ABSTRACT
In Taiwan, students on the vocational track can choose, at around the age of 14, to enter five-year junior college programs at institutes of technology. These programs provide five years of intensive study in applied science, business, or foreign languages. In this chapter, I examine the professional trajectories of six young women who graduated in 2009 with junior college diplomas in English. Using a critical view of the language as pure potential ideology (Park 2016) as a theoretical lens, I discuss the young women’s motivations for choosing, while still quite young, to commit themselves to five years of intensive foreign language study, the aspirations that they had during their five-year course of study, and the realities they ended up experiencing. While some participants had the good fortune of encountering only situations that facilitated deployment of their foreign language skills, others were forced to contend with uneven playing fields that constrained their professional development. Those in a position to influence students in the process of cultivating their linguistic abilities should thus consciously propagate counter-hegemonic discourses, reminding learners that, in the inequitable world we live in, hard work and perseverance will very often not be sufficient for realizing professional aspirations.
