“Spanish So White” Now Accessible as an Audiobook!

We recently brought out our very first audiobook of our 2023 title Spanish So White by Adam Schwartz. In this post Adam explains why it was so important for him that the book be available in audio format.

Upon the first anniversary of the publication of Spanish So White: Conversations on the Inconvenient Racism of a ‘Foreign’ Language Education, I’m so pleased to announce that my book is now available in audio format. I narrate my own text, which was recorded, mixed and edited at Don Ross Productions, in Eugene, Oregon. I send special thanks to Multilingual Matters and the Center for Humanities at Oregon State University, both of whom provided essential funding for this effort.

From the outset of its writing, I attempted to draft and design Spanish So White as a highly accessible text. I’ve thought a lot about its accessibility this past year, and how this has or has not been realized for its readers. Leading up to and following the book’s publication, I was tasked with helping Multilingual Matters to publicize Spanish So White widely. Implicit in this effort is a request to ensure that the book’s content is engaging, relatable, accessible.

Even before pitching a proposal to Multilingual Matters and other publishers, I imagined that an accessible book about language education, race and Whiteness could and should take many forms. For instance, I was thrilled that my work would not only be available in print, but through the flexible modality of an ebook. Additionally, of primary priority was a need to depart from academic discourse whenever possible. This was most challenging. As researchers, we have been trained to communicate in ways that (1) assume an audience of fellow scholars whose work falls within a shared academic community of practice; and (2) reproduce standardized language in order to communicate “rigor”. Throughout my writing process, I thought about wisdom of my students, my family, or an unknown individual encountering this book online, or perhaps at the recommendation of another. Would my words invite those wisdoms into the “conversations” this book urges are necessary? Would a reliance on academic language reproduce the very Whiteness I intended to challenge?

Questions of accessibility also extended to the length, organization, and layout of my book. This is not a long volume. I wanted the book’s physical size to communicate a lightness, to counter the necessary heft of topics taken up within. I was fortunate to have creative input in the design of the cover: Suggested in its artistry is a kaleidoscopic view of what a Spanish “So White” might entail. In addition, I knew that a shorter book would cost less for the buying public. I think often about how my students regularly go into debt when purchasing course textbooks in a given semester; I therefore hoped that a book addressing issues of social inequity would be affordable as possible. Multilingual Matters assured me that my book could be sold under $20 in paperback, and indeed, such is the case.

Finally, many of us have very little time to read, and this includes those for whom regular reading is essential: Students and teachers. This book is written expressly for this audience, of which I am a part. I personally enjoy flexible access to audiobooks for this very reason, and I know many others do as well. I commute to my campus by car, but I also walk, run and take care of life around the house – my daily soundtrack necessarily alternates music and spoken narration of all sorts. If a book is particularly engaging, I’ll be inclined to locate a hard copy as well, so I may pivot between versions, and not lose access to visuals or the personality of a book’s packaging.

As a text that invites conversation, Spanish So White is waiting to be “heard” in this new format. I’m excited about the possibilities of its impact, just as other texts in their audio format, in fact, impacted my own writing of Spanish So White (Amanda Montell’s Wordslut, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World and Me, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, among many others). I’ve also assigned portions of a few texts, also read by their authors, for my own students. To engage with one’s written language is a gift, but listening to one’s voice suggests a particularly personal, dialogic connection.

Listening indeed invites us to engage differently. In my book, I write about listening as method, one where we must be present and awake in multiple senses. As such, this recording is meant to be shared. Listen with your friends, your family, and your students – whomever joins you in the work of dismantling racism and White supremacy. Take a break and debrief not only at the pause points, but whenever something resonates and invites you to more deeply think, feel and act. This book is yours, as ever.

One limitation to an audiobook, as alluded to above, is that its affordances do not include illustrations and other referents that appear in the print edition. While an audiobook may activate our imaginations, it might be helpful to see images, read captions and interact with pause points that require a more visual scaffolding. Please visit the Multilingual Matters website for the full complement of resources to accompany you on your listening journey. Along the way, you’ll be prompted when a visit to this site is necessary for your participation.

Publishing this book in triplicate – physical copy, ebook and audio – was a significant ask for Multilingual Matters. This is the first audiobook for my publisher, and while I’m so grateful they took a risk on me, I hope it’s not their last. My hope is that the audiobook engages with an expanded audience of reader-listeners, and that it inspires future researchers and educators to write with the accessibility of this format in mind.

Please let me know what Spanish So White sounds like to you. Let’s converse! My email is adam.schwartz@oregonstate.edu.

Adam Schwartz

This audiobook is available on Audible UK here, Audible US here and from other audiobook retailers. You can learn more about the book from the author himself in a recent online author event here.

What Happens When We Undo and Reimagine Gender and Language Together?

This month we published Redoing Linguistic Worlds edited by Kris Aric Knisely and Eric Louis Russell. In this post the editors explain why the book is so necessary.

Has anyone ever told you that the way you language is “wrong”? That it “doesn’t exist”? That “you can’t” do or say or sign something in the way that you have? And, yet, here you are, speaking, writing, signing – doing language in those ways. As a languager – someone doing any form of linguistic activity – you are existing, shaping your world, and sharing that world with others (even if some of those people attempt to use claims to linguistic authority and power to suggest that you are not).

The kind of language pedantry that would suggest that anyone’s language is impossible or wrong is not new. Language is always a site of contestation, controversy, expansion, and tension. Language seems to always stir up these kinds of attitudes about what can and cannot (or what should and should not) be. We live with language attitudes and, often, we accept them as more palatable covers for racism, classism, sexism, cissexism, binarism, and other oppressive systems.

Why? What are these attitudes doing in our worlds and what’s behind them? Frequently, language attitudes are used as a tool to constrain and conserve, as a part of futile attempts to circumvent a core truth: Language is always changing, in large part because the linguistic doings, redoings, and undoings of languagers are very real ways of expressing how they understand their worlds. And like the individuals and collectives that inhabit them, these worlds are always shifting.

With Redoing Linguistic Worlds we – and our contributors – ask: What happens when we undo and reimagine gender and language together? What happens when we move beyond cislingualism (i.e. the intersection between normative ideas about language and about gender modality that center and value cisgender positionalities and ways of doing language)? In what ways is this about a movement past gender binarism (i.e. the idea that gender is a man/woman binary)? How does this open up possibilities for moving past other binarities (e.g. gender modality as a trans/cis dichotomy)? Where and in what ways is this about an expansion of gender? When is it about fluidizing – a blurring of the very concept that people can, might, or should be gendered in any way? How might it be about expanding, fluidizing, burning down, and reimagining all at once?

For those of us whose genders exist beyond normative frames, these questions are evidently bound up in the ways that we experience our worlds and the languaging through which they are constantly remade; these questions are the intellectual exploration of our lives and linguacultures. For others of us – those who sit more comfortably within dominant frames for doing language and gender – these questions may appear less salient, less obligatory; they are not about our own self-understandings, but a means of respecting and honoring those of others. Yet, it is a fallacy to think that we are not all involved in this change-in-progress: When someone engages singular they or xe or any form that expands their linguistic world, they ask others –directly or indirectly – to also expand their own.

If you’re reading this blog post, these are perhaps lackluster examples – you undoubtedly are familiar with such expansions in Anglophone settings – but what of other linguacultural spaces? What does this “redoing the world through redoing languaging habits” look like for others, especially in communities in which gender markings are done more extensively than in English, such as those deploying canonically-labelled masculine and feminine forms? How are languagers remaking the linguistic world through German, Spanish, French, or Italian?

We began this project with the observation that there is relatively little attention given to these linguacultural contexts and their inhabitants – and that what has been given is often rendered through an appropriating, approximating lens. Rather than simply calque understandings of Anglophone patterns onto those of other languaging ecosystems, or map cislingual frames onto communities that reject these, we wanted to understand these from within. And hence Redoing Linguistic Worlds was born.

This volume, the first of its kind to our knowledge, brings into conversation scholars working on how people do language and gender together in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Each of the chapters takes a different perspective – some focusing on classroom pedagogy and teaching practices, others on empirical data from various languagers, still more taking ethnographic approaches to the question of how redoing is accomplished, how it affects the lives of languagers and what any redoing means, individually and collectively. We’re thrilled to see these works be made available to the public – and to participate in the conversations that they engender, wrestle with the questions they ask, and attend to the perspectives they manifest.

We join with many of our colleagues (both those who are a part of this volume and those working beyond its purview) to assert – as the late John Henner so directly and perfectly stated: “How you language is beautiful. Don’t let anyone tell you your language is wrong. Your languaging is the story of your life.” With Redoing Linguistic Worlds we begin to sketch the contours of these beautiful linguistic worlds that are undone, reimagined, and remade when the infiniteness of language meets that of gender.

(Spoiler alert: These infinite galaxies cannot be contained in one volume – We are already formulating the next volume, in which we hope to continue to expand the conversation past well-trodden spaces. We invite any, but especially those working in “less commonly studied” linguacultures and among their languagers, to contact us for more information.)

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Reimagining Dialogue on Identity, Language and Power edited by Ching-Ching Lin and Clara Vaz Bauler.

How Can We Meet the Language Learning Needs of Refugees?

We will soon be publishing Meeting the Needs of Reunited Refugee Families by Sarah Cox. In this post Sarah introduces her book.

This book explores the gap between policy, practice and academic literature within language learning for refugees. Both policy and academic literature recognise the benefits of multilingual approaches to language learning, however language classes are often based on monolingual pedagogies which centre on the need to use the target language as much as possible.

The book explores the language learning needs of a small group of refugee women and their children who had recently arrived in Scotland through family reunion. The book is based on a 5-month teaching study, using critical participatory action research to develop a multilingual approach, which combined translanguaging principles (where people use all their linguistic resources to learn) with decolonising methodology. The book is set within the context of arrival in the host community which is often a period of disorientation and profound change.

To draw the recommendations for multilingual approaches into teaching practice, rather than teaching and researching solely in English, I became a learner of the participants’ languages (Tigrinya, Tamil, Farsi and Arabic) to explore how teachers and researchers might use a multilingual approach even when they don’t speak the same languages as their learners/research participants. The translanguaging ‘stance’ we adopted meant embracing an openness to other languages and using them as much as possible in the research. In the book I talk about how this approach can be part of ‘linguistic hospitality’ which complements the principle of two-way, mutual integration laid out in Scotland’s New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy.

The book centres on three key findings:

1. The first is that decolonial, collaborative learner/teacher relationships bring particular benefits in terms of empowerment and confidence-building for refugee women during the initial stages of refugee arrival. These relationships were enhanced by the shift of power created by the teacher participating as a learner and by researching and teaching multilingually.
2. The second is the importance of the physical environment and the connections people have with their new physical surroundings as they develop a sense of belonging. In the book I draw on ecological approaches to language education and human geography to illustrate language learning as orientation to a new physical environment in a human and embodied way.
3. Thirdly I explore the ‘languaging’ within ‘translanguaging’ as a two-way dialogical process which valorises the full linguistic repertoire and encourages learners and teachers to draw on all their linguistic resources to learn. I consider ways that learners’ home languages can be harnessed in the classroom and detail our experiences of using translanguaging pedagogy. We found multilingual strategies brought particular benefits at the very beginning of learning English so soon after arrival.

The book illustrates how policy, practice and theory might be brought closer together as part of a decolonial approach to language teaching that shifts the balance of power in the classroom, repositions the roles of teacher / researcher and learner / participant and addresses inequality between languages by reducing the dominance of English. The themes of mutual integration and language learning as solidarity are at the heart of the book.

I hope the book will be relevant for anyone interested in ESOL, refugee integration, language teaching, language policy or researching multilingually.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Decolonising Multilingualism by Alison Phipps.

How to Organise Successful Online Intercultural Exchanges

This month we will be publishing Making Connections by John Corbett, Hugo Dart and Bruno Ferreira de Lima. In this post John summarises what the book can offer its readers.

Since the very first days of the rise of digital communications technology, many language educators have enthusiastically grasped the opportunity to connect their own language learners with others elsewhere in the world. Online exchanges, or telecollaborations, have been taking place since the early 1990s on a variety of platforms: email, Facebook and virtual learning environments such as ‘Moodle’ and ‘Canvas’. The focus of the exchanges can simply be the development of language competence, or, in ‘online intercultural exchanges’, there can be a dual focus on developing language and intercultural communicative competence.

While there have been many publications on the pedagogy and outcomes of online intercultural exchanges – describing online tasks that learners might undertake, and the capacities required of learners and instructors – little has been written explicitly to give guidance and reassurance to educators who are embarking on online intercultural exchanges for the first time. Most veterans of telecollaboration will say two things about online exchanges: they are certainly worth doing, but they can be frustrating. Novices who start organising an online exchange with the idealistic view that wonderfully rich interactions will occur, simply by putting learners in touch with each other, are probably in for a rude awakening. And yet, given the right conditions, wonderfully rich interactions can occur.

With this in mind, Making Connections: A Practical Guide to Online Intercultural Exchanges was written to give advice to the novice educator, and reassurance to the veteran. The slim, readable volume is informed by the experience of the three authors as much as by the research literature on the topic. In the book, readers will find sensible ideas on a range of crucial topics:

• Finding reliable partners
• Choosing a suitable platform
• Identifying common goals, both linguistic and intercultural
• Addressing questions of ethics and personal security
• Breaking the ice online
• Designing online tasks
• Developing rapport among participants
• Assessing learners’ participation
• Evaluating the online collaboration as a whole

There is also some advice for those educators who might wish to use their experience of running an online intercultural exchange, or participating in such an exchange, as the basis of a thesis or dissertation for a postgraduate degree. The three authors have, between them, decades of experience of participation in intercultural telecollaborations, and one of them used that experience as the basis for his PhD. The book draws on their long history of working on telecollaborations by giving actual examples of when exchanges go well – and when they go badly. The guidance will help organisers and teachers of online exchanges to avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls, and give them support when they hit the inevitable obstacles. All in all, Making Connections encourages language educators to open up the world for their learners – and supports those who are already doing so!

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Second Language Use Online and its Integration in Formal Language Learning by Andrew D. Moffat.

How Can Teachers Deepen the Connection Between Language Classrooms and the Outside World?

This month we published Intercultural Citizenship in Language Education edited by Kaishan Kong and Allison J. Spenader. In this post Allison discusses the importance of Intercultural Citizenship in the language classroom and how the book can inspire both inservice and aspiring teachers.

It’s back-to-school season where I live in the Midwest region of the United States of America. Heading back to the classroom inevitably means taking a closer look at resources for teaching and learning. Our new edited volume, Intercultural Citizenship in Language Education: Teaching and Learning Through Social Action, explores ways to deepen meaning and connection between language classrooms and the world. By engaging in Intercultural Citizenship work, teachers can bring enhanced relevance to their language classrooms and promote learner engagement.

As a faculty member who prepares teachers for World Language and Multilingual Learner classrooms, I work with undergraduate students who will soon be doing the important work of language teaching. What is important about our work as language teachers? How will we motivate our students to delve into their language studies, and to stay engaged with language learning for more than just a year or two?  Our new book gives both theoretical and concrete suggestions for aspiring language teachers who are preparing for their future classrooms. I plan to share with my students some of the insights from the first chapter in our volume. This chapter explains how the important work of Social Justice education is intrinsically connected to developing Intercultural Citizenship. My students will benefit from the specific examples of classroom activities for developing a deeper understanding of one’s identity, engaging students in critical analysis of resources, fostering dialogue, developing agency to act and providing opportunities for reflection. I also plan to share with my students the research findings regarding the role of study abroad in teacher education. My pre-service teachers have all engaged in international study and are curious to explore how those experiences will impact their work as language teachers.

Current teachers are busy envisioning how this school year is going to play out. Through which new lenses can they spark students’ interests in the content they will teach? One chapter describes how Professional Learning Communities can be used to support teachers’ pursuits of Intercultural Citizenship education. Another explores how virtual tandem learning allowed Chinese and American students to build Intercultural Citizenship through structured cultural discussions. The benefits of Contemplative Pedagogies are explored in yet another chapter in the volume, providing concrete suggestions for framing intercultural questions and experiences with students. Finally, our book also explores the opportunities for Intercultural Citizenship that naturally present themselves in elementary and middle level dual language immersion contexts.

The framework of Intercultural Citizenship in Language Education provides teachers with inspiration for curricular innovation that helps students use their language skills to enact social change both within and beyond their local communities. We hope that both inservice and aspiring teachers will find our new book to be a valuable resource!

Allison Spenader

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Intercultural Learning in Language Education and Beyond edited by Troy McConachy, Irina Golubeva and Manuela Wagner.

An Interview with Kyle McIntosh, the New Series Editor for NPLE

We recently welcomed Kyle McIntosh to the team as an additional series editor for our New Perspectives on Language and Education (NPLE) series, joining existing series editors Phan Le Ha and Joel Windle. In this post we get to know Kyle, his work and his hopes for the series.

How did you come to be the new series editor of NPLE?  

Kyle on a trip to Scotland last summer

I was invited by one of the editors, Joel Windle, to assist with the growing number of proposals and projects that were being submitted to the series. Joel contributed an article to the 2023 special issue of TESOL Quarterly, which I co-edited, and we presented together as part of a colloquium at the AAAL conference in Portland, Oregon. I also worked with him and Phan Le Ha, the other series editor, on a book that I edited. I greatly admire the work they both do, and so I am honored and excited to be joining them in this endeavor. 

How do you feel this series contributes to the field? 

I think NPLE encourages those who are working on innovative approaches to language and education or in underrepresented contexts to make their research publicly available as soon as possible, even if they’ve only recently completed a PhD program or are still trying to establish themselves in the field. We really stress the “new” in the series title, and sometimes that means taking chances on authors who may not yet be widely published. A valuable lesson I learned from my grandfather, who was a farmer in Indiana, is that you can’t keep planting the same thing in a field year after year and expect it to remain fertile; you need to switch things up so that the field can be enriched with new nutrients, or in this case, new perspectives. 

What do you see as the series editor’s role? 

First, it is important to look for the potential in all the proposals that we read. Some of them are very polished, and it’s easy to see how the project will develop. Then, it’s mainly a matter of deciding whether or not the project will be a good fit for the series. Other proposals might be a little rougher around the edges, but there could be an important question or captivating idea at its core. In that case, the role of the series editor is to provide constructive feedback to help the author(s) revise the proposal so that the rough edges can be polished, and the bright core can shine through. Once we’ve accepted a proposal, the role shifts somewhat, and we have to help guide the project to completion. This includes finding reviewers who are knowledgeable about the subject and willing to help the author(s) refine the project even further. So, you need to have built up some goodwill with others in the field. Once a book is published, then the editors should promote it in as many venues as possible and get other potential authors interested in submitting proposals to the series.   

What are your own personal research interests? 

My background is in TESOL and second language writing, but I have become increasingly interested in the politics of English as a global language, particularly the ways it has been impacted by the resurgence in nationalism worldwide following the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. These political shifts with regard to cross-border movement and cooperation present some difficult challenges for the internationalization of education and the promotion of cosmopolitan views, which we have perhaps taken for granted in past decades. This is the focus of the special issue of TESOL Quarterly that I mentioned earlier.  

What is the key to successful academic partnership? 

I always try to respect the time and views of those with whom I work. That doesn’t mean we will always be on the same page with every new project or proposal, but I try to understand where they are coming from, what they may be dealing with at the moment, and how they can best accomplish the task before us. Then, I make adjustments to my own approach or schedule to better accommodate them, and hope that understanding will be mutual.    

What are you most looking forward to about being a series editor for NPLE?  

As a new series editor, I am looking forward to the moment when the first book I have helped usher through from the proposal stage onward finally appears in print. There’s just something rewarding about holding a book that you have been involved with, whether as an author or editor, and knowing that others will be able to read it for years and years to come. 

How do you see the series developing and what direction would you like to see it take? 

The series has done a fantastic job of presenting interesting and varied perspectives on language teaching and learning, and I see it continuing in that direction with an increased focus on education research coming out of the Global South and on languages other than English.

We are looking forward to working with Kyle. If you have a proposal for the New Perspectives on Language and Education, please send it to Anna Roderick anna@multilingual-matters.com. 

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.

Spanish So White: Conversations on the Inconvenient Racism of a ‘Foreign’ Language Education

We recently published Spanish So White by Adam Schwartz. In this post the author explains how the book came about.

Before it existed as a book, Spanish So White long persisted as generous, personal invitations into conversation. Such invitations assume so many forms over my 20 years as a White Spanish language educator and researcher in the US. These come at me daily, and I cannot envision a future where I am not accountable to such a conversation. This book is my attempt to project that conversation outward and invite others – particularly White students and colleagues – to join me.

The invitations I reference initiate in ordinary, persistent ways in which I must contend with my own racism and relationship to racist logics. They might emerge as a question from an observant student, not one necessarily broadcast to signal my attention, about why “all my Spanish teachers have been White men with gringo accents.” Another invitation doubles as a memorable email from a middle school parent about why their son can’t simply focus on “mastering English first” before tending to the minutiae of a vocabulary quiz, one that shares the language of that family’s heritage.

And then, of course, there are the reminders that slyly re-emerge through well-circulated discourses about the use of Spanish for “foreign” or “world” language education. I have learned to interpret these as capitalist, racist messaging in advertisements and pedagogical literature that communicates tired tropes, which critical language researchers (Valdés, 2003; Leeman & Martínez, 2007) have called out for some time:

• “Good Spanish teaching” reproduces the vernacular of the educated in “Spanish-speaking” nation-states, aligned accordingly with Eurocentric standards for communication.
• To teach chiefly about the colonial origins of a language is to maintain ideas of linguistic purity.
• It is not a priority to acknowledge the existence, let alone condone the practice, of codeswitching or Spanglish in our classroom spaces or local communities.

Invitations into conversation about gringo accents, English “mastery” and “good Spanish teaching” beget larger questions about Spanish language education in the US. What a fascinating and frustrating cultural experiment it is. As educators, we may teach language, but whose voices are heard in the spaces we share? Who is vocalized, and who is silenced? And if language and voice inevitably emerges from racialized bodies, how do race and racisms sustain in these spaces? And how is a consciousness of our Whiteness – among many other privileged identities we may claim – essential to addressing these questions?

Adam Schwartz

The “we” here – the intended audience of this book – is White-identified, non-Latinx for whom Spanish is not a language of heritage. I include myself in this “we.” Put simply: If we as White people uphold and benefit from White privileges and White racisms, how must that logic extend to our language classrooms where Spanish captures a most troubling paradox? As a commodity, Spanish is enjoyed as a “foreign” or “world” language from whom bilingualism is beneficial and employable for White “non-native” learners and speakers. As an identity, Spanish is a language of heritage – an icon of ethnicity, perhaps – for those whose linguistic abilities are systemically ignored or misunderstood in institutions designed for and by White people.

These conversations, introduced as starting points in this book for multiple parties (ourselves, our students, fellow colleagues in teaching, friends and family) are reminders that we carefully consider Spanish language education in the US as a White supremacist project. This logic is not easy for many to understand. And yet, as my students and colleagues have demanded for some time, we must do so.

This is your invitation into conversation, and one for you to share with your own students, colleagues, friends and family. Join us via ebook, print volumes, or in audiobook format.

Adam Schwartz (he/his/él) is Associate Professor of Language, Culture and Society at Oregon State University. Contact him at adam.schwartz@oregonstate.edu.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Hablar español en Estados Unidos by Jennifer Leeman and Janet M. Fuller.

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.