“Aren’t We All Complicit?”: A Commentary on Multiple Faces of Race and Language in English Language Education

Abstract

This paper reviews recent work on race and language ideologies in Asia, aiming to a more complex understanding on the subject that avoids determinism and dichotomous thinking. The first part of the paper discusses current work on English language teaching in Japan, and concludes that greater emphasis on teacher agency is needed. The second part offers ethnographic vignettes of scenarios in which race plays sometimes a surprising role in shaping interactions and exclusions. These scenarios focus on the implications of the scholars’s commitement to social justice in ideological and institutional structures in which prejudice is reproduced and relayed in situations that involve multiple Asian identities and positionalities.