Shaping ESOL: Addressing and Advancing Issues of Policy and Practice

Abstract

An increasingly globalized workforce, coupled with 2020 marking a record high for the number of forcibly displaced people in the world (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2021), means that millions of people are choosing to, or are being forced to, make a new life in countries where their mother tongue is not the predominant language. The result is that most towns and cities, in both the United States and the UK, are more multicultural and multilingual than ever before. Acknowledging and providing effective governance for these new “superdiverse communities” (Canagarajah, 2017, p. 2) is fundamental to creating inclusive, cohesive societies.

Regrettably, however, the failure of governments to recognize the central role language(s) can play in establishing integrated communities is common. Indeed, authorities often use language as a tool of control rather than as the means to create more cohesive societies. For example, language is frequently used as an instrument of immigration control (Khan & McNamara, 2017), in erecting barriers to employment or study (Piller, 2016), or as a means to promote the idea that monolingualism is crucial for a homogenous, integrated society (Simpson & Whiteside, 2015). Therefore, the ideological approach governments take toward providing language education for migrants, and how that plays out in ESOL provision in local contexts, is of great importance, and is why these themes were chosen as the focus of this special issue.

Stemming from decades of frontline ESOL teaching experience, of meeting people from other cultures with whom we share much in common, it was our frustration with the way in which language education is currently supported and organized in our local contexts that led to our desire to create and publish this special issue. Change at both policy and practice level is needed in thinking afresh about how language provision for migrants might be most effectively organized. The pieces presented here encompass both of these themes. At the policy level, convincing arguments are made for taking a multicultural, multilingual perspective on language education, while on a practice level, articles focus on how we can emphasize equality, diversity, and inclusion in our ESOL provision. The Black Lives Matter movement and COVID 19 both occurred since we initially proposed the idea for this special issue, and two of the articles in this collection, Baker’s and Graham-Brown’s, focus on these field-changing events.