In this personal reflection, Sonia Nieto recounts the lessons she learned about language and literacy from learning to speak Spanish and then English; to reading and writing; and the impact of these lessons on her identity, teaching, research, and life; and, more broadly, on the fields of education and literacy.

In this paper, I narrate highlights of my long process of learning and teaching English as a foreign language in mainland China and Australia, presenting a picture of the practices of learning and teaching English in mainland China from the bottom up. Over the past 50 years, English learners in mainland China, as Gao Yihong has written, have…

This chapter is based on heuristic research and phenomenology which honors the dialectic of personal narratives as a way to process and understand the politics of change centered on hegemony, discourse, and cultural plurality. This methodology utilizes personal narrative and dialog as way to consider the importance of reflecting on individual…