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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 examining how teachers and teacher educators learn to teach has advocated for a more critically oriented and better developed pedagogy of teacher education, in which teacher educator as practitioner is both in evidence and examined. Yet we currently know little about teacher educators as learners and reflective scholars open to examining their practice and research, and such inquiry is particularly limited within the scholarship in English language teacher education. This article brings together the narratives of the five co-authors, all TESOL teacher educators based in U.S. universities who examine questions about the intersections of their identities and pedagogies. They do so as a first step toward addressing the gap in the literature regarding the self-reflexivity of teacher educators. Identifying themes related to the intertwining of their social and professional identities and their pedagogies, their perceived legitimacy as teacher educators, and the impact of multiple contexts on their identities and pedagogies, the five co-authors consider how they are both domesticating and domesticated by teacher education (Morgan, 2016) and argue that when teacher educators engage in shared and transparent exploration of their identities and pedagogies they are better able to identify their pedagogical blind spots and opportunities to agentively leverage their identities to challenge dominant discourses.

Drawing on Delgado and Yosso's "counterstory," Yosso's "community cultural wealth," and Alsup's "borderland discourses," the authors, who are women of color academics, use narratives from their lives to discuss the ways in which they draw on resources in managing and reconfiguring their multiple identities within the academy. These include identities of scholars, mentors, teachers, community members, mothers, and partners. They suggest that rather than merely being socialized into cultural reproduction, as much of the literature oriented toward women of color advises them to do in order to become successful, they seek to actually engage in transforming their roles and that of the academy by consciously and repeatedly making present and visible facets of identity that have previously been more-or-less absent in higher education. By presenting these counter-narratives the authors attempt to engage with ways of self-positioning that are, especially for women of color in academia, not frequently discussed or presented.

This article examines processes of gender identity construction in the classrooms of two ESOL teachers living in their first year of teaching. Drawing from a year-long study of beginning teaching, the author explores the complex relationship among the physical body, language pedagogy, and socially constructed understandings of beauty, then goes on to problematize the pedagogical location of the body and ask how the gendered body can be mediated in classroom contexts. The article contrasts the two teachers' pedagogical approaches to the intricate work of locating the body in the ESOL classroom and discusses the range of possibilities available for the exploration, negotiation, and expression of gender identities in relation to the physical body.

In this article, the authors argue that at the center of every English language learning moment lies desire: desire for the language; for the identities that English represents; for capital, power, and images that are associated with English; for what is believed to lie beyond the doors that English unlocks. However, despite its centrality within TESOL practice, the construct of desire has been largely undertheorized by English language educators. The authors propose (1) that educators in the TESOL field would benefit from a greater recognition of desire as situated and co-constructed, acknowledging that our desires are not solely our own but are intersubjectively constituted and shaped by our social, historical, political, institutional, and economic contexts; (2) that the difference between conscious and unconscious desire is significant in language learning; and (3) that whereas desire can be manipulated in exploitative or unethical ways, it can also, given the right circumstances, serve as a tool for compassionate and liberatory pedagogy. This article explores the interconnectedness of desire with motivation and investment, the commodification of English, "akogare" desire, racial identities, globalizing forces, colonialism, and communicative language teaching. The authors propose a revisioning of TESOL that recognizes the centrality of desire in the acquisition of English.

In this article, we explore the complex and nebulous terrain between two theoretical concepts, imagined communities (Norton, 2000, 2001), that is, individuals' imagined affiliations with certain groups, and regimes of truth (Foucault, 1980), dominant images inscribed and reinscribed into individual consciousness until they become normative. Using the context of two research studies, one a critical narrative study of life-story narratives of L2 users and the other a critical feminist ethnography of beginning ESOL teachers, the researchers examine the ways in which social structures and contexts can behave simultaneously as tyrannizing regimes of truth and as liberating imagined communities. This inherent contradiction illuminates the ways in which the two theoretical constructs taken together can lead to a more complex and nuanced understanding of identity construction. (Contains 5 footnotes.)

Through a year-long critical feminist ethnography, this article examines the challenges faced by beginning K-12 ESOL teachers in the United States as they grappled with the significance of their own racial identities in the process of negotiating the inherent racialization of ESOL in their language teaching contexts. I foreground the significance of race in the teaching, language, and identities of four K-12 public school teachers; three White and one Korean American, whose orientations were specifically antiracist. The study examined the implications of teachers' privileged status as native speakers of standard English, a raced category, within an institutional culture that underscored the supremacy of both Whiteness and native speaker status. The study found the teachers' practice to be complexified by their attentiveness to their own and their students' racial identities and by their consciousness of the situatedness of their practice within a broader sociopolitical context. The findings also illustrated the ways in which the teachers negotiated spaces in which they could challenge the silent privilege accorded to Standard American English by problematizing school policies surrounding World English and African American Vernacular English. Implications for theory, practice of teaching English to speakers of other languages, teacher education, and professional development are discussed. (Contains 1 table and 4 footnotes.)

The year-long study that was the context for this article explored the complicated relationship among the shaping of ESOL as a school construct, the historical legacy of colonialism, and the contemporary influence of globalizing forces on the teaching of English worldwide and the lives of multilingual students enrolled in ESOL. In the context of a year-long critical feminist ethnography of four first-year teachers, this data-driven exploration examines each of three interconnected colonialist manifestations within the schools of the study: (1) an embracing of the supremacy of English over other languages, related to the dominance within school walls of a monolingual model of identity; (2) an investment in keeping Self and Other dichotomous, reflected in a construction of the school category of ESOL as Other and deficit; and (3) the promotion of a White, NES, American norm and the consequent marginalization of ethnic minority, NNES, and immigrant status. (Contains 1 table and 3 notes.)

Drawing on Delgado and Yosso’s counterstory, Yosso’s community cultural wealth, and Alsup’s borderland discourses, the authors, who are women of color academics, use narratives from their lives to discuss the ways in which they draw on resources in managing and reconfiguring their multiple identities within the academy. These include identities of scholars, mentors, teachers, community members, mothers, and partners. They suggest that rather than merely being socialized into cultural reproduction, as much of the literature oriented toward women of color advises them to do in order to become successful, they seek to actually engage in transforming their roles and that of the academy by consciously and repeatedly making present and visible facets of identity that have previously been more-or-less absent in higher education. By presenting these counter-narratives the authors attempt to engage with ways of self-positioning that are, especially for women of color in academia, not frequently discussed or presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we draw on our family histories of language loss to stimulate public discussion of the consequences of linguistic attrition for public school students in the United States. Our concerns for multilingualism, antiracism, and peace—and the salient connections among these three—are rooted in our lived experiences. Through an exploration of our family histories, we examine the ways in which empire and language identity can interact to shape decisions made by individual speakers of minority languages. We argue that multilingualism is a valuable resource for countering xenophobia, and that the teaching of foreign and world languages adds an important dimension to engaging empire, promoting peace and solidarity, and ultimately redefining what is legitimately “American. ” We call attention to the potential power of well-designed educational policies to support heritage language maintenance, to promote language rights, and to respond to dangers posed by the disproportionate power accorded to English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a year-long critical feminist ethnography, this article examines the challenges faced by beginning K-12 ESOL teachers in the United States as they grappled with the significance of their own racial identities in the process of negotiating the inherent racialization of ESOL in their language teaching contexts. I foreground the significance of race in the teaching, language, and identities of four K-12 public school teachers; three White and one Korean American, whose orientations were specifically antiracist. The study examined the implications of teachers' privileged status as native speakers of standard English, a raced category, within an institutional culture that underscored the supremacy of both Whiteness and native speaker status. The study found the teachers' practice to be complexified by their attentiveness to their own and their students' racial identities and by their consciousness of the situatedness of their practice within a broader sociopolitical context. The findings also illustrated the ways in which the teachers negotiated spaces in which they could challenge the silent privilege accorded to Standard American English by problematizing school policies surrounding World English and African American Vernacular English. Implications for theory, practice of teaching English to speakers of other languages, teacher education, and professional development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for abstracts for the 2016 special-topic issue on language teacher identity in multilingual education is presented.