Study Abroad (SA) has long enjoyed the unquestioning support of the general public, governments, and its benefits for language learning in many ways have been naturalized as "common sense" (Twombly et al., 2012). Language ideology scholars would say that this naturalization itself is indication that there are strong ideological forces at work (Kroskrity, 2004; Verschueren, 2012). Victoria Surtees advocates the idea that given the political push to increase the number of students studying abroad, educators must continue to critically investigate what ideological load might be permeating the SA context. In Surtees' view, by conceptualizing students' attitudes and beliefs toward language as ideological, educators can move past the actions of individuals to look at the broader processes. While it is individuals who use language ideologies as resources, individuals are never viewed as their sole proprietors or creators. For SA, this implies that students' attitudes about learning languages abroad have broader historical antecedents constructed through interactions with friends, faculty, family, media, and institutional policy. By adopting the understanding that language ideologies are necessarily partial, researchers are also forced to ask who benefits when SA is framed in this way: the students themselves, institutions, or perhaps a particular type of language learner? Surtees notes throughout this paper that a number of SA researchers have begun exploration of this process by adopting critical approaches and pointing to the broader societal discourses that shape students' experiences. A language ideological framework provides an additional theoretical tool for connecting everyday practices to broader societal discourses. Surtees challenges further research by encouraging further work to examine the ways in which recruitment documents and institutional policies shape students' expectations of their SA experience or investigate how students use circulating language ideologies to rationalize their actions or reactions during their studies and travels.