ABSTRACT
This chapter describes English as a Foreign Language (EFL) discourse in the service of a cultural politics of peace, social justice, and human prosperity. It focuses on the need to construct a transformative EFL pedagogical discourse that might promote students’ agency and advance a cultural politics of peace, social justice, and human prosperity. Instead of facilitating learning processes about mutual understanding and enabling the growth of a multicultural learning community, in Israel, EFL discourse perpetuates ideologies of dominance, native speakerism, Anglo-centric superiority, and Western hegemony. Analysis of EFL discourse in Israel shows the constitutive role language plays in constructing individual identities and attitudes. Exploring the ways in which EFL discourse might become transformative largely amounts to constructing students not as passive receptacles of knowledge, but as creative agents of social change. The chapter argues that students should be given textual exposure that interpellates them as motivated agents who are able to question and eventually contest discourses of inequality and Anglo-/West-centrism.
