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Based on the research literature of the 'native/non-native' distinction and on Bourdieu's notion of field and social action, this paper proposes to use the specific case of foreign language (FL) teaching in the French educational system to conceptualize the FL teaching field as a highly contested space where unequal actors vie for symbolic power and influence. The FL teaching field is organised into two large spaces: one representing state school educational systems, the other representing private language schools. Symbolic power and teaching legitimacies have been jointly constructed giving more power and legitimacy to non-native teachers in state school settings, and more power and legitimacy to native teachers in private language schools. Universities occupy a middle position between the educational settings of the national education systems and the private settings of language schools: the teaching of language to future specialists is still in the hands of non-native speaker teachers whereas the teaching of language to non-language specialists seems more open to native speaker teachers. The 'native/non-native' opposition that linguists thought to be relevant linguistically might no longer be a linguistic concept (; ; ; ; ), but, as a social construct, this opposition is still very much alive. It serves to design language policies within which actors-teachers of foreign and second languages confront one another. Due to the global deregulation of educational settings, language actors-teachers are therefore put into a highly competitive market: both native and non-native language teachers struggle to be recognized, and essentialist or even racist attitudes have developed into what calls 'nativespeakerism'. Understanding the structure of the language teaching field worldwide makes it possible to clarify the power struggle and symbolic violence within the field, whose goals and values are paradoxically aimed at mutual understanding through language teaching and cultural mediation - and even more so in the age of multilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the main features of the French Educational system and analyses the ongoing controversies surrounding pre-elementary education, grade repetition, class size reduction or educational priority zones in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution to the European Journal of Applied Linguistics addresses the contextualized challenges that the Association Française de Linguistique Appliquée is still facing despite the fact that it was created as far back as 1964, at the same time as AILA. The landscape of French research may explain why the tag “Linguistique Appliquée” is not as widespread as its equivalents in some other scientific cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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