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Since it was first published by the Council of Europe in 2001, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has become one of the most widely referenced documents in language education, particularly in English language teaching and assessment (Savski, in press). The recently released CEFR Companion Volume (2020), with its new descriptions of plurilingual and pluricultural competence and mediation, has done much to extend the potential of the framework, as it provides a more concrete foundation for using CEFR to support heteroglossic pedagogies. In this way, CEFR has acquired a greater level of potential relevance to innovative pedagogies in English language education, such as Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT), which seeks to equip learners with communicative skills and dispositions needed for success in a world where the target interlocutors are linguistically and culturally diverse (Rose & Galloway, 2019). In this paper, we examine the prospects for using CEFR to support heteroglossic pedagogies like GELT, highlighting points of convergence between descriptions of competence in CEFR and current scholarship in Global Englishes, as well as points of divergence between the two. We underline the need to embed CEFR in decentralizing educational reforms, in which the framework is used to facilitate teacher agency, rather than to impose objectives and methods upon them.

Over the last two decades, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has become ubiquitous in ELT. In this article, I consider how differences in the way in which the framework is being interpreted by different powerful actors, including governments and for-profit organizations, affect its usability for ELT practitioners, a key segment of its intended audience and thus, at least in theory, key beneficiaries of its spread. I highlight three key paradoxes faced by ELT practitioners working with the framework, relating to whether CEFR is to be seen as a flexible point of reference or a set standard, whether the communicative competence described by CEFR is to be seen in a conventional, universal sense or from a more dynamic contemporary perspective, and whether CEFR is to be seen as associated with prepackaged methods (textbooks) or as a vehicle for the development of local pedagogies. I conclude by calling for deeper awareness of these paradoxes among ELT practitioners to support the productive implementation of CEFR.

One of the products of globalization in sociolinguistics is the emergence of transnational regimes in language policy, in which power is exercised across boundaries of traditional nation states. This paper engages with audit culture, a transnational policy mechanism which involves the continuous evaluation of nation states' performance through the use of purportedly neutral, typically quantitative instruments. As achieving broader visibility in public discourse is a key part of how such evaluations enforce language policy regimes, the paper presents an analysis of how an audit instrument, the Education First English Proficiency Index, was recontextualized in media discourse in Thailand over a 6-year period. The findings highlight an apparent discontinuity, as much of the neoliberal rhetoric in the audit instrument was not taken up in Thai media. Rather, the recontextualization was selective, with elements of the audit texts being integrated into an already established language policy regime in Thailand, built on nationalism and developmentalism. These findings point to the need to consider how language policy mechanisms like audit culture can facilitate synergies between hegemonic ideologies, particularly when they are recontextualized across different scales.

There is now increased awareness of the need to challenge 'common sense' ideologies of language in education, turning language classrooms into spaces of analysis and liberation. Key to achieving this goal is equipping students with the skills needed to navigate diverse, complex discourses about language (critical thinking), as well as fostering an agentive disposition among them (critical language awareness). This article reports on research which examined how these qualities can be developed by involving language learners in analysis of public signs (linguistic landscape). 33 undergraduate students at a public university in Bhutan were recruited to participate in an extra-curricular activity in which they were asked to independently collect examples of public signs from the capital Thimphu and engage in guided analysis and discussion of the linguistic and visual features of the signs. Analysis of video recordings of learner interaction as well as of the textual data produced during and after the activity indicated that critical thinking processes were activated with relative regularity. In combination with pre- and post-activity interviews, these data also indicated that activating critical thinking through the activity also allowed several of the learners to take up a more agentive position in discourses about language in Bhutan.

One of the features of the growing prominence of English across the globe is the proliferation of English-medium instruction (EMI) programmes at all levels of education, driven by a neoliberal agenda which places a disproportionate value on English over other languages. While this spread has primarily affected more developed, urban contexts, EMI has also started to spread beyond the borders of large cities and into peripheral, rural areas, including those where minority languages are used. There is at present, however, a sparsity of research on how the introduction of EMI impacts the often delicate language ecology in such contexts. This paper presents the results of a study of how EMI policy was implemented at a primary school in the Deep South of Thailand, a region where the majority of the population speak Malay as their L1. The findings of this research, drawn on the basis of interviews, focus groups and classroom observations, highlighted the existence of a hierarchical linguistic ecology in which English and Thai, the international and national language, were privileged over the local language, owing both to their dominant position in official language policy and the attitudes of local policy arbiters.

The investigation and unmasking of racial inequality have been one of the cornerstones of the critical turn in TESOL, so much so that a significant body of literature on the topic now exists. Yet, there is often a lack of reflection on the fact that discourse surrounding contentious social issues like race is inherently dialogical in that it consists of constant interaction between different voices (heteroglossia) and ideologies (polyphony). This paper presents the findings of a study focussing on the dialogicality of discourse surrounding the recruitment of non-local teachers of English in Thailand. This research, framed by the existence of significant inequalities between teachers of different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds in the Thai educational system, examined the role race played in interactions in a Facebook group for non-local teachers of English seeking employment in Thailand. The analysis focussed on identifying points of struggle, salient topics around which particularly intensive concentrations of dialogicality could be found. Two are presented in this paper, the struggle for discursive space to debate racial inequality and the struggle over the assignment of victimhood and perpetratorhood. I conclude by arguing for more attention to be paid to how global inequalities in TESOL are debated and challenged locally.

Since its publication in 2001, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has become a highly influential means of describing language proficiency. Its spread has, however, been marked by contradictions, since the framework has been appropriated in the service of a variety of different policy agendas. In this paper, I argue that such contradictions are indicative of broader ideological contrasts, which may impact how the framework is implemented at the local scale. By drawing on critical discourse analysis and conceptual history, I analyse a set of recent language policy texts from Thailand and Malaysia, two Asian contexts where CEFR has recently been introduced, to examine how such global ideological struggles connect with local agendas. I find that CEFR has in these multilingual contexts been embedded into a bilingual policy agenda which foregrounds the national language (Thai or Bahasa Malaysia) and English while backgrounding other languages. This means that CEFR was detached from the agenda of the Council of Europe, with the recontextualization of CEFR shown to have been a selective process in which the only part to be consistently transferred were the CEFR levels, which were in this decontextualised form presented as a transnational standard. I argue that these patterns are indicative of a struggle between the global agenda of ELT and its roots in the ideology of neoliberalism, that underlies much of the worldwide spread of CEFR, and a local nationalist agenda attempting to appropriate the framework for its own purposes.

Existing research has highlighted the complexity of the discourse surrounding '(non-)native speaker', particularly with regard to how teachers are perceived by learners. This complexity has been compounded by globalisation, which has increased transnational mobility of teachers. Thailand has been particularly affected by this, as its population of local teachers has been complemented by a growing yet highly diverse contingent of migrant teachers. In this paper, we present the results of a study conducted at three secondary schools in Southern Thailand, which used a combination of interviews and focus groups to examine how various local participants in English teaching and learning (teachers, students, parents, administrators) perceived migrant (i.e. non-Thai) English teachers, focussing particularly on how these perceptions used '(non-)nativeness' as a point of reference. Our analysis focusses on two overarching themes, 'race' and 'inequality', which also invoke links with broader discourses: Firstly, we show that the perceptions of migrant teachers were heavily racialized, with 'nativeness' equated with whiteness and Westernness and 'non-nativeness' associated with Asianness. Secondly, we find that the participants' perceptions involved significant reference to inequality, as access to 'nativeness' represented a symbolic resource accessible only to learners with sufficient economic capital.

This article examines how inequalities of race impact on the way migrant teachers of English in Thailand articular their identity and belonging to the teaching profession and to the society they live in. There is at present a rather limited body of work on the migration of language teachers, despite the fact that mobility of teachers across conventional borders is part-and-parcel of language education in the globalised era. We report on research conducted in Thailand, whose education sector accommodates a large, varied population of migrant teachers. On the basis of 14 interviews with migrant teachers based in Thailand, the article highlights significant tension around identity and belonging, both at the professional level (identification with the teaching profession) and the societal level (identification with Thai society). The study highlights the need to balance perspectives in the study of identity and belonging in teacher migration, including the ways teacher migration may be instrumentalised as part of local inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on linguistic landscapes at schools (schoolscapes) has highlighted the complex dialogic relationship between the semiotics of public signage in educational spaces and policies seeking to enforce dominant ideologies. In this paper, we discuss the results of research conducted in the Deep South of Thailand, a minority region in which the predominant language, ethnicity and religion are different from the rest of the nation, and which has over the last century been exposed to significant assimilatory pressure. Drawing on an analysis of language use in two Islamic schools in the region, as well as interviews and focus groups with administrators, teachers and students, we focus on the temporality of meanings – how schoolscapes are anchored in narratives of the past, present and future. Historical memories evoked by particular elements of the schoolscapes are discussed, particularly in light of the efforts of the local population to resist assimilatory policies. We also discuss the aspirations of our participants for the future, observing that, while recent language policy in Thailand has focussed primarily on promoting Thai and English, our participants saw a much more varied plurilingualism as relevant to their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is at present much focus in ELT on describing and promoting teacher and learner agency. However, ELT as a professional field is concurrently characterised by an increasing orientation toward authoritative texts, particularly those imbued with authority at the transnational level. Global textbooks are a notable example, since they, along with global language testing and language policy, play an increasingly important role in determining teaching and learning practices across a range of different settings. Our focus in this paper is on how the authoritativeness of global textbooks is upheld in online promotional materials. Examining websites of three contemporary ELT textbook series, we analyse discourse strategies employed to legitimise the authoritative position of the textbooks and their publishers. We find that publishers legitimised their authority through strategic links to external forces (policy, testing), in this way foregrounding the universality of the textbooks. In contrast, the websites represented the agencies of teachers and learners only minimally, primarily as subordinate to the agency attributed to textbooks themselves. We conclude with a reflection on the need for applied critical scholarship in ELT that can offer practical alternatives and thus disrupt dominant notions of universality and the hierarchization of knowledge these are based on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multi/translingual turn in sociolinguistics has highlighted a number of ideological entanglements of foundational concepts, most significantly the way that the notion of 'named languages' as bordered entities is intertwined with ideologies of nation and race. In this article, I consider what the conceptual place for linguistic borders is within a 'trans' framework of language and propose a focus on bordering , social actions in which indexical meanings at different scales are mobilized to exert control over discursive space by erecting boundaries within or around it. I draw on data from a Facebook group for non-local teachers of English in Thailand, examining how bordering served interests of hegemonic power when linguistic borders were policed with reference to ideologies of nation, as well as how it enabled counter-hegemonic resistance when borders were erected to separate teachers of colour from the intense discursive struggle in the group. (Translanguaging, linguistic borders, bordering, code-switching, scale, resistance, discursive agency) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ecology of Slovene in the twentieth century by focusing on two key emergent themes. It focuses firstly on monolingualism as a key goal for Slovene language planners, starting with their efforts to create a standard language with no German influences in the nineteenth century, and continuing in their work to prevent Serbo-Croat influence in Yugoslavia in the twentieth century. A particular focus of the paper is on how standardisation enabled an emergent Slovene-speaking elite to accumulate linguistic capital and, upon the dissolution of the Habsburg state, to become solely culturally and politically dominant. The second focus is on how the gradual development of a language ecology dominated by prescriptive practices and a strongly nationalist language ideology allowed the elite to maintain its dominance over the allocation of linguistic capital despite the social upheaval caused by the turbulent political and economic context of the twentieth century.

This article analyses how the drafting and implementation of the Resolution for a National Language Policy Programme 2014-2018, a Slovene language strategy, were influenced by political instability and inter-institutional struggles. By conducting a historical ethnography to trace how different authors contributed to the policy text, and examining these contributions against political shifts and the dynamics of the media discourse surrounding the policy, and by collecting accounts from key actors through interviews, the paper presents a detailed reconstruction of the process of drafting the strategy. The analysis uncovers an on-going struggle between different groups of Slovene linguists to secure their own interests, and finds that political shifts enabled different groups to shift wordings within the document in their own favour. It also analyses how, once officially adopted by the Slovene parliament, the strategy began to be implemented as serious discussions began about funding the creation of a new monolingual dictionary of Slovene.

Contemporary analyses of language policy often tend to presume ideological uniformity, rather than focus on the contrasts between various positions, and the power struggles that those differences bring about. In this paper, I present an approach that implements the notion of voice in language policy analysis to denote the ideological positions and interests of different social actors, in this case as reflected in government documents. I propose a method of analysis based on the discourse-historical approach in critical discourse analysis and demonstrate how this exposes different social actors behind policy documents by focussing on the traces of their participation in policymaking. I analyse two different texts produced by the Slovene government and intended to specify its language policy strategy for the 2007-2011 and 2012-2016 periods. I show that there are two hegemonic voices of linguists behind both texts, one based on values of national unity, and a second based on human rights and broad inclusion. Alongside these, there are various voices from other domains of Slovene society and EU policy, all recontextualised through the prisms of the two dominant voices.

Although English language variation is an inevitable and a natural linguistic phenomenon, language attitudes research has suggested that varieties other than the mainstream native-speaker standards usually receive unfavorable social evaluations. This may reflect the existence of prejudices and discrimination against speakers of many Englishes. Global Englishes literature, however, offers a news pluralistic lens to examine English, providing key implications for language education. While practical proposals have recently been made for how this lens may be used in the context of English teaching, there is as yet only sporadic evidence of how English learners respond to efforts to transform attitudes. This study aimed to examine how a group of Thai learners of English responded to a 9-week global Englishes awareness raising program. Findings obtained through classroom observations, analysis of an online chatroom and interviews suggest that learners developed an increased awareness of the global role of English and experienced a critical reorientation of beliefs about English language variation, gaining enhanced tolerance. These findings point to the importance of teaching English beyond prescribed linguistic skills and helping English learners a pluralistic view of English through the analysis of critical issues related to the global spread of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has become one of the most widely cited documents in language education across the globe, its influence now felt far beyond the confines of Europe, the context for which it was originally produced. In Malaysia, CEFR was given particular prominence in the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025 and English Language Education Reform in Malaysia: The Roadmap 2015-2025, both of which positioned the framework as the primary yardstick by which curricula were to be developed and against which achievements (or lack thereof) were to be evaluated. This paper examines CEFR from the perspective of language policy, focussing particularly on the implications this document has for local agency in the Malaysian context. The paper begins by examining the constructs of language and language education underlying CEFR, pointing in particular to how these reflect the socio-political context for which the framework was developed. The next section examines how policy texts in the Malaysian context, in particular the 2015 Roadmap, have interpreted CEFR, highlighting in particular the way that these texts (as other policies across the globe) have tended to treat the CEFR reference levels as a global standard, with little scope for local agency. The final section considers alternative, localized models for using CEFR as language policy in Malaysia, in particular how the framework may be used in support of an inclusive agenda in which diversity and multilingualism are embraced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary public discourses are, despite the growing array of technologies and spaces for participation, becoming increasingly characterized by polarization – the formation of two distinct and relatively homogeneous 'sides'. However, while such polarization may be commonplace, it is not an inherent property of discourse but rather a result of strategic polarizing actions taken by specific actors in order to establish control over the debate. In order to describe the process of polarization in a public discourse about language policy in Slovenia, this paper presents a theoretical framework based on Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglossia (diversity of voices), polyphony (diversity of ideology) and dialogicality (relatedness of voices and ideologies) and on the central concepts of critical discourse studies (CDS). The case study is based on a qualitative analysis of a sample of 48 newspaper articles reporting on the language policy debate, collected from two major Slovene newspapers during 2016. Additionally, the case study also relies on field notes and transcripts obtained from a public hearing held in the Slovene parliament. The analysis of these two data sources uncovers a debate which was heavily polarized due to both ideological difference as well as continuous reinforcement of the Manichean dichotomy. In particular, the paper shows that this polarization was strengthened by explicit practices of identity construction and suppression of dissent which allowed the construction of a homogeneous Self and Other in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]