Universities are institutions designed to serve adult students, yet the structures of academic labor often operate with minimal input from the very individuals they are meant to support. This study examines the perceptions of adult second language (L2) English users regarding the efficacy and equity of adjunct professorships within university systems. Specifically, it explores how students, who pay full tuition and often accumulate significant debt, experience and interpret the assignment of adjunct faculty in their required courses—decisions in which they have no participatory role.
Adult second language users are uniquely positioned to offer insight into the dynamics of contemporary educational service delivery, particularly when these services are shaped by the growing reliance on precariously employed adjunct instructors. The investigation centers on the intersection of social and economic capital, institutional decision-making, and the lived experiences of students navigating a university system in a non-native language. In doing so, it aims to uncover how corporate and neoliberal values manifest in adjunct labor practices, and how these practices are perceived by the very students who bear the financial burden of education.
Recent scholarship in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics continues to investigate how language, labor, and ideology intersect in educational contexts. Across qualitative, ethnographic, and critical paradigms, researchers have highlighted how linguistic identity and social positioning are entangled with institutional hierarchies and labor stratification. This body of literature provides the foundation for the present study’s inquiry, which adopts a Rawlsian lens to explore questions of justice, fairness, and institutional responsibility in the provision of university instruction.
Adult second language users enrolled in university programs often pursue education in English at considerable financial cost, frequently assuming student loan debt as a means to secure academic credentials and advance their social and economic mobility. This population navigates both linguistic and institutional challenges in higher education systems that are increasingly shaped by neoliberal labor practices. One such practice is the reliance on adjunct faculty—non-tenure-track instructors who are often paid less, lack institutional support, and have limited involvement in academic governance.
While universities frequently assign adjuncts to teach core and required courses, including those attended by L2 students, significant disparities exist between adjunct and full-time faculty in terms of compensation, availability, and pedagogical support. These differences can result in unequal academic experiences for students, raising pressing questions about the ethics and equity of such labor arrangements.
From a social justice standpoint, it is crucial to examine whether second language learners—already marginalized by linguistic and cultural barriers—are further disadvantaged by institutional labor choices that affect the quality and consistency of their instruction. This study is designed to explore these tensions by centering the voices of adult second language users as informants of their own educational conditions and by critically assessing the institutional norms that govern adjunct labor in relation to educational equity.
According to Rawls (1999), a just society is one in which social and economic inequalities are arranged to benefit the least advantaged, and where positions of power and responsibility are open to all under fair conditions. In the context of adjunct labor, the “least advantaged” can be understood both in terms of precariously employed instructors and the populations they serve, particularly marginalized students such as adult second-language users. From the standpoint of Rawls’s difference principle, a system in which instructional labor is unequally distributed, and where vulnerable populations disproportionately receive instruction from under-resourced adjunct faculty, violates the moral conditions of fairness and reciprocity.
Furthermore, Rawls’s emphasis on institutional justice—the moral legitimacy of rules and systems, rather than isolated acts of injustice—invites a structural critique of adjunct labor. While the educational system may offer formal access to instruction, the quality of that instruction becomes stratified through neoliberal labor practices that reduce the adjunct professor to a disposable labor unit (Bousquet, 2008; Giroux, 2014). This reduction has direct implications for the experiences of adult L2 users, who are increasingly treated as tuition-paying consumers within a commodified education system. Their perceptions, thus, are not incidental but are crucial ethnographic data on the ways institutional practices manifest as lived inequality.
Grounded in Rawlsian principles of justice and informed by a critical theory paradigm, this study situates adjunct labor as a systemic institutional practice subject to ethical scrutiny—particularly when evaluated through the experiences of adult second language users in higher education. By framing these learners as consumers navigating asymmetrical power relations within university systems, the theoretical framework establishes the moral and institutional stakes of the inquiry. The perspectives of L2 users offer a unique vantage point from which to interrogate labor equity, instructional quality, and educational access within neoliberal academic environments. With this ethical and conceptual foundation established, the following literature review surveys existing research on second language user experience, academic labor conditions, raciolinguistic ideologies, and applied sociolinguistics to contextualize and inform the present investigation.
Taken together, this body of literature advances several key themes relevant to Second Language Research. First, language instruction and acquisition are sites of identity construction, shaped by racial, economic, and institutional power structures. Second, pedagogical decisions and language norms are entangled with raciolinguistic ideologies that reinforce inequality, even under the guise of neutrality. Third, language teaching labor is increasingly precarious and politicized under neoliberal regimes, demanding greater scholarly attention to the conditions of teachers’ work. Fourth, rigorous and reflective research design is essential for uncovering and challenging these dynamics in empirical studies. Finally, the ideological positioning of English as a global language must be understood within the broader contexts of nationalism, marketization, and justice. As such, SLR must engage not only with linguistic forms and learner outcomes but also with the political economies and racial structures that shape how language is taught, learned, and lived.
The intersecting domains of second language use, contingent academic labor, and institutional equity form the core of the literature informing this study. A growing body of work in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics has critically examined how language users experience power, identity, and marginalization within formal educational settings. Concurrently, research into the academic labor market has revealed structural inequities faced by adjunct instructors, especially in neoliberal institutions where labor is increasingly casualized and cost-efficiency outweighs pedagogical consistency. These two fields—while often treated separately—converge meaningfully in the context of adult second language users, who are not only language learners or users, but also consumers of university services shaped by precarious instructional labor.
This review synthesizes key contributions from four interconnected bodies of scholarship: (1) studies exploring the lived experiences and identity formation of second language users in academic settings; (2) research on adjunct and contingent labor within higher education; (3) investigations into raciolinguistic ideologies and institutional language practices; and (4) critiques of neoliberalism and consumerism in postsecondary education. Together, these bodies of literature provide the empirical grounding for assessing how second language users perceive, experience, and interpret the labor structures that shape their access to educational equity.
References
Bousquet, M. (2008). How the university works: Higher education and the low-wage nation. NYU Press.
Giroux, H. A. (2014). Neoliberalism’s war on higher education. Haymarket Books.
Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice (Revised ed.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1971)
Recent Comments