ABSTRACT
Nonetheless, as a sociolinguist whose views on language are driven by language use, I expose my students to ideas like English as lingua franca and World Englishes in order to battle some of these native-speakerist ideologies and to encourage bi/ multilingual identities. My students seem to appreciate the ideas even though they fi nd them completely novel, which is often surprising to me since concepts like World Englishes have been around since the 1960s. However, as we proceed through these topics, it always becomes clear that there are major gaps between how English can be envisioned in institutions that will hire my students to teach, and how English operates in the “real” world. I would like to think that the real world is what matters more, but after ten years of teaching introductory sociolinguistics courses, I am often not so sure. This has led to discussions and jokes about the need for acronyms like TENAR (Teaching English for No Apparent Reason), which at least acknowledges the gap but fails to provide concrete ideas for pedagogy, particularly for those who have taught in contexts where there seems to be little actual need for English as a language of international or cross-cultural communication.
Defi ning language teacher identity
