Critical applied linguists, such as Kubota (2014), have stated that there seems to be a gap between theory and practice despite contributions from the so-called multi-pluri turn. In the field of English language teaching, this gap is evident among well-intended pedagogies which, despite addressing diversity, don't usually tackle the problem in depth. Decolonial thinking is a critical field of inquiry committed to excavating the genealogy of asymmetrical power relations in history with an emphasis on how racialized bodies, cultures, identities and languages turn out to explain oppression and marginalization. Once we identity and interrogate how these oppressive mechanisms were engendered by Modernity/Coloniality and how colonial traces persist in contemporary society (Mignolo, 2000), we might commit ourselves towards the interruption of coloniality in daily-live racial micro-aggressions. What do English scholars, teachers, teacher educators have to do with such things? Along with Kubota, I advocate in favor of approaching language studies to the above concerns brought by decolonial thinking. This seems paramount specially for those involved with English language education research and practice for English language holds a privileged and controversial condition as consequence of colonial and imperialist traces. New terminologies have arisen as a response to monolingual and monocultural orientations to language, such as the concept of English as a Lingua Franca (EFL). As this symposium addresses, over the years, ELF has become a full-fledged research field generating important scholarship all over the world. This proposal is a call to further invest in the approach of ELF research to issues of decoloniality for its potential to prevent English teachers from self-marginalization (Kumaravadivelu, 2012). Regardless of advances in ELF theorizations, normative centripetal forces seem stronger than ever in neoliberal society particularly among global south English users whose disapproved mestisaje linguistica (Anzaldúa, 1987) « needs to be fixed ». This talk aims at presenting the constraints and potentialities of ELF in contemporary Brazilian educational policies and practices. In doing so, results from an exploratory focal group study composed by English student teachers will be shared, with an emphasis on how participants make meaning of ELF. Preliminary analysis show constraints and potentialities in the implementation of ELF as English teachers' agency is either thrived or withered depending on how diverging school contexts respond to neoliberal and colonialist driving forces and the prevailing fiction of monolingual imaginaries.
Reference:
Anzaldua, G. (1987). How to tame a wild tongue. Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Pp. 53-64. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Kubota, R. (2014). The Multi/Plural Turn, Postcolonial Theory, and Neoliberal Multiculturalism: complicities and implications for applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 37(4), 474-494.
Kumaravadivelu, B. (2012). Individual identity, cultural globalization and teaching English as an international language: The case for an epistemic break. In L. Alsagoff, S. L. Mckay, G. Hu, & W. A. Renandya (Eds.), Principles and Practices for Teaching English as an International Language (p. 9-27). New York: Routledge.
Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
