Guest editors’ introduction: critical Global Englishes in language education

Abstract

As the English language has played a steadily pivotal role as a global lingua franca, various language ideologies have been practiced with some tension in different educational landscapes. Issues of ideology and attitudes toward different aspects of the English language, linked to English language policy and curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, have been snowballing. Although English education scholarship in the field has been attempting to pull native-speakerism away from hogging the limelight, many classroom practices and assessment models are still in favor of the entrenched standard English ideology (see Fang & Widodo, 2019; Jenkins & Leung, 2019; McNamara, 2012). With this in mind, it is important for both language researchers and practitioners to understand the complexity of the identity construction of English language education from post-native speakerism and postcolonial perspectives (see Houghton & Bouchard, 2020; Kubota, 2018; Widodo, Fang, & Elyas, 2020). It is also imperative for them to regard Global Englishes (GE) as an ecological system situated in multilingual sites. In a broad sense, GE is an inclusive term covering the discussion of World Englishes, English as an international language, English as a lingua franca (ELF), and translanguaging (Galloway, 2017), which allows one to analyze the spread, development, and use of English in a myriad of plurilingual settings. In truth, GE-oriented language education focuses on the use of English in multilingual situations to (re)construct and (re)negotiate meaning for intercultural communication As guest editors of this issue, we have witnessed how English was used differently in terms of accent and pronunciation styles, lexico-grammatical (or syntactic) choices, semantic and pragmatic choices, and discursive practices within English-speaking territories. So far, the use of English as a global language or a lingua franca (Kim, 2021) has unprecedentedly mushroomed as different people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds around the globe have spoken or written English for such instrumental purposes as doing overseas business, maintaining international relations, studying abroad, taking an internationally accredited English test, and joining international academic and cultural exchanges within English-medium encounters or intercultural communication (Fang & Widodo, 2019; Jenkins, Cogo, & Dewey, 2011; Widodo, Wood, & Gupta, 2017). The need to use English as a global language has brought about the notion of GE. From a critical perspective, this concept has attempted to problematize the mainstream ideology of native-speakerism, where the use of English should follow anglophone norms (Fang & Widodo, 2019). The publication of this special issue is especially timely, taking into account the fact that stakeholders in educational (e.g. schools, colleges, and universities) and noneducational (e.g. firms, corporations) institutions continue to operate within the ideological and normative influences of native-speakerism (Fang & Widodo, 2019; Murata, 2016; Widodo et al., 2020), which privilege inner circle norms, anglophone-oriented ASIAN ENGLISHES 2022, VOL. 24, NO. 2, 115–118 https://doi.org/10.1080/13488678.2022.2076027