Date: 15th November 2023
Abstract:
The spread of English through British colonialism and American globalization has been the discussion of many academic grassroots research activism endeavours. At the same time, various varieties of Englishes have emerged which have created unique varieties of Englishes (Kachru, 1998) in several socio-linguistic contexts which also depict a sense of symbolic ownership rather than its mere association as the oppression imposed by the former colonizer.
However, the dominant ways of ‘doing being an English teacher’ are still steeped deeply in colonial ideologies, language policies rooted in ‘one nation, one language’ and the Direct method which historically assumed that languages should be kept separately in water-tight like containers and language mixing was considered blasphemous in such language teaching methodologies. In folk linguistics, language mixing and puritanical ideals are still assumed to be the best way to do languaging. Both in classrooms and everyday conversations, at micro and macro level, individuals do self-policing (Amir, 2013b) or do language policing to others (Amir, 2013) which has proven to be more time consuming and counter-productive to the goals of second/foreign language teaching (Amir, 2015).
Therefore, this talk will creatively explore the coloniality and racialization of (English) language teaching in Pakistan and Sweden beyond the universalizing Euro/American centrism (Bagga-Gupta, 2022) and “with a whole ecology of knowledge formations, not a monoculture” (Cornell, 2019)
About the Speaker:
Dr. Alia Amir serves as a Research Associate at the School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics at SOAS, University of London, UK, and holds the position of an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at Halmstad University, Sweden. Her teaching expertise lies in language teacher education and English language teaching amassing over fifteen years in English Language Teaching within Swedish tertiary education. Her research expertise lies at the intersection of sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics, encompassing diverse topics such as British Indian English policy and discourse, along with the enforcement of language policing in English classrooms within the Swedish context. Her research areas bridge the intersection of interactional linguistics and applied linguistics, delving into classroom interaction, language policy, English as a Foreign Language (EFL)/English as a Second Language (ESL), English in Sweden, and extending to contexts in Turkey and Pakistan.
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