revealing some meaningful contexts that have been erased in the case of an asylum seeker who became a murder victim and whose asylum file was used in the assize trial as a resource to sketch his social identity. The analysis explores the ideological functioning of textuality in the situated details of communicative practice, thereby aiming for a better understanding of the intricacies of multidiscursive identity construction in translocal procedural settings. (Institutional discourse analysis, multidiscursivity, language ideology and identity, sociolinguistic mobility, asylum procedure, assize court procedure)*