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…

During the last 20 years, "Critical Inquiry in Language Studies" has played an important role in advancing research on critical applied linguistics. Although the level of scholarly interest in critical research and its visibility have increased, issues that critical research has attempted to problematize, such as normative ideologies of…

The study employed a blended approach of translanguaging pedagogy and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in an Anthropology class of a Bangladeshi public university. Data were collected through classroom observation, a pedagogical intervention, a focus group discussion with six students, and a semi-structured interview with the class…

The authors explore the theoretical and pedagogical premises of their critical systemic functional linguistics approach, which they developed to challenge the deficit positioning of bilingual students in the Southeast of the United States. As multilingual educators from postcolonial Ireland and India, the theoretical framework has helped the…

In line with what Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010) describe as a cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences and given the growing interest in cosmopolitanism as a result of neoliberalism (Bernstein et al., 2015) and the global rise in the use of English (Seargeant, 2012), this article investigates the ideology of cosmopolitanism by drawing on the…

Linguists and language specialists, as well as the lay public, have generally viewed language from a perspective that is fundamentally positivist in orientation. We tend to assume that language as an abstract entity exists as just such a knowable entity. More problematically, we assume that particular languages also exist as knowable entities…

Based on a long-term, evolving exploration regarding English language teaching and learning in English-and vernacular-medium settings in Gujarat, India, this paper offers a discussion of two key points: 1) the degree to which English is vernacularized in multilingual postcolonial contexts, and 2) ways in which vernacular pedagogic practices are…

Much of the research on the effects of tests on foreign and second-language classrooms has examined the impact or washback effect that commercial/institutional language tests, such as the TOEFL, have on teachers' instructional practices (Hughes, 1998; Wall & Alderson, 1993). Using a case study methodology, this study uncovered the ways in…