Decolonising language education through narrative inquiry: English teacher educators’ perceptions of the ethnoreligious diversity in Sri Lankan Englishes

Defined as a ‘link language’ in the Sri Lankan Constitution, teachers of English are encouraged to teach English as a local language that promotes communication and coexistence among diverse ethnoreligious communities in the country. However, little is known about teachers’ perceptions of Sri Lankan Englishes (SLE) that reflect local diversity. This study explores eight English language teacher educators’ narratively-constructed perceptions of the ethnoreligious diversity in student essays on Sinhala-Buddhist, Tamil-Hindu, Islamic, and Portuguese Burgher-Catholic festivals with a high number of multilingual SLE lexis. Their multiple, complex, and situated responses included deeply personal reactions, and the affordances and challenges of incorporating SLE in teaching and assessment. Overall, they presented a nuanced, practice-based assertion of a social justice-oriented role for teaching and researching ethnoreligious variation within country-based Englishes that could potentially decolonise some aspects of English language education in Sri Lanka and in comparable South Asian contexts.