Using a sociolinguistic ethnography performed in a London secondary school in a working-class district, which turned into a Language Specialist School teaching Mandarin to be able to enroll the officially compulsory minimum amount of students in order to obtain public educational funding, this paper especially debates the quotidian discursive “collusion” (McDermott and Tylbor 1986) practices via which teachers and students generate a feeling of easy language learning, even when most students face problems in attaining outcome goals.