In this polylog to the special issue on "The rise of Chinese language education policies in the oil-rich Arabian Gulf: New players, discourses and linguistic markets," three researchers with different personal and professional connections to the three languages 'at play' in the region -- English, Chinese, and Arabic -- offer their…

This paper explores graphic novels that address issues of diversity and migration and enhance multiliteracies learning in the German classroom. By adopting a multiliteracies approach, the paper proposes a transformative learning approach that explores these issues within graphic novels. Examples of learning activities from an intermediate course…

This study investigates the efforts towards promoting the decolonial teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language in instructional materials adopted in early Portuguese courses at higher education institutions in the United States. A framework for qualitative analysis of course materials, textbooks, and syllabi was designed based on Zavala's…

This article uses English as a Foreign Language education as a lens to bring a post-colonial perspective to the conceptualisation and application of global citizenship education in Global South contexts. To achieve this objective, four standardised English as a Foreign Language textbooks that are currently used in public middle schools in Algeria…

This paper explores the relationship between language education and identity realization and the consequences of choosing either an Indigenous or a colonial language education approach. The focus is on the African postcolonial context; however, the arguments are also substantiated by examples from other parts of the world. I argue for a…

With the goal of contributing to ongoing efforts to decolonize ELT, this article addresses the potential of microanalytic research into classroom interaction in disrupting hegemonic forces of coloniality. Microanalytic research provides a step-by-step, minute examination of interactional discourse, and it has the capacity to reveal gaps between…

When Spivak (1988/2010) provocatively raised the question "Can the subaltern speak?" and concluded that they cannot, she did not mean that the subaltern literally or physically cannot speak. She meant that Western/Eurocentric/White ways of knowing and languaging produce colonial, epistemic violence that silences subaltern bodies. In this…

This review article reflects on the notion of pedagogy in English language teaching and teacher education. To advance in the state of the art at stake, forty-four articles were profiled out of eighty-eight to trace how pedagogy has been built as a universal that carries onto-epistemological consequences. The analysis here concentrated on the…

Testing practices and the construct of English both serve separately and interactionally to promote activities of modernity and coloniality. Tests categorize and rank learning and knowledge in discrete, static ways. The construct of the English language through standardization and other processes upholds linguistic purism ideologies. Such concerns…

This article adopts a sociomaterial perspective on ELT materials and illustrates how a mandatory textbook is used as a springboard to create decolonizing relations in the classroom ecology. Sociomaterial perspectives view learning as not the transmission but the emergence of knowledge from embodied relations, which shifts the focus from the…

Many people consider the Internet to be refreshingly democratic; everybody appears to have a 'voice,' and there is much sharing of 'open' content. The use of the internet for the learning/teaching of languages often seems particularly apt: People from different countries practice a language as they interact online, at the same time deepening their…

The Portuguese policies of colonisation and Christianisation were closely linked. In 1549, the Portuguese monarchy adopted Catholicism as the official religion of the colonial administration and requested that the Society of Jesus establish the Catholic faith among the indigenous people in Brazil. The Jesuits established catechesis, founded the…

This article reports data from a qualitative study conducted within the elitist English-medium schools in three cities of Pakistan to claim that theory building, and English teaching practices are still modeled on monolingual biases inherent in the orthodox notions of linguistic purism and Anglo-normative traditions of the 1990s. Orthodoxy is…

English is core to HE (higher education) globally, with both HE and English seen as pathways to success for students. Yet, access to English is unequal and colonial ideologies associate English with Anglophone settings. Much of the research on English in HE has focused on elite institutions and students, while the majority of the world's HE…

Language tests, including international high-stakes English proficiency tests widely used around the world, are to be viewed as ideological constructs connected with power relations and center-periphery demarcations at different social levels. In this paper, we examine the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) as an instance of…