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,…

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 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.…

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…

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…

The government of the Sultanate of Oman actively promotes the value of English as a global "lingua franca" to support modernization and national economic growth. This policy, however, creates difficulties for many teachers, who find themselves implementing certain practices that conflict with a vision of English language teaching (ELT)…

This article records and evaluates a student's learning journey in two modules on an MA (Education) English Language Teaching (ELT) programme: an Oracy and ELT Pedagogy module and an Educational Technologies module. The notions of 'exploratory talk' and 'task-based learning' are explored using a single case study with material drawn from the…

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 the long process of my encounters with English language learning and teaching, manifesting characteristics of English teaching at different levels of schools in mainland China. After viewing the limitations of English teaching in mainland China from my fresh point of view as a UK visiting scholar, some suggestions are…

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…

The rapid and wide spread of English has given rise to its lingua franca status, which in turn, changes the nature of English and English teaching at the tertiary level. This paper, based on a survey, discusses some of the problems with the current English curriculum used in Chinese universities and proceeds to offer some suggestions for a more…