ABSTRACT
The diversity of Englishes has led to endless scholarly calls for fostering respect for different Englishes in ELT, which I have been actively responding to via teaching and writing about WE. However, there linger memories of my encounters with disturbing raciolinguistic ideologies or practices driven by these ideologies in various sociocultural and pedagogical sites, and the effects I have felt. Often these memories are not documented in my published works or even discussed openly in classrooms. Hence, I will share in this chapter my memories of those encounters (cf. Haug’s [2008] notion of ‘memory work’) and proffer implications for teaching and researching diversity in ELT. Framed within the lens of Unequal Englishes, the overall intention of this chapter is not to cast doubt on the scholarship of WE, but to prompt critical dialogues on discourses on lingua-cultural pluralism in which diversity is ‘romantically’ celebrated, obscuring entrenched linguistic inequalities or hierarchies that exist in the society.
