CONTACT | Identity

EAP teacher identity negotiation and its impact on our teaching practice: Research insight from the public college system in Ontario

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Rationale for research into EAP teacher identity

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pre-sessional/pathway classes are a popular course offering at private and public institutions in Ontario (Kushkiev, 2022) as Canada ranks amongst the most popular study destinations for English language learning (Languages Canada- Bonard Research Report, 2021). Around 40 % of Canadian ESL and EAP…

Multimodality-enhanced teaching: Fostering global citizenship and intercultural competence in ELT

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*For images, please see the PDF version of the article. 

Introduction 

This article showcases multimodality-enhanced learning tasks that embrace learners’ linguistic and cultural diversity as an asset to advance their oral communication skills, promote global citizenship (UNESCO, 2018), and cultivate intercultural competence (Byram, 1996) in a university English communication course. Drawing upon Cummins’…

The Native Speaker Myth and re-storying oneself within a disempowering discourse

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It was in high school that I started toying with the idea of pursuing teaching as a career. Having not known much about what I needed to pursue for this career path initially, I assumed my plan to earn a university degree in literature would be enough. When I found out that teacher’s college was a…

An ESL immigrant teacher’s insight into languages

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As a recent immigrant to Canada, I involuntarily find myself in between-situations, driven by a set of choices that diverge me away while preserving bits and pieces of my natural habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). As a native speaker of Arabic and an ESL teacher who mainly spoke English and French back home, I never realized how…

Identity in undergraduate L2 writing: A juxtapositionof academic voice and internal voices

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Abstract
Despite mounting research on the potential that cultivating self-identity affords students, it is often forgotten in most academic contexts, whether in instruction or assessment, that L2 writers have an L1 identity. In all avenues of higher education, researchers agree that multiple, complex, and simultaneous identities of students are advantageous for their advancement in academic writing…

Possibilities in decolonizing English language learning

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Abstract
Racism in education has a long 500-year history with colonial roots that situates knowledge production as a Western prerogative. Colonizers intentionally created an educational system based on Eurocentric epistemologies that promoted White supremacy. Pieterse & Parekh (1995) argue that in the 20th century, capitalism and industrialization enabled global oppression and resurgent nationalism which undermined social…