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…

Decades of theorisation and research on the teaching and learning of second-language writing have hardly created coherent theoretically profound and practically relevant understandings of writing instruction. This article discusses the possibilities and insights created by bringing personal meaningfulness into the realm of writing pedagogy.…

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…

Writing is often a massive challenge for the learners who study English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Many EFL practitioners are searching for solutions to help learners improve the level of their writing. In this auto-ethnographic study, two narratives are discussed. In the first narrative, the primary challenges of EFL writing encountered by a…