Teaching English as an International Language: Identity, Resistance and Negotiaion (New Perspectives on Language and Education)

Drawing on both Western and Asian theoretical frameworks, this book showcases the complexity of EIL teachers’ roles as their identities are challenged by values and practices that seem contradictory to their own. It examines how their identities are constantly constructed and reconstituted through resistance and negotiation. Building on both Western and Asian theoretical resources, the book examines how EIL teachers see themselves as professional and individual in relation to their work practices. It reveals the tensions, compromises, negotiations and resistance in their enactment of different roles and selves, especially when they are exposed to values often associated with the English-speaking West. The ways they perceive their identity formation problematise and challenge the seemingly dominant views of identity as always changing, hybrid and fragmented. Their experiences highlight the importance of the sense of belonging and being, connectedness, continuity and a coherent growth in identity formation. Their attachment to a particular locality and their commitment to perform the moral guide role as EIL teachers serve as the most powerful platform for all their other identities to be constructed, negotiated and reconstituted. Contents Foreword Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Language, Culture and Identity 3. The Politics of English as an International Language and English Language Teaching 4. Identity Formation: Negotiations of Apparently Contradictory Roles and Selves 5. Identity Formation: The Teacher and the Politics of ELT 6. An EIL Teacher’s Identity Formation: Kien 7. Teacher Identity and the Teaching of English as an International Language References Drawing on both Western and Asian theoretical frameworks, this book showcases the complexes and sophistications of the negotiations that EIL teachers have to make when their identities are challenged by values and practices that seem contradictory to their own. Through resistance and negotiations and by holding firm to the teacher-as-moral-guide role, their identities are constantly constructed and reconstituted Drawing on both Western and Asian theoretical frameworks, this book showcases the complexity and sophistication of the negotiations that EIL (English as an international language) teachers have to make when their identities are challenged by values and practices that seem contradictory to their own