Author: Riah Werner

Riah Werner is an English teacher and teacher trainer who has taught in Tanzania, South Korea, Thailand, Ecuador and Cote d'Ivoire. Her research interests include drama and the arts, social justice in ELT and locally contextualized pedagogy, particularly in African contexts. She is a PhD student in Language and Literacies Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto and Co-Chair of TESOL International's Social Responsibility Interest Section.
Reader Response Journal

More than a Game: A Critical Discourse Analysis of a Racial Inequality Exercise in Japan by Kay Hammond

Riah Werner

This article outlines another racial discrimination simulation, this time at a university in Japan. Hammond frames her study with discussions of simulations games, race relations in Japan, critical pedagogies and critical discourse analysis. Hammond carried out her inequality simulation twice, based on procedures similar to the Jane Elliott’s Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes exercise. The first year she divided student based on the color of their clothing, but the second she made the marginalized group wear pink sashes. She enacted a number of discriminatory practices, keeping her distance and refusing to make eye contact with the disfavored group, referring to them collectively rather than by name and invalidating their efforts to imitate the favored group. In contrast, she used the names of the students in the favored group, spoke to them enthusiastically and praised their efforts. The first year she had two groups of equal size, with each student spending half their time as part of each group. Based on student feedback, in the second year, the favored group was twice as large as the non-favored group, which meant each student experienced being in the favored group twice and the non-favored group once. In the first session, the favored students adopted one member of the non-favored group to treat well, decided what to do with the extra chairs provided for them (the non-favored group did not have enough chairs for everyone) and chose a name for the non-favored group. In the second session, Hammond gave the favored group a set of non-verbal instructions, which allowed them to follow along during a gibberish discussion, while the non-favored group was lost. The favored group members were also given pieces of paper to make into balls to throw at the non-favors group, which only received one sheet of paper to share amongst themselves. In the final session students took a fake test with impossible answers, to allow one student from the non-favored group to be promoted to the favored group. One test sheet had the correct answer printed on it in advance, ensuring that that student and only that student would pass. After the simulation, the students wrote written reflections on their experiences, which Hammond compared to written statements by people who has experienced actual racial discrimination. She compared the themes and found the students responses to be similar to the authentic accounts, including themes such as uncomfortable feelings, entitlement and coping mechanisms. This implied that the students’ awareness of racial issues had, in fact, increased. However, then she did a critical discourse analysis to examine the language that the students had used. She found that the students engaged in several forms of diversion, focusing attention on overt rather than subtle forms of racism, and shifting their reflections away from racial issues by making analogies to other forms of discrimination. Hammond reflects on the ways her own identity and the choices she made while designing the simulation might have encouraged these forms of diversion. By framing the exercise as being intended to help students see “what discrimination feels like” (p. 562), she encouraged them to focus on their experiences when they were in the discriminated group, rather than the experience of being part of the privileged group, which was also part of the exercise. By including obviously discriminatory actions in each of the sessions, she may have led them to focus on overt racism and the expense of recognizing more subtle forms. In the second year, when the favored group was larger, she may have discouraged the students from recognizing that racism can be enacted by powerful groups, even when they are numerically smaller. By enacting the most obvious behaviors herself, she also framed racism as being made up of visible individual actions, rather than subtle systemic and intergroup practices. She also reflects that her own identity as a White woman may have influenced the student responses, which were written in English rather than Japanese. She ends the article with a section on the pedagogical implications of her study, encouraging teachers to make sure that their students aren’t allowed to use diversionary tactics such as focusing only on overt racism or making analogies that don’t then return to the racial issues. She gives some specific suggestions on how her simulation could be modified to include more subtle forms of racism, including framing the activity as a chance to experience racism from both sides, including actions that contain more subtle forms of racism (like the benevolent racism of praising the disfavored group for only one characteristic) and sometimes conducting simulations where the favored group is in the minority. She also encourages a more critical awareness of the language students use in their reflections after such exercises.

The biggest takeaway from this article for me was how the content and the language of the students’ reactions could carry such different messages. Recognizing the diversionary tactics that people engage in to avoid in depth consideration of social issues is really important, and this article makes it clear just how much students can be avoiding the core issues while seeming to achieve the goals of an exercise. I was also struck by how thoughtfully Hammond deconstructed the way she might have contributed to these diversionary discourses. Thinking about the impact of the choices we make as teachers is incredibly important, and Hammond clearly demonstrates how this is even more the case when our goal is to raise our students’ social awareness. In the future, if I ever use activities that are similar to this, I will be sure to incorporate the more subtle forms of discrimination as well, which is necessary for a complete picture of how racism plays out in society.

Hammond, K. (2006). More than a game: A critical discourse analysis of a racial inequality exercise in Japan. TESOL Quarterly, 40(3), 545-571.

Reader Response Journal

Promoting Critical Racial Awareness in Teacher Education in Korea: Reflections on a Racial Discrimination Simulation Activity by Shannon Tanghe

Riah Werner

This article describes a racial discrimination simulation activity that Tanghe carried out with her Korean teacher education students. Based off of Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes experiment and Kay Hammond’s adaptation, she divided her students into two groups, one of which was treated as privileged and the other as disadvantaged for half of the class period, before the two groups switched roles. Tanghe provides ample background on the “one race” ideology that is so prevalent in South Korea, as well as the nation’s increasing diversity and the ways that non-Korean or multicultural students face discrimination in Korean schools, to provide context for her students’ reactions to the simulation. Based on a pre-simulation survey, most of her students believed that racism exists in South Korea, but isn’t a factor in their classrooms. This is consistent with Korean policies that put the onus of assimilation on multicultural students or non-Korean immigrants, rather than addressing racism with mainstream Korean Koreans (a repetition Tanghe uses deliberately to disaggregate Korean ethnicity and nationality). However, the simulation and subsequent reflections did lead some teachers to reconsider their personal experiences with race and the relevance of race to their school contexts. However, others felt that it was not an appropriate issue to address in language classes. That said, Tanghe points out that the Korean national curriculum does, in fact, expect students to understand other cultures and develop a “cooperative spirit as a cosmopolitan citizen,” which means that addressing racial issues in Korean classrooms can be justified as part of the teacher’s job. Tanghe recommends that Korea implements multicultural education programs targeted at mainstream ethnic Koreans, not just ethnic minorities, and suggests that teacher training programs need to integrate diversity training and raise teachers’ awareness of their own privilege, as well as schools hiring more diverse teachers. By implementing these suggestions, she hopes that Korea can move away from its current practices of ignoring race as unnecessary in homogenous classrooms, and refusing to address it in diverse classrooms to avoid singling out non-Korean students and causing discomfort. Given the changing demographics of the country, race is an important issue for teachers to be able to address in class.

This article was interesting, because it describes a race-focused version of the linguicism demonstration that Tanghe presented at this year’s TESOL conference, which I am using as a starting point for my linguicism article for the SRIS newsletter. The background on Korea’s racial identity and changing demographics was interesting and seemed accurate to me, based on my informal perceptions when I lived there, so it was good to see that actual data and studies back up my intuitions about Korea’s racial problems. It was also both plausible and shocking that so many Korean teacher candidates viewed race as something so distant from them and their classes. It makes me wonder how else teachers of racially homogenous classes can productively address race in their classes in a way that makes it real and important for their students, not something that happens somewhere else far away, especially since colonial legacies mean systems of white supremacy and racial hierarchies are in place pretty much all over the world.

Tanghe, S. (2016). Promoting critical racial awareness in teacher education in Korea: Reflections on a racial discrimination simulation activity. Asia Pacific Educational Review, 17(2), 203-215.

Reader Response Journal

Using Local Languages in English Language Classrooms by Ahmar Mahboob and Angel Lin

Riah Werner

This chapter examines why local languages are devalued in ELT pedagogy and proposes a model for incorporating local languages into the classroom in a multimodal way. After the Grammar Translation method fell out of fashion, the inner-circle dominated methodological developments, which meant that techniques were being designed with an ESL context, without a dominant language shared by all students, in mind. In this context, focusing on English-only instruction made sense, but the techniques were exported to other countries as the most current and modern approaches, without adapting to local EFL conditions. The result of the global spread of these inner circle approaches has been the perpetuation of the myths that languages are stable, standardized and rule-governed, rather than socially situated and fluid; the language learning is a zero sum game, where using the local language detracts from students’ ability to learn the target language and that language is a commodity that can be bought, sold and internationally marketed, turning teaching into an exchange of goods. In contrast to these harmful approaches, Mahboob and Lin argue for “more inclusive and context dependent models of language” (p. 9). They argue that local languages can be used in class for ideational, textual and interpersonal functions. They analyze an extract from a study Lin did in 1999, where a bilingual teacher in Hong Kong used codeswitching for Intiation-Response-Feedback exchanges. When the exchanges focused on the story (interpersonal function), all three phases were conducted in Cantonese, but when the exchanges were about language (ideational or textual functions), the initiation and response phases were in either language and were repeated until the student response was in English with the feedback in English as well. In this way, she started where the students were comfortable and built them towards the English expressions. They end their chapter by outlining Lin’s Multimodalities/Entextualization Cycle (MEC) as a method for systematically incorporating local languages into the classroom. In the first phase, students’ interest in the topic is raised through multimodalities and the use of familiar language, either LL or TL. In the second phase, students read a target language text and unpack it using everyday language, either LL or TL, along with multimodal representations of the meaning. In the third stage, students entextualize (put the experience in the text) using scaffolded academic target language in the appropriate genres.

The historical context that they give on why English only instruction is so dominant is really useful for thinking about why its ok to challenge the existing paradigm. Essentially, the use of the inner circle strategies in EFL contexts was never consciously chosen as appropriate (and certainly wasn’t based on research showing its effectiveness), but instead was a quirk of the cultural and economic dominance of the inner circle countries, which were uncritically adopted as normative worldwide, rather than being perceived as locally and contextually specific to the countries the techniques were developed in. The balance between local languages in the class is something I’ve been thinking about a lot here in Ecuador, where I use a fair bit of Spanish in my teaching. The MEC approach and the example of the teacher in Hong Kong both seem worthwhile, but they assume the teacher has full (rather than partial) abilities in the local language. I’m interesting in exploring whether there are any resources or studies out there about teachers who are not native speakers of the local language using it as an effective teaching tool in the classroom, and if so, what the best ways to do that are. It’s also interesting to me how strong the discourse of shame around LL in the classroom is too, which is definitely something I feel here at times. It’m thinking back on World Teach’s training, where they didn’t advocate for an English-only classroom, but they did discourage the use of Spanish to teach English content (instead suggesting it only for procedural information, like directions). It’s a step in the right direction, but not far enough yet. In contrast, the Edificar training was super dismissive of any valid role for Spanish inside the English classroom, which is problematic and increasingly out of date. Reading this now has encouraged me to incorporate plutilingual pedagogy into my EcuaTESOL proposal, alongside multiple intelligences and multimodality.

Mahboob, A., & Lin, A. M. Y. (2016). Using local languages in English language classrooms. In Willy A. Renandya and Handoyo P. Widodo (Eds.), English language teaching today: Building a closer link between theory and practice. New York: Springer.

Reader Response Journal

The Mapping of a Framework: Critical Race Theory and TESOL by Tonda Liggett

Riah Werner

In this article, Liggett connects critical race theory (CRT) to the experiences of linguistic minority TESOL students. She positions her examination in the current, hostile political climate and uses current events to inform her analysis and as examples of the phenomena she writes about. She notes that linguicism has become accepted as a way of continuing discrimination against racial groups, couched in linguistic rather than racial terms in the public discourse, but that the two systems are mapped onto each other. Applying the core tenants of CRT to TESOL, she argues that linguicism is 1) an ordinary, invisible and pervasive feature of life for ELLs and perpetuated at the institutional and structural levels, just like racism is. One example she gives is the way No Child Left Behind sanctioned removal of resources from ELLs, despite Title VI’s mandate that students have access to fully funded educational programs regardless of race, even though ELLs in the US are predominately students of color. Racialized linguicism is also 2) part of the colonial legacy of white supremacy, and that discrimination against racialized language learners plays out at the policy level even today. Examples include Oregon requiring ELLs to take state standardized tests in English after one year, despite the fact that research shows academic language proficiency takes 5-7 years to develop, and California’s Proposition 227, which eliminated the possibility of funding for bilingual education. 3) Linguicism can be challenged through counterstorytelling, as a way to ‘‘analyze the myths, presuppositions, and received wisdoms that make up the common culture about race and that invariably render blacks and other minorities one-down (Delgado 1995, p. xiv).’’ This actively positions individual experience as worthy of theorization and helps teachers understand their students’ identities, situations and understandings of their own learning. As Liggett writes “Key to this interchange is connecting individual identity construction/ deconstruction to broader contextual factors that work to frame worldviews and ideas about individual possibility” (p. 118). Within TESOL, these three tenets of CRT help decenter White Anglo epistemic privilege and acknowledge students’ intersectional identities. Letting students “name their reality” is important because reality is socially constructed through storytelling, provide a psychic outlet for marginalized groups to heal their pain and challenge ethnocentrism. All of this happens within a postcolonial framework, where marginalized people try to “force its alternative knowledges into the power structures of the west as well as the non-west” (Young 2003, p. 7), which is important because of the ways the global economy structures migration from poor, rural and developing areas to those that are richer, urban and more developed. Using CRT to inform how we look at the intersections between race and linguicism allows us to better understand the perspectives that our students bring to the classroom.

Having researched the intersections between racism and linguicism extensively, and having used counterstorytelling as a core framework in my thesis, I was delighted to read this article. I really agree with her points and the ways she connects the two areas feel accurate to me. I also appreciated the ways she links the ideas she’s talking about to specific current events that illustrate them, because it makes the importance and relevance much more concrete. Overall, I think the 3 aspects she focuses on (the permanence and invisibility of linguicism, the colonial legacy and counterstorytelling) are going to be useful mental touchstones for me as I continue to think about these issues in the future. It also makes me want to read some of her references, especially those about CRT in its original form (ie not applied to TESOL), to make sure I have the proper grounding in the original theory.

Delgado, R. (Ed.). (1995). Critical race theory: The cutting edge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Liggett, T. (2014). The mapping of a framework: Critical race theory and TESOL. The Urban Review, 46(1), 112-124.

Young, R. (2003). Postcolonialism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Reader Response Journal

Unpacking the Native Speaker Knapsack: An Autoethnographic Account of Privilege in TESOL by Steve Iams

Riah Werner

In this article, Iams begins by laying a foundation for auto ethnography as a valid form of inquiry within TESOL and situates himself in a position of privilege within the field. In the past, the majority of autoethnographic work has been done from the perspective of those with less privilege, so he is filling a gap by providing a personal account of a white, male native speaker. He begins his personal story by recounting how he got his first job in Japan, based on his native speaker status alone. He juxtaposes this with Philipson’s fallacies (monolingual, native speaker, early start, maximum exposure and subtractive fallacies) (1992, 185), but notes that none of this was part of his awareness at the time. He was also not considering himself as embarking on a career in TESOL. Next, he joined the Peace Corps, and was suddenly declared a teacher trainer. While the experience was personally fulfilling, he questioned the “unintended consequences of damaging the quality of English instruction and jeopardizing the professional identity of local non-native English-speaking teachers” (Wang & Lin, 2013, p. 5). He asked himself how does one become a TESOL professional and wound up enrolling at SIT. While there, his language and power project on NNEST issues, which he did with an older Korean woman, opened his eyes to some of these issues. For his project, they did a simulation where participants looked through job ads as if they were native or non-native speakers. In autoethnographic terms, this represented an epiphany for him. Searching for a job after graduation, he wound up training teachers in Korea, a situation where he was positioned as an “ideal language teacher” according to a study of Japanese students’ perspectives. The issues raised by his language and power project became more real when a qualified Korean colleague was not able to fill a real and immediate void in his institution, simply because he was not a native speaker. Despite the volume of research and advocacy devoted to disrupting the native/non-native dichotomy, the linguistic imperialism that Philipson wrote about is still present within the English teaching world. He ends without answering any questions, but expressing his discomfort with some of these tensions.

For me this article was really interesting, in part because I know Steve and I really respect the ways he uses his privilege to be an ally to others. It was also interesting to see how closely our careers paralleled each other, with one year of teaching in East Asia, four years of Peace Corps and then SIT, where the language and power project was a pivotal moment for me as well. Hearing the personal progression of his thinking is important, because issues of equity won’t change without the investment of people in privileged positions working alongside those who are being undervalued by the field. It makes me think of the Sister Scholars and their article Women Faculty of Color in TESOL: Theorizing Our Lived Experiences, where they presented personalized accounts of their positions within the academy. It’s noteworthy, because it’s 6 women of color alongside one white woman. The position of us white native speakers is also informed by race and native speaker status, so including our voices denormalizes white native experience as the assumed norm. From a critical perspective, disrupting the hegemony of privileged teachers is super important in creating a more just profession.

Iams, S. (2017). Unpacking the native speaker knapsack: An autoethnographic account of privilege in TESOL. Korea TESOL Journal, 12(2), 3-22.

Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Wang, L. Y., & Lin, T. B. (2013). The representation of professionalism in native English-speaking teachers recruitment policies: A comparative study of Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 12(3), 5–22.

Reader Response Journal

Race and TESOL: Introduction to Concepts and Theories by Ryuko Kubota and Angel Lin

Riah Werner

This article is the introduction to the 2006 Special Topics issue of TESOL Quarterly on Race and TESOL. It starts with two anecdotes of racialized experiences of the authors, both Asian women in TESOL, which establishes the fact that racial issues are real and have consequences for real people within our field right from the outset. The authors make a case that race was (at the time) being overlooked within TESOL and that it needs to be included as an explicit area of inquiry alongside other aspects of identity. The authors differentiate the terms race, ethnicity and culture and argue that all three terms are used to exclude and otherize racial minorities. They define racialization (the process of assigning meaning based on racial categories) and racism (practices that exclude racial others or lead to domination of one group based on race) and emphasize that racism is a societal discourse, not a matter of individuals having personal prejudices. They distinguish between institutional or systemic racism, perpetuated within TESOL through discriminatory hiring practices and the use of the ESL label to exclude students from mainstream schooling in the US, and epistemological racism, which privileges White ways of knowing and delegitimizes “nonmainstream race-based ways of thinking and writing” (480). They discuss the ways race intersects with other identities and the ways racialization of nonnative speakers constructs English as a White language. They outline the basics of Critical Race Theory (including counter-storytelling) and Critical White Studies, including some criticisms of the approaches, and they propose critical pedagogies and critical multicultural education as approaches for exploring race within TESOL. They summarize the articles in the special issue and end with a call for more attention to issues of race within TESOL, especially outside of a White/Non-White dichotomy constructed around Anglo-European epistemologies.

I initially read this article when I was researching the intersections of racism and linguicism for my language and power project last year. The clarity and succinctness of the article make it a really good starting point for exploring race in TESOL, since it defines important terms quite well and covers the basics necessary to understand much of the work being done in the area. I think the special topics issue was a good starting point for race to enter into the discourse of our field, and now, over ten years later, I see a lot more attention being paid to it. However, issues of race still tend to be thought of as “extra,” rather than central to English language teaching practices, so I think we as a field still have a way to go. It was interesting for me to go back and revisit the article, because while I have a level of familiarity with these ideas, having absorbed them into my ways of thinking about my work, I feel like this is still the exception rather than the norm. I also think that this was where I first encountered the idea of counter-storytelling, which wound up becoming a fairly significant aspect of my thesis, so it was interesting to go back and see my original highlights. If there was one article I could make required reading in my TESOL program, I think this would be a strong contender.

Kubota, R., & Lin, A. (2006). Race and TESOL: Introduction to concepts and theories. TESOL Quarterly, 40(3), 471-493.