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This book embarks on an ever-expanding array of language, academic mobility, neoliberalism, and accompanying rich scholarly debates. It examines the ways in which international English language teachers in Saudi Arabia's higher education system position themselves, negotiate, interact, adjust, make sense of their classroom dynamics, and validate their senses of selves and pedagogies in their day-to-day (dis)engagement with their institutions and encounters at work. Informed by rich empirical data from a multi-year, multi-site project in addition to other qualitative studies, the book reveals on-the-ground complexities involving speaker status, language, ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, sociocultural factors, emotion labour, work dynamic and professionalism. It promotes thinking beyond normative ideologies on marginalisation, the native and non-native speaker dichotomy, linguistic, racial, religious and ethnic (inter)relations, and translanguaging pedagogies, while also offering new material for original theorisation in multi-Englishes multilingualism, local-trusting-local and the limits of negotiability.

This book inspects higher education reform in market-oriented socialist Vietnam, with a focus on newness narratives and enquiry. Engaging in dialogic conversations with global and regional forces and exploring convergences in the domains of policy, curriculum, research, pedagogy, and society, chapter authors analyse ideologies that have entered Vietnam's educational landscape. Chapters include discussions of post-Soviet legacies, socialist thought, privatization, neoliberalism, global rankings, academic freedom, autonomy, and elitism, as well as the actors, discourses and practices through which they manifest. In so doing, authors'commentaries juxtapose phenomena in Vietnam with other national contexts such as the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam, Japan, Australia, and Trinidad and Tobago.

In this book, Phan Le-Ha identifies and discusses four growing self-sustained/sustaining fundamental phenomena in transnational education (TNE), namely (1) the planned, evolving and transformative mediocrity behind the endorsement of English-medium education legitimized by the interactive Asia-the West relationship; (2) the strategic employment of the terms ‘Asia/Asian'and ‘West/Western'by all stakeholders in their perceptions and construction of choice, quality, rigour, reliability and attractiveness of programs, courses, and locations; (3) the adjusted desire for an imagined (and often misinformed) ‘West'among various stakeholders of transnational education; and (4) the assigned and self-realized ownership of English by otherwise normally on-the-margin groups of speakers. A focus on how these phenomena impact questions of identity and desire in TNE is a running theme.The above phenomena are discussed against the backdrop of ‘the rise of Asia'sentiment and how this sentiment has played out in interactions and relationships between ‘the West'and ‘Asia'and among Asian institutions and various entities. Phan Le-Ha's examination of the identified phenomena in TNE has been informed by her multi-layered engagement with the dialectic of the Asia-the West relationship, her critical take on certain pro-Asia and decolonisation scholarship, and her interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to theorise the field and the specific topic under scrutiny.Phan Le-Ha shows that the current Asia chooses (not necessarily by force but largely by will and often with an informed and well-articulated agency) to go with the idea of the West and often desires an affiliation with the West either directly or indirectly, something that is getting more intense in the context of globalization, regionalization, and commercialization of education. The rise of Asia has made the idea of the West even more looked-for in Asia. TNE in Asia, in many ways, is the transforming and dynamic transit point, a layover that facilitates entry into a wanted destination – the West and/or the idea of the West. The West and Asia need one another more than ever in the context of the internationalization and commercialization of higher education. What's more, the West and Asia have hardly ever been mutually exclusive but have rather been in an eventful love-and-obsession relationship with each other. This is the very dialectic proposition that Phan Le Ha takes throughout this book while paying specific attention to transnational higher education in the greater Asian region including the Middle East, following her several research projects conducted in the region since 2005 to date. Transnational Education Crossing'the West'and'Asia'explores: • English, Internationalisation of Higher Education, and Identity: Increasing Academic Monolingualism and English-only Package • Transnational Education and Dream Realization: From the Philippines to Vietnam, From Afghanistan to Dubai, From Everywhere in Asia to Thailand • Desiring International /Transnational Education: Theorisation of Key Concepts and Next Steps from HereThe book will be of interest to researchers in the field of transnational education, Asia education and education policy.

This book addresses how Western universities have constructed themselves as global providers of education, and are driven to be globally competitive. It examines how the term'international'has been exploited by the market in the form of government educational policies and agencies, host institutions, academia and the mass media. The book explores matters relating to the role of the English language in international education in general and the field of TESOL in particular. It demonstrates how English and TESOL have exercised their symbolic power, coupled with the desire for international education, to create convenient identities for international TESOL students. It also discusses the complexity surrounding and informing these students'painful yet sophisticated appropriation of and resistance to the convenient labels they are subjected to.