English Language Teaching in a Multilingual World
A special issue of Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102). This special issue belongs to the section "Teacher Education".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 March 2024) | Viewed by 9858
Special Issue Editors
Interests: teaching English in multilingual education contexts
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Ortega (2013:14) is often credited for using the term ‘the multilingual turn’ for the first time to explain one of the challenges in second language acquisition (SLA) in the 21st century. In fact, she believes that situating second language acquisition in a bi/multilingual context “will most radically impact on the field’s [i.e. SLA’s] continued and growing transdisciplinary relevance in the 21st century”. In a world where English is taught and learnt for multiple purposes, it seems facile to say that it needs to find its place as one language among many, and yet, for many teachers, their students’ multilingual background is ignored, or at best, regarded as a hindrance. Garcia, Flores, Seltzer, Wei, Otheguy and Rosa (2021:5) point to “the lack of attention to racialized bilingual students, whom teachers evaluate only through what they can do in English”. From the decolonial perspective of Garcia et al. (2021:6), they strive “to engage educators and their students in critical decolonial thinking about language and education”, a battle cry also raised by Gerald (2020) in his challenge to all English language teachers to decenter whiteness and the ‘ideal’ of sounding like a white native speaker of English. As Ortega (2018:65) points out, despite the growth of World Englishes, “SLA and WE seem to have led parallel, incommensurable lives” for the past sixty years, and she calls for a “multilingually-attuned ethos” among researchers and teachers.
Against this backdrop, we call for papers that address the teaching of English in a multilingual world, with a focus on issues such as:
- English language teacher education for a multilingual world;
- Researching English language acquisition beyond middle-class, higher education students;
- Decolonising English language teaching in a multilingual world;
- The place of translanguaging in English language teaching;
- Linguistic superdiversity and English as a medium of instruction;
- ‘Troubling the waters’, using lingua receptiva in multilingual ESL classrooms;
- Languaging and languagised learning.
Prof. Dr. Christa Van der Walt
Prof. Dr. Nhlanhla Mpofu
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- English language teaching
- English language teacher education
- multilingual education
- multilingualism
- translanguaging
- world Englishes
- decoloniality
- critical language awareness
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