Diary of an Edu-Tourist in Costa Rica: An Autoethnographical Account of Learning Spanish

Abstract

This article presents an autoethnographical account of my foray into Spanish immersion education in Costa Rica as a professor of multilingual education at a university in Canada. This language-learning journey was inspired by curiosity about the growing trend for Internet marketing of second-language learning as a form of tourism, which I label edu-tourism. I map the course of my edu-tourism experience, contemplating second-language learning in a local context, describing professionalism in private language teaching institutes, comparing pedagogical practice across various Spanish-as-a-second-language teachers, and documenting my experiential sociopragmatic acquisition of textbook Spanish.