Unveiling the discourses of coloniality: Mexican Student-Teachers’ language awareness in personal stories and language practices

Abstract

IN ENGLISH(English) language teaching in Mexico occurs within ‘coloniality. Hence, it is imperative to raise the critical multilingual language awareness of future language teachers in terms of colonial practices. In order to promote decolonizing pedagogies, this paper presents the results of a critical-ethnographic-action-research study, whose main goal was to unveil the discourses of coloniality present in the daily lives and personal stories of 37 student-teachers enrolled in a language teaching BA program while connecting the student-teachers to language teaching in general and the position of Spanish and English vis-à-vis Indigenous languages in Mexico in particular. The data originates from student-teachers’ stories about (self)discrimination, their collection and analysis of memes, videos circulating in their social media, samples from their language textbooks, and a written piece in which the student-teachers identified and reflected on words and phrases stemming from coloniality. Based on an iterative and recursive analysis of the data and utilizing a decolonizing theoretical lens in connection to race theories in Latin America, this paper addresses three emergent themes: (1) race and physical appearance; (2) colonial linguistic hierarchies; and (3) awareness of the discourses of colonial difference.

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