Reporting on the research collaborations of a group of teachers, graduate students and a university professor, this book weaves together their collective insights about how classrooms might be better for students of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, abilities and socio-economic circumstances, and better for teachers as well. It also shows how research collaborations can result in rich and compelling descriptions of classroom events. Written in a style accessible to teachers and student teachers, it introduces sociocultural perpectives on identity, classroom and community...

When analyzed in multilingual contexts, English is often treated as an entity that is separable from its linguistic environment. It is often the case, however, that multilinguals use English in hybrid and transcultural ways. This book explores how multilingual East Africans make use of English as a local resource in their everyday practices by examining a range of domains, including workplace conversation, beauty pageants, hip hop and advertising. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of multivocality, the author uses discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches to demonstrate the range of...

Based on participant observation in a California English as a Second Language family literacy program, this ethnographic study examines how the complexly gendered life histories of immigrant adults shaped their participation in both the English language classroom and the education of their children, within the contemporary sociohistorical context of increasing Latin American immigration to the United States. Through outlining the connections between (gendered) identity work and language learning, this study builds theoretical and empirical justification for teachers to negotiate classroom...

This is the first in-depth examination of "half-Japanese" girls in Japan focusing on ethnic, gendered and embodied 'hybrid' identities. Challenging the myth of Japan as a single-race society, these girls are seen struggling to positively manoeuvre themselves and negotiate their identities into positions of contestation and control over marginalizing discourses which disempower them as 'others' within Japanese society as they begin to mature. Paradoxically, at other times, within more empowering alternative discourses of ethnicity, they also enjoy and celebrate cultural, symbolic, social...

It has been said there are more Chinese learning English than there are Americans. We all have a sense that the first decades of the third millennium, including the effects of the global financial recession, signal dramatic changes to the shape of the world to come. China's emergence as a superpower is one of the few certainties in this rapidly changing world. What is less well realised is the critical role which China's decisions about English will play in the world's communication profile. This unique volume explores this question looking at the debates on identity, cultural values and...

This book examines how critical literacy pedagogy has been implemented in a classroom through a year-long collaboration between the author (a researcher) and an EAP teacher. It details the teacher's introduction to functional grammar and accompanying critical literacy approaches to EAP, and her growing critical language and discourse awareness of power and meaning making in the classroom. The book traces her evolving classroom practices and addresses how powerful discourses in social circulation found their way into the classroom via the curriculum materials the students encountered. The...

Debates about the place of mission work in English Language Teaching continue to rage, and yet full-length studies of what really happens at the intersection of ELT and evangelical Christianity are rare. In this book, Johnston conducts a detailed ethnography of an evangelical language school in Poland, looking at its Bible-based curriculum, and analyzing interaction in classes for adults. He also explores the idea of a relationshipa (TM) in the context of the school and its mission activity, and more broadly the cultural encounter between North American evangelicalism and Polish...

This book examines racism and racialized discourses in the ELT profession in South Korea. The book is informed by a number of different critical approaches to race and discourse, and the discussions contained in the chapters offer one way of exploring how the ELT profession can be understood from such perspectives. Observations made are based on the understanding that racism should not be viewed as individual acts of discrimination, but rather as a system of social structures. While the book is principally concerned with language teaching and learning in South Korea, the findings are...