Teaching English literacy in First Nations Australian communities is bound up with the policy aim of improving the social and economic outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the desire to acknowledge, recognise and respect their unique cultural identities, languages and knowledges. But for English literacy teachers working…

This essay arises out of critical reflections in which I have engaged through my teaching in an Indonesian University. All my students are learning English as a foreign language. They typically struggle with how they are positioned ideologically, especially in relation to the so-called 'native speaker'. My goal as an English educator is to free…

This essay presents a decade-long reflective account of resisting (in) and appropriating English that I have experienced as a young, female academic from the Middle East who has been engaged in teaching and researching Academic English pedagogy transnationally. Informed by Bakhtin's philosophy of dialogue and his notions of insided-ness,…

This article aims to visibilise the opportunities for decolonising standardised language practices for multilingual students learning English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) in Australian schools. We suggest that a decolonising approach to language education would value the multilingual, non-standard, and diverse language practices of…

Efforts to decolonise foreign/English language teaching involve recognising the importance of diverse meaning-making resources rooted in speakers' socio-cultural realities, traditions, and values alongside English practices. This focus highlights the value of multicultural and multilingual environments, particularly in dominant English-speaking…

This essay reports on the findings of a study of Swedish teenagers who have a free-time interest of creative writing in English. The essay includes extracts from interviews in which the participants explain their motivations to start their writing activity and continue with it over a longer period. Having been inspired initially by a desire to…

This article uses Karen Barad's agential realism to re/world the English language as used in Pakistan. My arguments draw on my students' term project where they not only 'resist' the ex-coloniser's language by creatively adapting it while translating an Urdu text into English but make gender related and political statements. Using post/colonialism…

China's impressive growth over the last three decades warrants the need to re-evaluate the position and positioning of English in the country's educational system. For long, English has been taught and learned compulsorily alongside Chinese and maths in primary and secondary schools in the mainland of China. It was not until recent years that the…

This paper is an extension of our 2021 research into pre-service teachers' linguistic autobiographies in a culturally diverse South African university. The paper, which is presented as conversations, examines what we learned about ourselves and our students through their reflective writing, our reflective writing, and our ensuing conversations.…

In this article, I present a thought experiment highlighting some lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic for language education. I focus on two characteristics of the pandemic and the English language teaching (ELT) industry. First, during the pandemic, humans appeared to grapple with the ancient problem of killer viruses, with modern medicine initially…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, academics and students have had to respond to the unexpected and unplanned shift from face-to-face to online teaching. Since teaching and learning through online portals has been a new experience, this has prompted the academics in the English Language and Literature Department at Çankaya University to seek…

On the path towards transformatory approaches to education and empowerment of students and teachers, this study made an attempt to explore literacy and critical literacy (CL) from the perspectives of teachers working in a tertiary institution in Oman. For this research, an exploratory research design with a critical stance was employed. Interviews…

One of the consequences of globalisation in recent years has been the unprecedented spread of English as the world's lingua franca. This has particular resonance in postcolonial countries, such as Pakistan and Australia, whose histories have been strongly shaped by English colonisers in contrasting ways. Written from the perspective of someone who…

This 'inclusive practitioner research' study presents a collaborative 'virtual intercultural fieldwork' project in which Balinese and Chinese university students communicated in English to explore similar emic cultural concepts related to the Japanese concept of "amae" (presumed indulgence); namely, "manying" (Balinese) and…

Nurturing critically engaged and reflective English language teachers is vital if the educational systems they work in are to change dynamically in response to learners' evolving needs. Given that criticality involves constant reflexive questioning of both public discourse and one's own beliefs and assumptions, teacher educators have a…