Onur Özkaynak, Zeynep Arslan
In Türkiye, English Language Teacher Education (ELTE) programs have expanded rapidly alongside national reforms in language education and the Englishization of higher education. We examine mission and vision statements from these programs, texts often treated as ceremonial but that function as strategic institutional narratives projecting ideological positions. Our corpus includes 132 mission and vision statements from 72 ELTE programs retrieved from official program webpages between February and April 2025. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we analyze how the statements construct the purposes and functions of ELTE, legitimize neoliberal and nationalist imaginaries, and position English within educational, national, and global frames. We interpret recurring lexical and rhetorical patterns, genre conventions, and notable silences in relation to Türkiye’s sociopolitical landscape, where market rationalities and state-centered projects increasingly cohere. The findings show how these institutional texts operate as soft governance, shaping an “ideal” teacher identity in public discourse while marginalizing equity- and multilingualism-oriented commitments.