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English language teaching has become a global phenomenon, involving racially and culturally diverse teachers travelling across national borders. While these transnational teachers bring diversity to host countries, the superiority of White native English speakers continues to be reinforced. This raciolinguistic ideology can uniquely shape the subjectivities of English language teachers of colour who sojourn abroad. Focusing on three African American female teachers of English who were participating in the English Program in Korea (EPIK) to teach in South Korean schools and posting YouTube videos to describe their experiences, this qualitative study examined the nature of their experiences and intersecting subjectivities regarding race, colour, language, gender, and nationality, as well as privilege and marginality as they are expressed online. The analysis focused on how intersectionality, a notion originally developed to describe Black women's unique experiences in the United States, would be applied to this transnational context. A thematic analysis of a total of 12 videos revealed these EPIK teachers' multifaceted and negotiated subjectivities as American teachers, victims of racial prejudice, and ambassadors with a mission to educate local people. These subjectivities signify the intersectionality of privilege and marginality, which are embedded in the local and global ideologies and power relations.

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 language and language education, continue to dominate policies, practices, and ordinary people's consciousness in the real world. Critical approaches to research should be grounded in praxis, namely, committed reflection and action for transformation. In order to further promote critical language studies with a vision of praxis, it is necessary to amplify a synergy between producing scholarly knowledge within academe and making efforts to put the knowledge into practice through concrete actions for transformation in the real world. This article examines some challenges that scholars face in forging the synergy, including institutional constraints and neoliberal expectations that dissociate research from local impact. Proposed ideas for praxis-oriented scholarly work include, but are certainly not limited to, decolonizing our minds, paying attention to and intentionally making a commitment to transformation, actively engaging with public scholarship for knowledge mobilization, legitimizing and encouraging multilingual scholarship, changing institutional expectations and practices, and actively connecting with communities.

Foreign language education primarily aims to cultivate learners' competence to communicate in an additional language. However, the meaning of communication competence is not entirely transparent, especially given the current neoliberal valorization of communication in the knowledge economy. The meaning of communication can be scrutinized in two contradictory trends observed in language education: the exclusive focus on teaching English as a global language, signifying a homogenizing trend, and increased scholarly attention to the heterogeneity of linguistic forms and practices. This article examines how communication competence is differentially understood by policymakers and corporate workers in Japan. The authors examine a government report that evaluated the attainment of educational goals for coping with globalization and contrasting it with interview data drawn from another study on the communicative experiences of Japanese transnational workers in Asia. Political discourse analysis and content analysis reveal the paradoxical nature of what can be called neoliberal communication competence, which on the one hand conflates global communication with use of the four measurable skills in English to transmit information and, on the other hand, challenges linguistic norms, foregrounding plurilingualism and co-constructed interactional competence. Transformation of policies and pedagogies can be pursued by appropriating neoliberal communication competence for achieving broader educational goals.

The impact of neoliberalism on language education has recently attracted scholars' attention. Linguistic entrepreneurship is a conceptual lens through which neoliberal implications for language learning and use can be investigated. This commentary offers comments on common threads of themes running through the four articles in this special issue. While neoliberal ideas provide people with hopes and desires to socioeconomically succeed through management of their linguistic resources, the neoliberal system reproduces inequalities for language learners, teachers, and users as well as for multiple languages. However, the perceived superior status of English that often serves as the foundation for linguistic entrepreneurship is considered to be a social imagination, given the complexity of global geopolitics and the multiple directions of global human mobility. Also, the neoliberal engagement with linguistic entrepreneurship-such as commodified language learning or writing in English for academic publication-often deviates from the genuine aims of learning and research. Such deviation also applies to our own scholarly activities. This recognition encourages us to explore how subversive actions can be made possible for not only language learners/users but also researchers ourselves.

In this review article on race and language teaching, we highlight an urgent need for the international educational community to continue to develop a complex understanding of how language teaching and learners' lives are shaped by our global history of racist practices of colonial expansion, including settler colonialism and transatlantic slavery. We outline the genesis of research on race and language teaching and review literature that reflects a recent increase in scope and range of studies that problematize the workings of race and racism in language teaching and point to hopeful solutions for addressing effects of racial inequities. We conceptualize two key terms, 'race' and 'language,' then overview theories that appeared most significant in the research literature. We explore five interconnected themes that featured prominently throughout the existing literature on race and language teaching: standard language ideology and racial hegemony, the idealized and racialized native speaker, racial hierarchies of languages and language speakers, racialization and teacher identity, and race-centered approaches to pedagogies and educational practices. We offer a critical analysis of the current status of scholarship on race and language teaching, including gaps and necessary reframing, and conclude with implications for future directions and questions arising from the work.

Recent scholarship in sociolinguistics and language education has examined how race and language intersect each other and how racism influences linguistic and educational practices. While racism is often conceptualized in terms of individual and institutional injustices, a critical examination of another form of racism--epistemological racism--problematizes how racial inequalities influence our knowledge production and consumption in academe. Highlighting the importance of the intersectional nature of identity categories, this conceptual article aims to draw scholars' attention on how epistemological racism marginalizes and erases the knowledge produced by scholars in the Global South, women scholars of color, and other minoritized groups. In today's neoliberal culture of competition, scholars of color are compelled to become complicit with white Euro-American hegemonic knowledge, further perpetuating the hegemony of white knowledge while marginalizing women scholars of color. Valorizing non-European knowledge and collectivity as an alternative framework also risks essentialism and male hegemony. Conversely, the ethics promoted by black feminism emphasizes a personal ethical commitment to antiracism. Epistemological antiracism invites scholars to validate alternative theories, rethink our citation practices, and develop critical reflexivity and accountability.

As critical perspectives in language studies have gained legitimacy and even mainstream status in applied linguistics, it is necessary to re-examine the meaning of criticality in language studies and to re-envision criticality for further development. The authors explore criticality from several theoretical perspectives as well as from the notion of praxis. They review three major theoretical threads--namely, postmodernist constructionism including poststructuralist theory, Marxist-influenced theories, and postcolonial theories--and examine how these frameworks have influenced critical applied linguistics and how their criticisms of other perspectives within the critical framework are historically, ideologically, and geopolitically implicated. Although these theories constitute the core of conceptual criticality, praxis is essential for critical enactment. The authors thus unpack the meaning of praxis and discuss how reflexivity, action, and transformation must inform the continuing (re)envisioning of criticality in contemporary society and institutions where it is necessary to confront neoliberalism as a new kind of domination

This article presents a language specialist’s content analysis of four topics related to the memory of World War II. The purpose of the analysis is to develop critical content-based instruction (CBI) in an advanced Japanese language course that will be implemented at a Canadian university. These specific topics are: Atomic bombs (A-bombs) in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Canada’s involvement in the development of the A-bombs, the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and representations of peace and war in language arts and history textbooks used in Japan. I identify higai and kagai [suffering from harm vs. causing harm] relations in various materials including articles, literature, textbooks, and films, while demonstrating how these victim-offender relations reflect complex international and domestic relations of power rather than a simple binary. Such intellectual engagement will enable learners to gain multiple perspectives for ethical understandings of historical events in the target and in their own societies. Some examples of materials and activities are presented.

Racism has increasingly been exposed and problematized in public domains, including institutions of higher education. In academia, critical race theory (CRT) has guided scholars to uncover everyday experiences of racism by highlighting the intersectionality of race with other identity categories, among which language constitutes an important, yet underexplored, component. Through the conceptual lens of CRT and counter-storytelling as a methodological orientation, this study investigated how racialized graduate students and faculty members at a Canadian university experienced racialization and racism in relation to issues of language, including communication and the use of ethnic names as semiotic markers. Individual and focus group interviews generated participants' stories, to which we applied a thematic analysis. Participants generally felt that they were forced into pre-determined and essentialized categories of race, ethnicity, nationality, and language. Racialized non-native speakers of an official language—English or French—often received compliments or inquisitive comments on their language proficiency, which further accentuated their raciolinguistic Otherness and caused pain. Conversely, racialized native speakers did not report receiving compliments on language. For East Asian participants especially, speaking White English seemed to offset their racial stigma and psychologically separated them from non-native, English-speaking East Asian immigrants who looked like them. These experiences indicate normative expectations. The participants felt they were expected to not only speak, write, or communicate in the White normative language and manners, but also to use or not use an Anglicized name against their will. These impositions were questioned and resisted by some participants, and antiracist consciousness was expressed. The participants' voices encourage universities to validate their stories as well as their ways of telling their stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In applied linguistics and language education, an increased focus has been placed on plurality and hybridity to challenge monolingualism, the native speaker norm, and the modernist view of language and language use as unitary and bounded. The multi/plural turn parallels postcolonial theory in that they both support hybridity and fluidity while problematizing the essentialist understanding of language and identity. However, postcolonial theory, which has been influenced by poststructuralism, met criticisms in the 1990s in cultural studies. The notion of hybridity has been especially criticized for its privileged status, individual orientation, and disparity between theory and practice. Furthermore, the conceptual features of the multi/plural turn overlap with neoliberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism, which uncritically support diversity, plurality, flexibility, individualism, and cosmopolitanism, while perpetuating color-blindness and racism. The multi/plural turn also neglects the ways in which neoliberal competition and the dominance of English affect scholars. This article examines the multi/plural trend by drawing on some critiques of postcolonial theory and neoliberal ideologies and proposes an increased attention to power and inequalities as well as collective efforts to resist the neoliberal academic culture underlying the multi/plural turn.

Many universities around the world today are actively promoting study abroad to raise their international profiles. This trend is tied to the neoliberal social imaginary, which constructs study abroad as a tool for students to develop communication skills, a global mindset, intercultural competence and a competitive edge in global labour marketplaces. Such social imaginary is reflected in online descriptions of the imagined benefits that study abroad generates: for example, developing language skills, fostering cultural understanding and intercultural competence, facilitating personal growth and identity formation, and increasing career opportunities. Juxtaposing these alleged benefits with the themes that have emerged from the empirical studies reported in this special issue, this article critically examines the social imaginary of study abroad. Various factors that affect the outcomes of study abroad indicate that students' sojourn experiences and purported benefits do not have a simple causal relationship; rather, the relationship is fraught with complexities and contradictions. Despite potential rewards, study abroad cannot escape gender, racial, geographical and socioeconomic inequalities.

Neoliberal ideology compels people to develop language skills as human capital. As English is considered to be the most useful language for global communication, learning, and teaching, English has been promoted in many countries. However, the belief that English connects people from diverse linguistic backgrounds in a borderless society contradicts nationalistic trends observed globally. For example, growing xenophobic nationalism in Japan and Japanese hostility towards China and Korea indicate that neoliberal promotion of language learning does not automatically lead to improved international communication. Drawing on two separate qualitative studies involving Japanese workers, this article presents two paradoxes: a paradox as seen in the workers' interest in learning English as a medium of international communication and their simultaneous reluctance or ambivalence to interact with Asian Others due to their negative attitudes towards the Others or fear for potential communication breakdown, and another paradox of having to advocate for communicative abilities and dispositions that appear to be aligned with neoliberal ideology in order to critique the neoliberal obsession with linguistic skills. Language teaching in rising xenophobic nationalism in our neoliberal era should consider appropriation of skills and dispositions for critical and transformative purposes in language use.

Issues of race constitute an emerging area of inquiry in language education. Yet, race, racialisation and racism are still stigmatised topics of discussion in everyday and professional contexts in multiracial and multiethnic countries. Canada is especially an interesting context in this regard due to its official policy of multiculturalism that constructs a national identity of tolerance towards diversity. Drawing on the author's personal experience, this article presents some fundamental ideas for critical antiracism which call into question the commonly accepted antiracist agenda in research and practice. These ideas include decolonising antiracism (moving beyond white vs. non-white dichotomy to scrutinise power relations between non-white settlers and aboriginal people), de-essentialising antiracism (paying increased attention to economic privilege) and de-simplifying and de-silencing antiracism (paying more attention to multifaceted forms of racism and making issues of racial inequalities explicit). Such critical reflectivity enables us to understand racism in broader relations of power and to take greater ethical responsibility in antiracism.