The chapters in this book call attention to vulnerabilities, challenges and risks for applied linguistics researchers and the communities they work with across a broad range of contexts from the Global North and South, and in both signed and spoken languages. Together they provide insights on both academic and professional practice across several areas: the vulnerabilities involved in researching, the limitations of traditional epistemologies, the challenges inherent in the repertoire of methodologies and pedagogies employed by applied linguists, and the effectiveness of practical responses to language-related problems. The book encourages those involved in applied linguistics to consider their own practice and their relationship with the communities, policies and educational contexts they engage with in the course of their teaching, research and activism.

This edited collection provides research-informed guidance on how reflexivity may be practised in applied linguistics research. Specifically, we promote reflexivity as an essential hallmark of quality research and argue that doing reflexivity confers greater transparency, methodological rigour, depth, and trustworthiness to our scholarly inquiries. The collection features perspectives from different sub-fields of applied linguistics, including intercultural communication, language education, and multilingualism, and draws on data from a range of settings, including language cafés, classrooms, workplaces, and migration and displacement contexts. Each chapter follows a unified structure: theoretical background, context of the empirical study used as a backdrop for the chapter, an analysis of how reflexivity played out throughout the study, and conclusions which include takeaway points for other researchers. This approach allows readers to gain a sound understanding of the challenges and affordances of doing reflexivity in concrete examples of applied linguistics research whilst also gaining guidance on how to nurture and report on researcher reflexivity as this unfolds throughout the lifetime of a project. This book will appeal to students and scholars in applied linguistics, particularly those with an interest in research methods in the areas of language education, multilingualism, and intercultural communication.

Drawing on the underrepresentation of the Global South in global knowledge production with a focus on the existing inequalities, the book highlights the importance of postcolonial narratives within Global Southern epistemologies in English language teaching (ELT) and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Chapters consider the epistemological landscapes of these fields, their dedication to English teaching and English-related topics, and the intersection of the coloniality of language and the supremacy of English worldwide. The book explores the type of discussion that is needed to advance a more nuanced understanding of sociopolitical circumstances and how they shape our academic practices and theorizations of ELT and TESOL. In doing so, chapters examine the current geopolitics of knowledge that are found in journal publishing, citing how it favours the Global North, and further exploring ways of decolonizing language practices, teaching approaches and research cultures. Calling for greater visibility and recognition of Southern ways of knowing within ELT and TESOL practice and research, the book will be an essential reading for scholars, researchers and students of TESOL, ELT, Applied Linguistics and multilingualism.

This book embarks on an ever-expanding array of language, academic mobility, neoliberalism, and accompanying rich scholarly debates. It examines the ways in which international English language teachers in Saudi Arabia’s higher education system position themselves, negotiate, interact, adjust, make sense of their classroom dynamics, and validate their senses of selves and pedagogies in their day-to-day (dis)engagement with their institutions and encounters at work. Informed by rich empirical data from a multi-year, multi-site project in addition to other qualitative studies, the book reveals on-the-ground complexities involving speaker status, language, ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, sociocultural factors, emotion labour, work dynamic and professionalism. It promotes thinking beyond normative ideologies on marginalisation, the native and non-native speaker dichotomy, linguistic, racial, religious and ethnic (inter)relations, and translanguaging pedagogies, while also offering new material for original theorisation in multi-Englishes multilingualism, local-trusting-local and the limits of negotiability.

This book critically and reflectively engages with the ‘Language Problem’ in the contemporary multilingual university. It paints a complex picture of the lived multilingual realities of teachers and students in universities across geographies such as Pakistan, Timor-Leste, South Korea, Bangladesh, Somaliland, Afghanistan, Fiji, Colombia, and the UK (including Northern Ireland) and focuses on three overall analytic themes: language and colonial epistemologies, language policies and practices, and language and research. Globalisation, global knowledge economy, and neoliberal governance has significantly impacted higher education by elevating colonial languages, particularly English, to a global academic lingua franca. Universities now collaborate and compete globally, with English emerging as the dominant language for education and research. The imposition, or uncritical adoption, of English poses profound political, cultural, and epistemic challenges for those who have to use the language in everyday university administration, research, and teaching and also intertwines with issues of race, gender, coloniality, and social class. This volume addresses this as higher education’s multifaceted Language Problem which requires interdisciplinary collaboration and critical debate, and ultimately aims towards understanding multilingualism in higher education across both the Global North and South. The contributions to this book continue to remind us of the coloniality of language and of the linguistic stratification that governs epistemological structures and power relations in the academy. It will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and practitioners of higher education, applied linguistics, education policy and politics, and sociology of education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Teaching in Higher Education.

This book investigates different ways in which neoliberal language and teaching policies have influenced the English language in global south countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Through the three main sub themes covered by the book, namely Neoliberalism and English Language Teaching Policies, Neoliberalism Ideology as in English Language Teaching Materials, and Experiences of Neoliberal Subjects, it investigates various aspects and means through which neoliberalism is realized in a variety of contexts. Through the first subtheme the volume covers the English language education policies of Chile, Bangladesh, India, and Morocco. The second sub theme concerns how different neoliberal values such as consumerism, entrepreneurship, and individualism are localized and constructed in the locally developed English language materials of Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The third sub theme includes studies on the impact of neoliberalization of English in relation to Colombian, Brazilian, and Pakistani stakeholders. This book is a valuable resource for academics, postgraduate students, researchers, policy makers, educators, and practitioners who are interested in neoliberalism in English language.

Language and Decolonisation is the first collection to bring together views from across scholarly communities that are committed to the agenda of decolonising knowledge in language study. Edited by leading figures in the field, the chapters offer new insights on how ‘decolonising’ can be adopted as a methodology for charting the next steps in solving practical language-related problems in educational and related social policy areas. Divided into two sections, the book covers the coloniality of language, the materiality of culture and colonial scripts, the decolonisation imperative, multilingualism discourse and decolonisation, and decolonising languages in public discourse. With 20 chapters authored by experts from across the globe, this pioneering collection is an essential reference and resource for advanced students, scholars, and researchers of language and culture, sociolinguistics, decolonial studies, racial studies, and related areas.