How is EFL Writing Teacher Education Shaped by Teachers’ Unique Local Contexts?

This month we published EFL Writing Teacher Education and Professional Development edited by Estela Ene, Betsy Gilliland, Sarah Henderson Lee, Tanita Saenkhum and Lisya Seloni. In this post the editors explain the importance of studying local contexts and how they shape the pedagogical landscape of EFL writing teachers.

What do geopolitics and socioeconomics have to do with the English classroom and the skill of teaching English language writing? In our recently published book with Multilingual Matters, EFL Writing Teacher Education and Professional Development, we go beyond the traditional boundaries of English writing education to investigate how diverse regions that are mostly underrepresented in the research literature shape the pedagogical landscape of EFL writing teachers. 

Well over a billion individuals speak English as a foreign language around the world today. There are millions of English language teachers globally, working in schools, language institutes, universities, online platforms, and private tutoring settings. It is important, therefore, to document EFL experiences of learning and teacher education and allow them to inform theories and practices of second language writing that are still US-centric. It is to these less represented narratives, research, and stories that we need to listen to gain a deeper understanding of local practices and eventually work to develop a sustainable and ecologically responsible writing curriculum. 

This timely collection sheds light on often-overlooked areas of the globe, exposing how local settings from Rwanda to Japan, Kazakhstan, and Argentina present distinct challenges and opportunities for EFL teaching and the training of EFL writing teachers. We hope to foster a deeper, more inclusive narrative of EFL writing education by weaving together the stories of practitioners and researchers from all backgrounds – one that respects and represents the diversity of voices contributing to this subject. 

Our book offers teacher reflections, action research, and models of resources that can be adapted to other contexts. Chapters illustrate how educators modify their approaches to fit within the educational, cultural, and political contexts in which they work. In doing this, they also challenge the status quo and overcome the challenge of having to be the main drivers of their own professional development. For example, teachers of minority students in China show how they move away from exam-focused instruction, negotiating the advantages and disadvantages of this shift. Teachers in Japan, Chile, and Algeria reflect on their personal journeys toward student-centered, real-world writing pedagogies. A teacher educator in Turkiye describes activities that engage learners in exploring written genres through creativity. Iranian English teachers reveal that given the political and educational environments in two eras of Iranian history, primary and secondary school students have limited opportunities to learn how to write for communicative purposes. These and many other chapters illustrate the breadth of innovation and investment teachers and teacher educators have made in EFL writing across the globe.

Our book invites academics, policymakers, and educators to take a more comprehensive look at the global scene of EFL writing instruction. It is an appeal to acknowledge and honor the various ways that educators worldwide are advancing the subject of EFL writing, frequently under challenging situations and with limited resources. 

For individuals fascinated by the complicated dance of teaching writing in various global contexts, our book provides a glimpse into EFL educators’ innovative and resilient practices worldwide. We invite you to go through these pages, as each chapter demonstrates the ingenuity and passion of teachers who shape the next generation of English authors. 

If this topic speaks to you, or if you have your tales about the problems and triumphs of teaching EFL writing, we would love to hear from you. Let us continue to learn from one another, forming a worldwide community of educators united in our dedication to developing proficient, confident writers across boundaries. 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Second Language Writing Instruction in Global Contexts edited by Lisya Seloni and Sarah Henderson Lee.

Innovation in Intensive English Programs

This month we published Innovation in University-Based Intensive English Programs edited by Jason Litzenberg. In this post Jason introduces the book.

Intensive English Programs (IEPs) are special types of English Language Programs that serve international students who want to take part in US higher education, although many IEPs also frequently offer short-term English language programming as “study abroad” opportunities. IEPs are a common feature of US higher education, used by institutions for bridging students into English-only classrooms. IEPs exert wide-ranging impact on the wider field of English Language Teaching: Researchers and academics in applied linguistics from around the world attest to having begun their careers in IEPs. Moreover, IEPs are sites of language acquisition research, provide practicum experience to pre-service teachers, and link theory and practice through curricular innovation and experimentation.

Innovation in University-based Intensive English Programs: From Start to Future begins with three chapters that trace the early beginnings of IEPs in the US to present day. It then considers the impact of these programs across topics such as applied linguistics, higher education, pedagogy, professionalism, the local community, social responsibility, corporatization, raciolinguistics, international relations and technology. The book ends with a forward-looking chapter inferring directions for future programs. The volume specifically looks at the concept of innovation, but also never really defines the term. Instead, contributors present their own conceptualizations of innovation through the content of their chapters, highlighting the range of ways that IEP professionals interpret their relationship to innovation in their area of expertise.

Even though the book mostly looks at language programs in the United States, the integrative and wide-ranging subject matter of the chapters is relevant to ELT professionals at all types of English language programs around the world (e.g. adult and community education programs, binational centers, international schools, proprietary language schools, and so forth). That is, regardless of the actual type of English language program where one might work, ELT professionals will find relevancy in these chapters. This book expands upon other publications about IEPs and English Language Programs in that it is less oriented toward program administrators (although certainly of interest to them!), and it doesn’t use IEPs as an anonymous (or often merely convenient) backdrop for research. Indeed, by considering language program operations and their relationship to the wider field, this volume is of interest to language instructors, pre-service teachers, and teacher educators and researchers who wish to contextualize their work. The final chapter of the book encourages practitioners to engage in “conscientious innovation” toward a more socially just and sustainable profession – a reassuring message that is sure to impact the careers of both current and future teachers.

For more information about this book please see our website. 

If you found this interesting, you might also like Antisocial Language Teaching by JPB Gerald.

The Past and Present of Grammar Teaching in ELT

This month we published Grammar in ELT and ELT Materials by Graham Burton. In this post the author explains what inspired him to write the book and what he hopes readers will take away from it.

What motivated you to write this book?

It was a combination of things. I started my career in ELT as a teacher but as my background was in linguistics, I always had a somewhat analytical eye with respect to teaching content and was often far more interested in the ‘what’ of teaching rather than the ‘how’. I also worked for years in ELT publishing as an editor and author and saw first hand how decisions on content selection are made. As I gradually moved from teaching and publishing into academia, I found that – particularly in the field of SLA – the focus was far more on questions of how language should be taught and how it can be learned, but the question of which content was appropriate and useful for learners was largely taken for granted. The latter is more commonly addressed in the fields of corpus linguistics, syllabus design and materials analysis, but it seemed that nobody had brought these things together, particularly in the context of ELT grammar. This seemed to make it ripe for an investigation.

Your book is both about the past and present of grammar teaching in ELT. What made you want to focus on the past?

There’s a well-known adage – perhaps a little trite – that says we can’t understand the present without knowing the past. In all kinds of professions and walks of life we come across ‘best practice’ – established ways of doing things that are accepted as being optimal in some way. We tend to be inducted into these ways of working when we enter into a profession, including language teaching, and there’s often not much space for people to question the assumptions underlying them. To understand ELT grammar now, we need to understand better where pedagogical accounts of English grammar come from. Were they ever planned out? Who came up with the familiar list of grammar points, such as relative clauses, tenses, reported speech and so on, which are ubiquitous in teaching materials and classrooms around the world? Who decided at which levels these areas of grammar are typically taught at? And while we’re at it, who decided on the level system generally used in ELT and other languages (ELT generally uses six levels, like the CEFR, but why six?). To address questions like this superficially is to do a disservice to the past, so the research reported on in the book includes an analysis of older coursebooks and grammars in order to track how accounts of English grammar evolved, and also interviews with some of the people who were involved in fixing the current consensus on grammar. I also investigated the views of ‘historical’ figures whose work was critical in the evolution of accounts of English grammar over the last several hundred years. While my intention in the book isn’t primarily to present a historical account, I hope to provide the reader a fuller understanding of the present by situating it in its historical context.

What do you hope people will take away from your book?

While there is both implicit and explicit criticism in the book of the grammar that is used in ELT, I hope that readers will also come away with a sense that the people who were involved in creating the familiar accounts of ELT grammar were highly capable and in many ways did a great job in creating rules and explanations that are understandable to learners and usable in the classroom. This is no mean feat and takes skill and experience. Equally, I hope that the book can contribute to reducing the ‘demonisation of the past’ in linguistics and language teaching, and the assumption that we simply ‘know better’ today. That said, there are all kinds of ways in which current pedagogical grammar accounts can be improved; I focus heavily on how data from learner corpora might be of use, but this is just one possible source of renewal. As most people realise, it’s not easy to effect change within the ELT profession because people are used to the status quo, and to the tried-and-tested approaches they’re familiar with; but I do hope we can start to focus a little more again in applied linguistics on pedagogical grammar and syllabus design. I think it’s clear that the explicit study of grammar in language teaching is – in one form or another – not going away, so we need to be sure that what we teach is appropriate, just as much as how we teach it.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Authenticity across Languages and Cultures edited by Leo Will, Wolfgang Stadler and Irma Eloff.

What are the Main Issues Within ELT Today?

In this post Rod Bolitho and Richard Rossner, authors of our book Language Education in a Changing World, answer some questions on the issues within ELT today and how things have changed since the pandemic.

How did the two of you come to collaborate on this book?

We have worked together before and have shared ideas about language education. We felt that there were few recent and accessible books that explore the broader picture of how language education, including learning of the language of schooling, has developed in response to changes in society and due to ‘globalisation’. Working together enabled us to pool and synthesise our accumulated experience.

Your book was published right at the start of the pandemic, and obviously a lot has changed in language education as a result of Covid. What would you add to the book now? 

One of us (Richard) was closely involved in a European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) initiative on the impact of the Covid emergency on foreign language education. The results of the various surveys and consultations undertaken are described in a recent publication called Rethinking language education after the experience of Covid. In general, while the experience was traumatic for many learners and for some language teachers, language education professionals adapted quickly to the challenges of online language teaching and to using the various internet resources that are available. The publication contains ‘guidelines’ arising from the research which highlight the importance of greater flexibility and of developing a willingness to experiment and adapt methods and resources to circumstances, while at the same time giving attention to the individual and collective well-being of learners and teachers, especially (but not only) during periods of crisis, like the pandemic. We might well have wanted to bring some of these points to the fore if the book had been published later.

What fundamentals of language education haven’t changed over the past three years?

The general neglect of language issues in school curricula and especially in teacher education. Despite isolated initiatives, mainly in parts of Europe, there is still no widespread acceptance of the fact that every teacher is effectively a language teacher, or of the need for teacher education to take this fully into account. Teachers of any subject working online with their learners during the pandemic must have felt this even more keenly than they had during face-to-face teaching.

What do you think is the main issue ELT faces today?

An issue that ELT has faced for many years but has never really confronted is the status of English as (currently) the dominant foreign language, and the impact that this has on the status of other languages, particularly those that are under threat. The fact that, for a large majority of speakers of English in the world, it is not their first language, has implications for the ‘ownership’ of the language and what versions and varieties of the language should be considered acceptable. Moreover, the dominance of English has tended to lead to lack of collaboration and interaction between teachers of English and teachers of other languages, and perhaps less attention to, and regard for, other languages in the practice of ELT.

One of the main goals of the book was to influence positive change, from classroom practice to policy. Do you see any signs that this is happening?

There are some signs of positive change that we are aware of. These include reflections on what all teachers including language teachers had to do to cope with the constraints arising from Covid, and national and international initiatives to promote language sensitivity across the curriculum, which is the topic of our most recent book and is the focus of an ECML project called ‘Building Blocks for planning language-sensitive education’. But we can’t yet claim that Language Education in a Changing World has played a role in these developments.

What are the key messages that you hope teachers and teacher educators might take away from the book?

The main ones are that all stakeholders in education, including especially teachers and also decision-makers and parents, should understand the critical importance of the role of language and communication as the lifeblood of any educational process. This has implications for pre-service teacher education as well as for the continuing professional development of all teachers, and for the way it is organised and resourced.

What are you working on at the moment (separately or together)?

As mentioned, we have already collaborated intensively on a new book published in late 2022 called Language-Sensitive Teaching and Learning. This is a resource book for teachers of all subjects and for teacher educators containing well over 100 tasks of different kinds focusing on language, mainly in educational settings. These are accompanied by commentary and discussion of what we see as the key practical implications of language-sensitive teaching and learning. In addition, Rod is working on a book of ‘Case Studies in CPD’ with Amol Padwad in India. Meanwhile Richard continues as a member of a Council of Europe team working on resources for use by those providing language support to migrants.

Rod Bolitho and Richard Rossner

For more information about this book please see our website.

Issues with the Current State of the ELT Industry: Why This is the Right Time for My Book

This month we published Antisocial Language Teaching by JPB Gerald. In this post, the author explains why the time is ripe for his book to be released.

Anyone who is affiliated with language education in some capacity is likely aware that there are issues in the field. Depending on your vantage point and level of progressiveness, those issues generally include hierarchical and exclusionary practices such as native-speakerism, so-called “accent reduction”, and the policies that descend from raciolinguistic ideologies, or the association of deficient language with marginalized racial groups. We language scholars and practitioners have, in articles and presentations and books, been trying to address these issues for decades now, and yet many of these barriers remain firmly in place. In my new book, Antisocial Language Teaching: English and the Pervasive Pathology of Whiteness, I make the argument for why we seem to be so ideologically stubborn.

Simply put, all of the issues above – to which you can add the ravages of capitalism and the way that colonialism continues to shape our field – are tied to the belief that certain people and groups are inherently disordered and in need of correction. My own research is based around the intersection of race, disability, and language, but, though it does not factor into my book, you can add religion and gender and other axes of oppression to this as well. Unfortunately, we have been forced to reform our field inch by inch, focusing on intertwined issues separately and thus leaving the overall harmful structure in place. As a rhetorical device, I use the diagnostic criteria of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (aka DSM-5) to make the point that the way our field was built and is currently maintained could be classified as deeply disordered and only isn’t because of who currently benefits from the system as is; more specifically, I map the seven criteria of antisocial personality disorder onto the connection between whiteness, colonialism, capitalism, and ableism and how these and other -isms harm the vast majority of the students – and educators – in the field of language teaching. Whether you end up agreeing with my argument or not, I do hope you give the book a chance to both inform and entertain you, for I believe that our discipline’s conversation has yet to feature the particular angle I am putting forth, and I also believe that we will never get out of our current cycles if we don’t try something radically different, a vision I put forth towards the end of the work.

The book has just been released, and if you are interested, you can order it here. If you’d like to have a good faith conversation with me about the issues, feel free to find me on twitter: @JPBGerald.

JPB Gerald, EdD, is a graduate of the Instructional Leadership program from CUNY – Hunter College in New York, USA. He works in professional development for a not-for-profit organization.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Bilingualism for All? edited by Nelson Flores, Amelia Tseng and Nicholas Subtirelu.

Language Learning in Primary School: Positive in Theory, Negative in Practice?

This month we published Early Language Learning in Context by David Hayes. In this post the author explains the inspiration behind the book. 

This book has its origins in my experience as a teacher, teacher-trainer and researcher in a variety of countries in Asia during my career and is also influenced by my own childhood educational experiences. Research tells us that access to high quality education, particularly basic education, offers one of the most important routes out of poverty for children born into poor and/or marginalized communities. That education ideally includes the opportunity to learn another language which has many potential benefits for children. For example, it can have a positive impact on children’s general educational achievement, it can help to develop intercultural competence through learning how the new language views the world as well as helping learners to reflect on their own language and culture from a different perspective and, when children leave school, it can even provide a competitive advantage in gaining employment in certain sectors of the economy.

The language that most children are offered in schools across the globe is English, which is closely linked to national economic needs in an era of globalization. However, the English as a foreign language education that many children receive (and the largest proportion of these will be the urban and rural poor) is often very far from high quality and demotivates rather than motivates them to learn. So there is a conundrum, one which I’ve had to face in much of my work: learning another language in primary school is good for children in theory but often a negative experience in practice.

I have been involved in several projects in different countries over the years designed to improve the learning of English in state education systems which, without exception, focus on ‘improving’ teachers’ pedagogical skills and ‘upgrading’ their English language competence. Though these projects have been well-designed and have had admirable objectives, the factors involved in successful language teaching usually extend beyond ‘improving’ English teachers to those which impact education more generally. It is difficult to provide high quality English language teaching without high quality education as a whole. Hence, this book discusses foreign – primarily English – language teaching in its wider socioeducational contexts to try to understand the place of languages in those contexts and the factors that either promote successful foreign language learning or hinder it.

The book also questions the wisdom of focusing so much on a powerful international language, English, when other languages may be available locally or regionally which would carry more meaning for children in school and then perhaps be easier for them to learn. If children develop a liking for languages closer to their experience early in their schooling, this might help the learning of an international language such as English later on. My main professional concern is with the education of the children of the poor and disadvantaged and a goal of the book is to encourage reflection on more equitable provision of language learning opportunities across educational systems, as a prelude to change in those systems. Without change at the system level, (English) language learning will just be one more obstacle to achievement for the world’s poor rather than an opportunity for their advancement.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Assessment for Learning in Primary Language Learning and Teaching by Maria Britton.

Another Invitation into the Global Pracademic Landscape of Transnational ELT Research

This month we are publishing Transnational Research in English Language Teaching edited by Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan and Suresh Canagarajah. In this post the editors introduce their new book, a follow-up to its sister volume Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching.

Some explorations require a follow-up act – and this is where our next collaborative editorial venture with Multilingual Matters comes in. Transnational Research in English Language Teaching: Critical Practices and Identities continues the conversation we started in its sister volume, Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching: Critical Inquiries from Diverse Practitioners, by complementing the practitioner-led self-inquiries in the first volume with inquiries by researchers looking at others’ ELT-related practices in this volume.

In West-based and West-oriented academia, a significant amount of past and recent work on transnationalism in ELT has focused primarily on specific communities of practice located within a country, such as the US or has been (de)limited to teacher education programs, with some notable exceptions. More needed to be done, as we discovered, to create a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding of the complex global ELT landscape across countries and across English language teaching and learning settings. Our second edited volume with Multilingual Matters contributes to this evolving knowledge base as an attempt to deepen our readers’ understanding of the transnational ELT landscape.

We are proud to highlight that along with us, the researchers and the participants in this volume collectively represent fifteen countries of origin: Afghanistan, China, Costa Rica, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Syria, Turkey, the UAE, the US and Vietnam – a truly diverse set of voices from global pracademia. Further, while many of us are currently embedded in the US, the studies in this volume showcase transnational identities and practices formed and informed by both countries – ‘home’ and ‘host’ – and include narratives that are not unidirectional (i.e. ‘home’ to ‘host’ only).

And yet, even with this diversity and our deliberate efforts to decenter our work as a site for transnational professional practice, our volume could not entirely escape inadvertently reifying some of the same inequities that it proposes to disrupt – as we explore in detail in our introduction chapter and endeavor to mitigate through the manner in which we have organized the rest of the volume, all twelve chapters, across three distinct parts: Part 1: Transnational Practices and Identities of ELLs in the US; Part 2: Transnational Practitioners and Participants in Global Contexts beyond the US; and, Part 3: Transnational Practices and Identities of TESOL Practitioners in the US.

Together, the chapters within the edited volume cover a range of qualitative research approaches and methodologies as well as span three common key themes – researchers’ reflexivity (including our own as editors, as we explore in detail in the introduction chapter), transnational participants’ sense of (un)belonging, and the overlaps between translingualism and transnationalism. We now invite you, our readers, to enter once again the transnational landscape of ELT research that we and our contributors have collectively populated with the empirical inquiries in this volume. We hope you enjoy traveling through the book and making your acquaintance with the diverse global voices and perspectives housed within the book covers!

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like the editors’ previous book, Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching.

The Story of “Person to Person Peacebuilding, Intercultural Communication and English Language Teaching”

This month we are publishing Person to Person Peacebuilding, Intercultural Communication and English Language Teaching by Amy Jo Minett, Sarah E. Dietrich and Didem Ekici. In this post the authors explain how the book came about.

This book began as a friendship between the authors. In 2014, Sarah shared with Didem that she wanted to provide her pre-practicum students authentic teaching practice. Didem was volunteering for an organization working with Afghan citizens who wanted to improve their English. Thus began a collaboration pairing graduate TESOL students with Afghans seeking English tutors. Tutors and students met through videoconferencing, in a space we call the virtual intercultural borderlands. After each meeting, tutors wrote reflections. The voices within those reflective journals – and their references to war, peace and intercultural communication – inspired this book.

In 2018, Amy, Sarah and Didem met for lunch. Didem was finishing her dissertation on how ESOL students developed intercultural competence by working online with Afghans. Sarah was investigating teacher development through the tutoring project. Amy, who had worked in Afghanistan, asked if she could read their data. Everyone pulled out their laptops and so the book began.

That conversation led to interviews with Afghans and tutors, analysis of reflective journals, and long virtual meetings between the authors (by now we lived far apart). By the time the pandemic had shut down most of the face-to-face world, we were confident in our discovery: that language tutoring and intercultural communication – in the virtual intercultural borderlands where Afghans and tutors met and worked – led interactants to build peace, person to person.

The participants whose voices we share in this book do not negotiate treaties or lay down weapons. They are peacebuilders, nonetheless, whose voices bring to life a constellation of elements pivotal to peacebuilding:

• A Ukrainian-born tutor overcomes her self-acknowledged stereotypes of ‘Afghanis’ when she and her Afghan counterpart share stories of conflict in their homelands, forming a powerful new in-group;
• A US-born tutor displays dramatic empathy when discovering her student – who was meeting her from a hot and unairconditioned office – was fasting during Ramadan and could not drink water (the tutor quickly put her water away and offered to reschedule the session);
• An Afghan woman who was a ‘child protection officer’ describes how her tutor helped her understand guidelines in English as she implemented ‘Father Daughter Hours,’ an international initiative intended to push back against generations of gender violence present in so many Afghan families;
• A US-born tutor learns her student’s educator parents – threatened with beheading under the Taliban – instructed their son ‘that peace will come through the ink in a pen rather than bullets from a gun.’ The tutor goes on to share this line ‘with everyone’.

On August 15th, 2021, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. A few Afghan participants made it out during the evacuations. Others are in hiding or have fallen completely silent. Now we work for their evacuation and for the resettlement of those who made it to the US. We also remain endlessly grateful to the voices in this book, as they provide ways educators can more deliberately leverage person to person peacebuilding in the virtual intercultural borderlands of online exchange.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Peacebuilding in Language Education edited by Rebecca L. Oxford, María Matilde Olivero, Melinda Harrison and Tammy Gregersen.

An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching: From Margins to Mainstream

This month we are publishing the second edition of An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching by John Corbett. In this post the author explains what’s new in this edition.

I first started drafting what would become the first edition of An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching in Brazil in the autumn of 1998; it finally appeared five years later. In March 2020, at the beginning of a period of semi-isolation from the Covid pandemic, in the state of Sao Paulo, I finally got around to revisiting and revising that volume for its long-delayed second edition.

Re-reading the first edition, I realised how much things (and I) have changed. At the turn of the century, despite the work of people like Mike Byram and Claire Kramsch through the 1980s and 1990s, there was a feeling that interculturality was still a peripheral concern, at least to many English language teachers, particularly those working in commercial schools. But last year, when I told a colleague from a commercial school in Brasilia that I was revising a book on an ‘intercultural’ approach to ELT, he responded, ‘Well, is there any other way of doing it?’ Why has an intercultural approach gone, apparently, from the margins to the mainstream?

We can point at different reasons: the publication of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) document, in 2001, put interculturality at least nominally at the heart of the language learning agenda; other influential documents, like the NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can do’ statements followed its lead. But the world also changed, with digital communications and social media giving many learners, for the first time, a direct opportunity to interact with speakers of different languages, speakers who come from quite different backgrounds and hold diverse views of the world. And digital communications also gave teachers abundant access to culturally rich materials to adapt for use in their classrooms. The days of teachers laminating pages cut from magazines are largely over. English rapidly assumed the status of an international language, not a foreign language any more so much as an auxiliary language that pervaded all societies and has been appropriated by their members for a range of functions.

So…the second edition of the book addresses many of these developments. Its treatment of the CEFR and subsequent guidelines is much deeper than that of the first edition, and it acknowledges the critical backlash against ‘universalising’ accounts of interculturality that the CEFR has been said to embody. Its discussion of ethnography extends to an entirely new chapter on online exchanges and the possibilities for cultural exploration they promise, and the challenges they often set for learners and teachers alike. While trying to remain true to the framework of the first edition, the second updates the references and reframes the contents so that they are relevant to the third decade of the 21st century.

And yet, some things remain the same. The first edition was predicated on the optimistic assumption that human beings are generally inclined to be active explorers and interpreters of the worlds they inhabit and encounter. Without necessarily atomising ‘intercultural communicative competence’ as a set of abstract abilities, the second edition likewise draws upon ethnography and semiotics as key disciplines that, if developed in the classroom, will enable learners to explore those worlds more effectively and interpret them in richer ways. The contents of the book might have been thoroughly overhauled, but I hope that its optimism remains intact.

John Corbett
BNU-HKBU United International College
johnbcorbett@uic.edu.cn

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might like Person to Person Peacebuilding, Intercultural Communication and English Language Teaching by Amy Jo Minett, Sarah E. Dietrich and Didem Ekici.

An Invitation into the Global ELT Landscape of Transnational Pracademics

This month we published Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching edited by Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan and Suresh Canagarajah. In this post the editors introduce the book.

Globalization is truly changing the world as we know it as cross-border migrations of people become increasingly common. International migrations are also no longer unidirectional, nor entail the giving up of ‘old’ affiliations in order to acquire ‘new’ ones. Many transnational migrants maintain deep connections with their ‘home countries’ while simultaneously constructing new ones with their ‘host countries’ (Levitt, 2004), while others transcend these static nation-state boundaries entirely to navigate the “liminal spaces between communities, languages, and nations” (Canagarajah, 2018, p. 41).

The field of second and foreign language pedagogy, especially, includes transnational practitioners with complex personal-professional histories that, in turn, impact how these practitioners construct their identities and engage in practices across diverse contexts. TESOL practitioners also work frequently with students who are migrants themselves. These participants – language learners, teachers, teacher educators, administrators – may already be engaged in reimagining ‘home’ as an idea that is beyond a geographical location (Jain, 2021), as well as problematizing traditional notions around ‘center’ and ‘periphery’, ‘native’ and ‘nonnative’, ‘researcher’ and ‘practitioner’, and ‘practitioner’ and ‘academic’.

As proud co-editors of Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching, we envision the term ‘practitioner’ as encompassing all those who engage in the practices of TESOL, including but not limited to those who teach English language learners of all ages and across diverse contexts, those who educate teachers and administrators planning to pursue careers in TESOL, those who research TESOL contexts, and those who theorize about these contexts. Further, these practices are not mutually exclusive and by engaging in different practices within (and beyond) TESOL, many dynamic practitioners and academics create areas of overlap, span boundaries, and become brokers between different communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), thus also essentially becoming transnational pracademics – an equitable amalgamation of the practitioner and academic identities inhabiting transnational spaces.

As we move more deeply into the 21st century, transnational TESOL practitioners are thus creatively negotiating ‘liminal’ spaces, charting new trajectories, crafting new practices and pedagogies, constructing new identities, and reconceptualizing ELT contexts. In the process, the transnational landscape of TESOL (Jain, Yazan, & Canagarajah, 2021) is being agentively changed from within – as the contributions that comprise the volume illustrate. This edited volume is thus both a critical and an accessible compilation of transnational narratives. Too often, scholarly publications tend to be inaccessible, in terms of both content and scholarship, to a large part of the very populations theorized about. We have, instead, endeavored to create a space for voices that truly move the field forward in ways that are approachable for all participants.

Our volume serves as a community space where narratives of transnational TESOL practitioners and participants may find a permanent home, with narratives ranging from autoethnographies to self-study reports and from theoretical pieces to empirical accounts. We are thrilled to invite you to read the volume with its rich, diverse narratives and perspectives spanning the global ELT landscape.

Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan and Suresh Canagarajah

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like The Complexity of Identity and Interaction in Language Education edited by Nathanael Rudolph, Ali Fuad Selvi and Bedrettin Yazan.