International TESOL Teachers in a Multi-Englishes Community

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. * Awad Ibrahim, University of Ottawa, Canada *

In this exciting and incredibly accessible manuscript, written consistently with an international readership in mind, authors Phan Le Ha and Osman Barnawi have produced what I see as a brilliant, regionally contextualized approach to bridging theory and practice in the “multi-Englishes” TESOL context of Saudi Arabia. Making great use of scripts of conversations between the authors for the preface and opening to the introduction, in the twelve chapters, the authors cover a comprehensive range of topics, targeting international mobility, as well as realities, practicalities, and limitations of how far new approaches influencing TESOL in the region can go. They raise critical arguments from the international scholarship, along with excerpts from a series of insightful interviews they conducted with international teachers. This book is a must-read for all TESOL researchers and practitioners interested in contexts where international teachers are the cornerstone of ideological developments and reshaping of not only TESOL theory and practice, but of the region itself.

* Jim McKinley, University College London, UK *

The authors skillfully expose, unpack and interpret complexities of contextualized professional identity negotiations of international TESOL teachers in the broader waves and entanglements of neoliberalism, transnational mobility, globalization, hybridity, and superdiversity. This book will set the tone and serve as an inspiring example for future projects focusing on the diversity and complexity of realities and perspectives in other parts of the world.

* Ali Fuad Selvi, METU Northern Cyprus Campus, Turkey *

International TESOL Teachers in a Multi-Englishes Community provides a compelling analysis of socio-cultural, political, and economic implications of transnational TESOL teachers working in Saudi Arabia. For those who are interested in the on-the-ground work realities of English teachers, this is a must-read book. The increasing demand of TESOL professionals in the Global South makes this exceptional account of teachers’ engagement with Saudi Arabia’s Higher Education system and their navigation of local tensions, challenges and demands more pressing than ever. Power, tensions, challenges, but also hope, resignation, and trust feed the multiple stories documented in this book written by two exceptional scholars who are clearly ahead of their discipline. This piece of writing provides a unique understanding of the inner workings of the international TESOL industry and makes a genuine contribution to a more politicized and ethnographically informed field of TESOL and Applied Linguistics.

* Alfonso Del Percio, University College London, UK *