Search

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 volume aims to provide insights into the process of knowledge construction in EFL/ESL writing - from classrooms to research sites, from the dilemmas and risks NNEST student writers experience in the pursuit of true agency to the confusions and conflicts academics experience in their own writing practices. Knowledge construction as discussed in this volume is discussed from individualist, collectivist, cross-cultural, methodological, pedagogical, educational, sociocultural and political perspectives. The volume features a diverse array of methodologies and perspectives to sift, problematise, interrogate and challenge current practice and prevailing writing and publishing subcultures. In this spirit, this volume wishes to break new ground and open up fresh avenues for exploration, reflection, knowledge construction, and evolving voices.

Building on both Western and Asian theoretical resources, the book examines how EIL teachers see themselves as professional and individual in relation to their work practices. It reveals the tensions, compromises, negotiations and resistance in their enactment of different roles and selves, especially when they are exposed to values often associated with the English-speaking West. The ways they perceive their identity formation problematise and challenge the seemingly dominant views of identity as always changing, hybrid and fragmented. Their experiences highlight the importance of the sense of belonging and being, connectedness, continuity and a coherent growth in identity formation. Their attachment to a particular locality and their commitment to perform the moral guide role as EIL teachers serve as the most powerful platform for all their other identities to be constructed, negotiated and reconstituted.