(Re)centering social justice in world Englishes for the English language classroom

Abstract

Abstract Building on three broad pedagogical approaches (raciolinguistics, culturally relevant pedagogy, and translanguaging) and three adjacent pedagogical efforts (valuing languages equally, addressing racialization and postcolonialism, and advocating for justice in language education) in applied linguistics, this conceptual article seeks to (re)center social justice in the World Englishes (WE) research agenda by distilling three pedagogical practices that WE practitioners can adopt in the classroom. To some extent, both fields of inquiry (i.e., WE and applied linguistics) have always had shared intellectual pursuits, as demonstrated in the special issue of WE that called for a more robust transdisciplinary dialogue between WE and second language acquisition, and a more recent special issue of WE that explored how translanguaging can help expand the WE research agenda. Building on these intellectual developments, we put forward three social justice‐oriented principles which we subsequently apply to our (re)analysis of data excerpts that were extracted from applied linguistics studies conducted in the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and South Africa, respectively. The article closes with a discussion of prospects and possibilities that would lay the groundwork for a constructive future dialogue between WE and applied linguistics.

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