The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language

Is it possible to envision a non-exclusionary TESOL world, or a ‘World TESOL’ as Holliday puts it (contrasting it with ‘English-speaking Western TESOL’), where a shared international, professional-academic identity is prime, and where the heterogeneity, diversity, and difference of its professionals is not treated as problematic but is acknowledged and prized? That question forms the crux of Holliday's new book, informed largely by a postmodernist perspective and critical theory. One of the central concerns of a critical approach to TESOL is the need to engage with questions of difference, and this the book achieves with extraordinary acumen. Postmodernism may be summarized as a scepticism toward long-cherished concepts and modes of thought, an unwillingness ‘to accept taken-for-granted components of our reality and the “official” accounts of how they came to be the way they are’ (Dean 1994: 4). One of the chief characteristics of postmodernism is its focus on...