International TESOL Teachers in a Multi-Englishes Community

Mobility, On-the-Ground Realities and the Limits of Negotiability

By (author) Dr. Phan Le Ha, Osman Z. Barnawi

Publication date:

16 June 2022

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781800415478

This book embarks on an ever-expanding array of language, academic mobility, neoliberalism, and accompanying rich scholarly debates. It examines the ways in which international English language teachers in Saudi Arabia’s higher education system position themselves, negotiate, interact, adjust, make sense of their classroom dynamics, and validate their senses of selves and pedagogies in their day-to-day (dis)engagement with their institutions and encounters at work. Informed by rich empirical data from a multi-year, multi-site project in addition to other qualitative studies, the book reveals on-the-ground complexities involving speaker status, language, ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, sociocultural factors, emotion labour, work dynamic and professionalism. It promotes thinking beyond normative ideologies on marginalisation, the native and non-native speaker dichotomy, linguistic, racial, religious and ethnic (inter)relations, and translanguaging pedagogies, while also offering new material for original theorisation in multi-Englishes multilingualism, local-trusting-local and the limits of negotiability.

Acknowledgements
Preface: Putting Curiosities in Action: An Uneasy Journey of Exploration
1: International TESOL Teachers: What’s Missing on the Ground?
2: International Teachers of English in the ‘New’ Middle East: Saudi Arabia in Focus
3: Engaging (with) Flavors of TESOL: Mobility, Space, Place, Neoliberalism, Multilingualism and Emotion Labor
4: Unpacking Mobility Drive: Geographical, Personal, Financial, Professional and More
5: Unpacking Often-Hidden Layers of Factors behind International Mobilities
6: English, ELT and Perceptions of Peers and Students
7: On-the-Ground Realities: From Training, Experience and Perception to Actual Classrooms
8: Every Teacher is Different, Every Classroom has its Own Dynamic
9: Sulaiman Jenkins: Examining the (Im)mobility of African American Muslim TESOL Teachers in Saudi Arabia
10: Unpacking Hardly-Ever-Revealed Emotions, Pains and Complexities
11: Abdullah Alshakhi and Phan Le Ha: A Much-Needed Conversation with Native-English-Speaking Caucasian Teachers: Emotion Labor and Affect in Transnational Encounters
12: International TESOL Teachers Working in the Saudi ‘Trust House’: (Re)Conceptualization of Key Constructs
Ryuko Kubota: Afterword
References
Index

All of us – nomads, immigrants, refugees, teachers, students, company executives, academics and farmers – are in flow, in motion and on the move, argues International TESOL Teachers in A Multi-Englishes Community. This is true even if physically we stay put. Methodologically innovative, scholarly grounded, and intellectually dareful, this book tells the story of this mobility, its challenges as well as its possibilities, especially how it looks like when it meets such a nice field as TESOL. It dares to ask, what does it mean to live in a time and a place that are neither neutral nor without history? At some point, especially for TESOL teachers and learners, we would not know if the stories told in the book belong to the authors or to the reader. This is the poetic of this book, you can’t put it down until the end. It is highly recommended, namely for those who are interested in that space of métissage between TESOL, mobility, historicity and negotiability.