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Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants' (ITAs') proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative success in academic disciplines such as STEM is more accurately understood through a materialist, as opposed to structuralist, orientation to competence. According to this orientation, communication is not contingent on autonomous competence in standardized English but instead on transcultural dispositions along with the strategic use of semiotic resources and spatial repertoires. In this paper, we provide a focused analysis of one university's Test of Oral English Proficiency (TOEP), which was recently redesigned in alignment with a materialist orientation to competence (e.g. through greater consideration for materiality, embodiment, and performativity). Through an analysis of audio and video recordings from the TOEP, this article demonstrates that a materialist orientation to competence can be actualized through a paradigm of assessment that accounts for the mutual negotiation of proficiency between speaking and listening subjects, or what we refer to as materializing assessment.

The notion of native speakerism describes the tendency to privilege and uphold "native speakers" as inherently more qualified to teach English on the arbitrary basis of linguistic birthright. In spite of the widespread recognition and critique of native speakerism within TESOL, it remains pervasive in professional practice, most evident in inequitable recruiting and hiring practices of English language teachers in a variety of global contexts. In this article, we propose that the imperviousness of native speakerism results from the enduring ideological commitment to what we call "native speaker saviorism," which reflects the long-standing assumption that the White community can "save" peoples of color by teaching them English. As an illustrative case study, we analyze a series of responses to the financial precarity of the English language teaching profession in South Korea following governmental budgetary cuts starting in 2014. The analysis foregrounds the ideologies of racism in the form of White normativity and White saviorism that construct, legitimize, and rationalize the need for native speakers of English in South Korea. The analysis is followed by a series of recommendations for moving beyond native speaker saviorism in language teaching.

This article examines the semiotic landscape of the Chinatown in Incheon, South Korea. Using the geosemiotic framework as a heuristic guide, we analyze how the spectacle of Chinatown is constituted through spatial, linguistic, semiotic, and material resources, and find that the unordinariness of the place is contingent on and emerges through its juxtaposition with ordinary space, practice, and language use. We suggest this apparent paradox can be understood through the process of scaling, during which signs and practices that might have been considered quotidian become monumentalised and ritualised when they are transported across timescales and spatial scales. Incheon's Chinatown then affords an opportunity to understand the semiotic and material production of 'unordinariness' through 'ordinariness'. These collective spatiotemporal disjunctures or juxtapositions reveal unexpected but nonetheless crucial intersections among language, semiotics, and nationness.

This article theorizes how the privileging of "intentional" deviations from ostensibly mainstream Englishes represents a form of epistemic violence that replicates and sustains the logics of coloniality, presuming the inherent and chronic inferiority of nonmainstream cultural forms, practices, and institutions. In response, this article considers the potentiality of errors in peripheralized Englishes as moments of disinvention through an extended analysis of an artifact that represents an enunciation of political and linguistic decoloniality. Focusing on the orthographic feature of capitalization as a case in point, I enact the practice of provincialization toward exposing the inadequacies of monofunctional orthography for an inherently and increasingly plurilithic language like English. To conclude, I use alternatively capitalized English as a reconstituted and decolonizing expressive mode.

In response to the limitations of the nation-state as a conceptual frame for the study of linguistic landscapes (LL), this article argues for a transnational approach that accounts for the material reconfigurations and symbolic reimaginations of space in the context of global flows and migrations (Appadurai, 1996). This approach enables one to recognize the fluidity of language practice that transgresses the metadiscursive regimes of language (Bauman & Briggs, 2003) upon which the ideological maintenance of native speaker idealization (Kachru, 2005) hinges. Drawing primarily on theories of language practice (Pennycook, 2010), language disinvention (Makoni & Pennycook, 2005, 2007), and language transgression (Pennycook, 2007), this article analyzes a variety of linguistic tactics in the transnational Korean LL, including those of the South Korean nation-state, and of ethnic Korean enclaves in the United States, including the Koreatowns of Los Angeles and New York. Language practice in the transnational Korean LL challenges the very boundaries of language that precede linguistic hierarchization (e.g., Inner Circle variety as superior to Outer and Expanding Circle varieties) and challenge the ideological commitment to native speaker idealization.

Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants' (ITAs') proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative success in academic disciplines such as STEM is more accurately understood through a materialist, as opposed to structuralist, orientation to competence. According to this orientation, communication is not contingent on autonomous competence in standardized English but instead on transcultural dispositions along with the strategic use of semiotic resources and spatial repertoires. In this paper, we provide a focused analysis of one university's Test of Oral English Proficiency (TOEP), which was recently redesigned in alignment with a materialist orientation to competence (e.g. through greater consideration for materiality, embodiment, and performativity). Through an analysis of audio and video recordings from the TOEP, this article demonstrates that a materialist orientation to competence can be actualized through a paradigm of assessment that accounts for the mutual negotiation of proficiency between speaking and listening subjects, or what we refer to as materializing assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the uses of English in the multilingual cityscape of Tehran, the capital city of Iran. Drawing from photographic data of 400 publicly visible signs in Tehran, this study aims to understand the various ways in which English, as both a linguistic and cultural resource, operates in tandem with emergent Iranian cultural practices in the context of globalization, especially in relation to the centrality of Persianness to contemporary Iranian national identity. The article, in addition to offering a sociolinguistic history and contemporary portrait of English in Iran, demonstrates how English is used not only to index Western cultural influences and ideals but also how English is relocalized in accordance with the local communicative needs of contemporary Iranians in Tehran. We refer to this phenomenon as the Persianization of English, in which English operates in a discursive field delinked from its indexes to Western culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]