This article examines how political discourse, language ideologies, recent Chinese curriculum reforms, and their representations in the media are inextricably related. Using the "Speak Mandarin Campaign" as background for the inquiry, I focus on textual features of the various media sources, TV advertisements, campaign slogans, official…

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) scholars have recently drawn on critical race theory (CRT) to critique and understand the propagation of Whiteness as a norm associated with native English speakers. However, the area of language studies, more broadly defined, has yet to develop the same link with CRT. To this end, this…

Narratives have become increasingly important in the field of applied linguistics, as recent publications have illustrated, yet narrative analysis could still be considered undertheorized. This article outlines a specific, dialogical approach to the narrative analysis of data in qualitative research. Building on Bakhtin's notion of dialogue,…

This article introduces the concept of "nation-state/colonial governmentality" as a framework for analyzing the ways current language ideologies marginalize the language practices of subaltern populations. Specifically, the article focuses on the innate limitations of re-appropriating nation-state/colonial governmentality in an attempt…

In this article, the author considers Daisaku Ikeda's (1928-) educational philosophy in the context of English education policies in Japan. The author begins by explicating Ikeda's concepts of wisdom versus knowledge and "society for education" (e.g., Ikeda, 2000; Sadovnichy & Ikeda, 2002). He then suggests consideration of these concepts, if not…

Over the centuries, first Latin and then French, German, and Russian have receded in perceived importance as languages of science. Other powerful languages with extensive internal scientific discourse, such as Japanese and Chinese, have always been largely excluded. The dominance of English has elevated the reputation of English-language…

When the International Society for Language Studies (ISLS) was founded in 2002 and the journal that is now "Critical Inquiry in Language Studies (CILS)" was in the planning stages, we recognized a need for an interdisciplinary, or perhaps even transdisciplinary (see Kaufman, Moss, & Osborn, 2003), venue for the publication of research on language…

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the micro-interactional processes by which powerful and powerless identities are locally reconstructed. The article specifically examines the interplay between consent and resistance to law-breaking identities. Data consist of transcripts of 45 incidents in which highway patrol officers issue traffic…

This article describes how Japanese TV programs adopting a consultation framework construct different realities for women and men concerning a specific social phenomenon, namely adultery. To do so, two perspectives, the theory of metaphor promoted by George Lakoff and membership category analysis, are combined toward a discursive analysis which…

This article looks at new information and communication technologies (ICTs) as sites of public pedagogy in that they produce particular forms of knowledge and literacies and reproduce representations that are always mediated through specific social relations. Public pedagogy as a process that constitutes a broader category beyond classroom…

From a critical language perspective, the main issues facing education of immigrant populations are the ways in which these populations are segregated as the Other and how educational practices often work to perpetuate a fringe status. In this paper, I draw upon both discursive perspectives on policymaking and pedagogical practices to address the…

This article first attempts to supply a definition of peoples' identity as scientific as possible and takes a close look at the conditions that make creativity possible. The study of science history clearly indicates that the periods of great creativity were those when communication was sufficient to make remote partners stimulate one another but…

In light of the ongoing attention to standards-based education in U.S. schools and the concern over how to effectively develop literacy skills in a first, let alone a second, language, this article reports on the drafting of the K-16 Student Standards for Learning Esperanto in the United States. Esperanto is ideally suited to aid children in the…

The article explores the transition from the linguistic imperialism of the colonial and postcolonial ages to the increasingly dominant role of English as a neoimperial language. It analyzes "global" English as a key dimension of the U.S. empire. U.S. expansionism is a fundamental principle of the foreign policy of the United States that can be…

This article pursues two main lines of inquiry: How might postcolonial theory, feminist and postcolonial translation studies sharpen our critical understandings of the micro- and geopolitics of English language learning? What kinds of pedagogical practice might such new developments ground in order to foster our learners' critical ways of knowing…