Un/Equal Englishes in TESOL Teacher-Education Programme: A Singapore Case

It has been widely established that the global spread of English and the status of English as an international language have challenged the monolithic conceptualisation and perspective of English, its user, and its culture. English is now conceptualised as a plurilithic language, used by people from diverse lingua-cultural backgrounds who naturally bring their own linguistic practices, resources, and cultural norms into their use of English. In response to this, applied linguists have called for the urgent need to raise teachers’ awareness of different varieties of world Englishes. Recently, many TESOL teacher-education programmes have attempted to incorporate a topic, a module, a course, or even an entire programme on World Englishes (WE), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), English as an International Language (EIL), or Global Englishes (GE) (Marlina, 2014; Matsuda in Preparing teachers to teach English as an international language, Multilingual Matters, 2017). Although some empirical studies have, to a large extent, revealed the positive impact of being engaged in a WE/ELF/EIL/GE-oriented lesson, course, or programme on pre-/in-service teachers’ perceptions/attitudes towards world Englishes and their users, the ways in which these Englishes are constructed still remain critically unexplored. This chapter, undergirded by the Unequal Englishes perspective, attempts to explore how those Englishes are constructed by in-service teachers in a TESOL professional development program from a particular educational institution in Singapore. Since English language education provides a pedagogical space in which linguistic, cultural, social, and racial differences meet, this chapter argues that the ways in which these Englishes are ‘unequally constructed’ or ‘politicised’, need to be taken into consideration in TESOL teacher education programmes that aim to raise awareness of the pluricentricity of English and its users.