Suresh Canagarajah
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 146865 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Suresh Canagarajah |
| PRENOMES | Suresh |
| SOBRENOME | Canagarajah |
| ASSINATURA | CANAGARAJAH S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1292-2366 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 99 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 687 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 97 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1993 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Exploring belonging of non-local university students in Hong Kong
The sense of belonging is one of the vital conditions for non-local students’ positive academic and social experiences. Despite extensive research in Hong Kong, studies remain fragmented, focusing on isolated student groups rather than offering comparative insights with global relevance. This study addresses this gap through a meta-ethnographic review of 25 qualitative and mixed-methods studies. Using trans-epistemologies, it shows how Hong Kong’…
Vulnerability and Ethics in the Global South
Trauma in Tesol
This editorial introduction frames the special issue ‘Trauma in TESOL: Theoretical, Methodological, and Pedagogical Perspectives’ by advancing a decolonial, feminist, and socially grounded orientation to trauma in language education. Moving beyond dominant medicalized models that treat trauma as an individual, pathological condition, we conceptualize trauma as a relational, sociopolitical, and affective phenomenon that is mediated through languag…
Post‐Traumatic Growth in the Global South
This article reports on a qualitative study of the way instructors and students understand and respond to traumatizing events in a Sri Lankan university. It shows how the attitudes and practices in the society at large are carried over to classrooms even though local institutions do not have a programmatic trauma‐informed pedagogy. Relational ethics practiced in the community, deriving from local understandings of life as inter‐dependent and vuln…
Motherhood as capital
Diversifying “English” at the Decolonial Turn
In this brief forum article, I draw from the disciplinary orientation of linguistic anthropology to discuss how a collection of linguistic and semiotic resources gets enregistered as the “language” for specific communicative activities. Enregisterment is an ongoing social and ideological process whereby a semiotic corpus gets identified as conventional for an activity or identity (see Agha, 2005). At a larger scale of consideration, it can also h…
Translingual negotiation in mixed‐gender communication
As a practical theory of language, translanguaging refers not only to speakers' use of multiple languages, but also to the deployment of other semiotic resources and artifacts in communication. To examine the use of semiotic resources and translingual negotiation strategies in STEM communication, this study explores the intersectionality of translingual communication and gender in a research group consisting of international engineering scientist…
Translingual Practices
Bringing together work from a team of international scholars, this groundbreaking book explores how language users employ translingualism playfully, while, at the same time, negotiating precarious situations, such as the breaking of social norms and subverting sociolinguistic boundaries. It includes a range of ethnographic studies from around the globe, to provide us with insights into the everyday lives of language users and learners and their l…
Translingual Practices
Gregory Hadley and Andrew Boon
Journal Article Gregory Hadley and AndrewBoon: CRITICAL THINKING Get access Gregory Hadley and Andrew Boon:CRITICAL THINKING. Routledge, 2023. xvi + 357. Suresh Canagarajah Suresh Canagarajah Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA E-mail: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1292-2366 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Applied Linguistics, amad006, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amad006 …
(Im)migrant women’s translingual literacy practices as problem-solving and learning resources
This paper calls for an expansion of translingual studies to include the examination of learners beyond university contexts to further our understanding of translingual literacies and practices. The authors present findings from a larger ethnographic study about practices and repertoires that (im)migrant women mobilize and employ when learning how to write in a community-based English literacy program. The study provides insights into the interse…
Crip translingualism
Forms of immobility both limit unqualified human agency and enable diverse channels of mobility. In this sense, mobility and immobility work together. Certain philosophical movements such as Southern theories and disability studies treat constraints, sedentariness, and boundaries as needing to be respected and accommodated in any inquiry. This article draws from these schools to theorize disruptions and constraints as resources in the circulation…
Decolonizing Academic Writing Pedagogies for Multilingual Students
This article discusses how academic writing pedagogies for multilingual students can be transformed by the literacy traditions that these students bring to North American classrooms. This is an embodied and personal rendition, situated in the author's South Asian literacies as illustrative of Global South traditions, and draws from his own empirical research and teaching practices for writing instructors in TESOL. Informed by developments in deco…
A Decolonial Crip Linguistics
This article opens a conversation between disability studies and linguistics from the author’s positionality from the Global South. It argues that capacity building for both the abled and disabled in the North is implicated in the disablement of people in the Global South. A decolonial orientation to disability studies values vulnerability, relationality, and ethics which are less privileged in the academy. The article demonstrates how such a cri…
Monolingual ideologies versus spatial repertoires
This paper explores language beliefs and writing practices of an international scholar in Biochemistry working at a large U.S. research university. Although the participant articulated monolingual ideologies and a desire to become like a ‘native speaker,’ he did not consider advanced writing skills in English a prerequisite for publishing in English in his field. Through ‘talk-around-text’ (Lillis 2008) and visits to his laboratory, we examine wh…
Spatial repertoires in the disciplinary communication of international STEM scholars
The overall goal of this special issue is to understand how bi-/multilingual STEM scholars navigate and deploy spatial repertoires for professional communication. The articles present contextualized, empirical cases from various genre contexts: instructional practices, scholarly writing, language proficiency tests, and research group meetings. While all the articles adopt a spatial orientation to understanding STEM communication, the authors draw…
Entextualizing affective meanings
Objects in embodied sociolinguistics
This article addresses recent calls in sociolinguistics to accommodate the agentive role of material objects in communicative interactions. The study explores how agency is shared between humans and objects, and how the latter may influence and shape the semiotic repertoires in a professional interaction. We adopt interactional sociolinguistics to analyze video recordings from the research group meetings (RGM) of a team of multinational microbiol…
Diversifying academic communication in anti-racist scholarship
This article develops a complex orientation to linguistic domination and resistance to demonstrate how academic communication can be diversified to facilitate anti-racist scholarship. While it draws from social sciences which provide complex theories of social structuration, it demonstrates how linguists can offer fine-grained analytical tools to track these processes across diverse scales of space, time, and institutions. The objective of this a…
Trajectories in Decolonizing Language
This interview presents the celebrated Kenyan writer Ngugi's changing orientations in decolonizing language. After adopting a Marxist approach to language in the 1980s, he now adopts an embodied and ecological orientation from his indigenous Gikuyu tradition. He articulates the importance of vernaculars and multimodal art forms in social transformation. He discusses the role of affective dispositions such as memory, pain, and hope in resistance.
Challenges in decolonizing linguistics
This article traces the roots of translingualism in the Global South, with particular relevance to the author’s South Asian heritage. After narrating his attempts to practice this orientation in his research and scholarship, the author analyzes the problematic ways in which translingualism is appropriated in the academic, economic, and political contexts in Global North. Employing the conceptual orientation of enregisterment, the article theorize…
Sojourner experiences and spatial repertoires
Research on translingual repertoires has highlighted the diverse semiotic resources that individuals access in communication, but little research has considered how spatial factors permit or limit access to these resources. Furthermore, as translingual studies have predominantly focused on interactional analysis, there is a paucity of studies on how social networks shape the repertoires of users. To fill this gap, we examine the communicative pra…
Language diversity in academic writing
This article draws from scalar theory to examine how textual diversification can engage with linguistic and social structures to both pluralize academic writing and facilitate an alternate structuration of publishing policies and practices. It adopts indexical analysis to demonstrate how non-normative linguistic choices can gain uptake for meanings and status in academic communication, leading to the rescaling of vernacular resources in global pu…
Student Artifacts as Language Learning Materials
South Korean job seekers face pressure to produce high scores on standardized English tests, which leads to the prominence of test‐oriented pedagogy. Though recent scholarship illustrates how materials reflect the values of society and how these are negotiated in classrooms it has mainly analyzed preexisting published books, leaving the potential of student‐generated materials (SGMs) underexplored. By using a new materialist perspective (Canagara…
Rethinking Mobility and Language
Codemeshing in Academic Writing
Studies on translanguaging of multilingual students have turned their attention to teachable strategies in classrooms. This study is based on the assumption that it is possible to learn from students' translanguaging strategies while developing their proficiency through a dialogical pedagogy. Based on a classroom ethnography, this article describes the translanguaging strategies of a Saudi Arabian undergraduate student in her essay writing. Her s…
Language shift and the family
Fishman's Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) emphasizes the family in maintaining the heritage languages of immigrant communities. This study uses interview data from Sri Lankan Tamil communities in the U.S.A., U.K., and Canada to explain how families account for the rapid loss of Tamil in the diaspora. It shows how the positive valuation of English since British colonization, the need to make up for past deprivations because of cas…
Critical Ethnography of a Sri Lankan Classroom
The article argues that the way in which domination is experienced and oppositional tendencies are formed in classroom life have to be observed closely rather than conceived abstractly. This ethnographic study of 22 tertiary-level Tamil students following a mandatory English for general purposes (EGP) course reveals that whereas the lived culture displays opposition to the alienating discourses inscribed in a U.S. textbook, the students affirm in…
Dilemmas in planning English/vernacular relations in post-colonial communities
In the context of globalization and post-modern discourses, the debate about the relative status of local and dominant languages poses serious policy problems for post-colonial communities. Critics of minority language rights (MLR) generally point out that engineering a language shift on behalf of a vernacular language - motivated by the preservationist interests, collective rights and sentimental associations of an ethnic group - is futile, as t…
Teacher Development in a Global Profession
In this ethnographic self‐reconstruction, the author represents the ways in which he negotiated the differing teaching practices and professional cultures of the periphery and the center in an effort to develop a strategic professional identity. He brings out the importance of using multiple identities critically for voice in the wider professional discourses and practices. As global English acquires local identities, and diverse professional com…
Diaspora Identities and Language
Recent developments in diaspora studies show the importance of language in constructing and negotiating diaspora identities and relationships. However, scholars in linguistics-based fields have not
Transnational work, translingual practices, and interactional sociolinguistics
This introductory article explains the need for interactional analyses of workplace communication, which is increasingly multilingual and multimodal in expansive spatiotemporal contexts and layered frames. It provides an overview of how neoliberal economic conditions have impacted workplace communication, generating new task structures and communicative practices. Arguing that there is a need to situate localized workplace interactions in changin…
Styling One's Own in the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora
This study focuses on the ways youth in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Canada, Britain, and the United States construct their ethnic identity when proficiency in their heritage language is limited. Though these youth claim only rudimentary proficiency in Tamil and identify English as their dominant language, they are nonetheless able to claim ethnic identity through strategic language practices. Different from Rampton's theorization of crossing…
Beyond Native and Nonnative
This article proposes translingual dispositions as a way to move beyond the NES/NNES dichotomy in understanding language teacher identity. Recent scholarship in TESOL and Applied Linguistics has problematized the NES/NNES binary from a poststructuralist perspective, highlighting how NES/NNES subjectivities are discursively and performatively (co-)constructed and negotiated. Despite the efforts to empower NNESs, the very binary reifies monolingual…
The everyday politics of translingualism as a resistant practice
This paper seeks to expand the translingual tradition through a stronger focus on ‘the political implications’ – a way to understand the ordinariness of everyday resistance. When people engage in linguistic resistance in everyday life, it might have mixed motivations; it might not be theoretically informed; it might draw from their cultures of resistance in their community history; it might need ideological analysis by scholars so that we can cre…
Agency and power in intercultural communication
Sociolinguists have recently employed the notion of spatiotemporal scales to explain the changing social status of linguistic codes across social and geopolitical domains. Scales enable us to address the portability of semiotic resources in migration with great insight. In addition, unlike romanticized orientations to globalization and transnational relations, this model enables us to address the role of power in shaping the uptake of resources i…
Tesol at Forty
This overview delineates the direction of pedagogical developments since the 25th anniversary issue of TESOL Quarterly. Three tendencies characterize our professional practice: (a) a continuation along the earlier lines of progression (i.e., in opening up the classroom to learning opportunities, integrating skills, and teaching for specific purposes); (b) a radical reorientation along new paradigms (i.e., in understanding motivation and acquisiti…
Reconstructing Local Knowledge
(2002). Reconstructing Local Knowledge. Journal of Language, Identity & Education: Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 243-259
Scalar politics, language ideologies, and the sociolinguistics of globalization among transnational Korean professionals in Hong Kong
This paper argues that the sociolinguistics of globalization is accompanied by a constitutive scalar politics. Based on ten interviews with Korean professionals in Hong Kong, we report that Korean migrants' use and experience of English is characterized by competing language ideologies we identify as: Pragmatic English/Perfect English, Multilingualism/English Only, and Global Language/Local Language. Tensions within these ideologies were revealed…
Diversifying “English” at the Decolonial Turn
In this brief forum article, I draw from the disciplinary orientation of linguistic anthropology to discuss how a collection of linguistic and semiotic resources gets enregistered as the “language” for specific communicative activities. Enregisterment is an ongoing social and ideological process whereby a semiotic corpus gets identified as conventional for an activity or identity (see Agha, 2005). At a larger scale of consideration, it can also h…
Language diversity in academic writing
This article draws from scalar theory to examine how textual diversification can engage with linguistic and social structures to both pluralize academic writing and facilitate an alternate structuration of publishing policies and practices. It adopts indexical analysis to demonstrate how non-normative linguistic choices can gain uptake for meanings and status in academic communication, leading to the rescaling of vernacular resources in global pu…
The connection between transcultural dispositions and translingual practices in academic writing
This article discusses how transculturalism and translingualism contribute to expanding epistemological landscapes in research on interculturality by analyzing the relationship between the two terms. While both translingualism and transculturalism respond to the increasing diversity, mobility, and hybridity in communication and identities, their relationship has not been studied, as scholars articulating either concept belong to different fields.…
From Critical Research Practice to Critical Research Reporting
Functions of codeswitching in ESL classrooms
This study analyses codeswitched utterances in ESL classes of 24 secondary school teachers in Jaffna (Sri Lanka). Although teachers are mostly unaware of using or permitting Tamil, and even consider it inappropriate for ESL classrooms, the study shows some useful functions codeswitching serves for classroom management and transmission of lesson content. The negotiation of values, identities and roles through codeswitching during the unintended op…
Materialising semiotic repertoires
This article takes the inquiry into semiotic repertoires beyond their classifications and inventories to analyse their interactions with each other and the way they gain indexicality in situated communication. As previous theorisation suggests that semiotic repertoires are deployed by agentive individuals, this article draws from New Materialism to focus on how social agents, semiotic repertoires, and material ecologies work together in distribut…
Changing orientations to heritage language
The notion of heritage language (HL) has recently been challenged by emerging orientations to language. That languages are always in contact, they are constructed by ideologies, and they don't have an ontological status challenge traditional notions of HL as primordial, pure, and territorialized. In this article, I draw from data from a qualitative inquiry adopting observations, surveys, and interviews on how families of the Sri Lankan Tamil dias…
Reconstructing heritage language
In recent years, Sri Lankan Tamils have fled their homeland as refugees as a result of the ethnic conflict in the country. Despite their heightened linguistic consciousness, community elders claim that Tamil youth are turning their backs on their heritage language. My data from Lancaster (California, US), East London (UK) and Toronto (Canada) shows a more complex attitude towards language maintenance by Tamil youth. Though a majority of the youth…
American textbooks and Tamil students
This paper illustrates how teacher‐conducted classroom research can interrogate ideological tensions in the ESL classroom. Using a post‐structuralist perspective on language and discourse, the paper interprets the verbal and visual signs constituting the American textbook and the graffiti scribbled by students in the margins. The pedagogical assumption of learning as a value‐free utilitarian activity, combined with content that is loaded with urb…
Embodied semiotic resources in Research Group Meetings
Drawing from Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS), this article presents an analysis of a Research Group Meeting in Microbiology occurring at a mid‐western US university. We focus on the performance of a South Korean postdoctoral scholar who claims limited proficiency in English and demonstrate how he makes valued contributions by leveraging embodied semiotic resources alongside verbal ones. The analysis also highlights the co‐participants’ openne…
Shame in English language teaching
Inadequate attention paid to understanding the complex relations between personal drives and situated social constraints means affect remains the least understood of language learning variables (Scovel, 2001). At a time when English is uncritically and universally treated as desirable, it is significant that its learning and use evokes shame in some communities. In this study, the authors analyze how Kiribati nationals and international developme…
"Comments on Ann Raimes's "Out of the Woods
0 Ann Raimes's remarkably readable article (Vol. 25, No. 3,) covers quite comprehensively the history of L2 approaches to teaching writing, including the methods of instruction and research tradition influenced by each approach. Although she uses the motif of a fairy tale journey through the woods by L2 scholars in search of new approaches, she judiciously refrains from championing any single approach in order to avoid taking false trails. Rather…
American textbooks and Tamil students
This paper illustrates how teacher‐conducted classroom research can interrogate ideological tensions in the ESL classroom. Using a post‐structuralist perspective on language and discourse, the paper interprets the verbal and visual signs constituting the American textbook and the graffiti scribbled by students in the margins. The pedagogical assumption of learning as a value‐free utilitarian activity, combined with content that is loaded with urb…
Critical Ethnography of a Sri Lankan Classroom
The article argues that the way in which domination is experienced and oppositional tendencies are formed in classroom life have to be observed closely rather than conceived abstractly. This ethnographic study of 22 tertiary-level Tamil students following a mandatory English for general purposes (EGP) course reveals that whereas the lived culture displays opposition to the alienating discourses inscribed in a U.S. textbook, the students affirm in…
Competing discourses in Sri Lankan English poetry
The realization that language is ideological has created a debate among postcolonial English writers on what language to use for their creative expression and how. While Ngügï wa Thiong'o has argued for the abandonment of English and the sole use of native languages, Gabriel Okara has argued for the fusion of the native and English discourses, thus constructing an alternate discourse that is ideologically satisfying for native aspirations while b…
Robert Phillipson, Linguistic imperialism. (Oxford applied linguistics.) Oxford & New York
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Manipulating the context
L'etude examine les strategies discursives associees a l'utilisation des emprunts anglais chez les vendeurs de poissons tamils au cours de leurs interactions. Bien que le type d'emprunts reflete une competence limitee en anglais et un faible statut socio-economique, l'usage de ces emprunts montre une complexite rhetorique et sociale
Functions of codeswitching in ESL classrooms
This study analyses codeswitched utterances in ESL classes of 24 secondary school teachers in Jaffna (Sri Lanka). Although teachers are mostly unaware of using or permitting Tamil, and even consider it inappropriate for ESL classrooms, the study shows some useful functions codeswitching serves for classroom management and transmission of lesson content. The negotiation of values, identities and roles through codeswitching during the unintended op…
"The political economy of code choice in a "revolutionary society
This article explores the persistence of Tamil-English bilingualism in the Marxist/Nationalist de-facto separate state of Jaffna (Sri Lanka) through an integrated macro- and micro-sociolinguistic analysis of code choice in the community. While Tamil is dominant at present, the international hegemony of English is nevertheless subtly felt. There are now few L2 dominant or balanced bilinguals; grammatical competence in "standard English" is declini…
“Nondiscursive” Requirements in Academic Publishing, Material Resources of Periphery Scholars, and the Politics of Knowledge Production
Although some consideration has been given to the manner in which academic discourse is culture-bound, how the “nondiscursive” conventions and requirements of academic publishing can serve exclusionary functions has not been adequately explored. Meeting the latter requirements is contingent upon the availability of certain material resources. Reflecting on personal experience in trying to meet such requirements from an under-developed region, the…
From Critical Research Practice to Critical Research Reporting
The Fortunate Traveler
A Geopolitics Of Academic Writing
1. Contextualizing Academic Writing -- 2. Communities of Knowledge Construction -- 3. Conventions in Knowledge Construction -- 4. Textual Conventions in Conflict -- 5. Publishing Requirements and Material Constraints -- 6. Literacy Practices and Academic Culture -- 7. Poverty and Power in Knowledge Production -- 8. Reform, Resistance, Reconstruction.
Reconstructing Local Knowledge
(2002). Reconstructing Local Knowledge. Journal of Language, Identity & Education: Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 243-259
The Forum
Rhetoricizing Reflexivity
In This Issue
Conclusion
Dilemmas in planning English/vernacular relations in post-colonial communities
In the context of globalization and post-modern discourses, the debate about the relative status of local and dominant languages poses serious policy problems for post-colonial communities. Critics of minority language rights (MLR) generally point out that engineering a language shift on behalf of a vernacular language - motivated by the preservationist interests, collective rights and sentimental associations of an ethnic group - is futile, as t…
Changing Communicative Needs, Revised Assessment Objectives
Postmodern globalization requires that students strive for competence in a repertoire of English varieties as they shuttle between multilingual communities. From this perspective, the current debate becomes irrelevant regarding whether local varieties or dominant varieties (British/American) be used in international proficiency tests. Because it is unwise to define proficiency based on a single variety and because it is impossible to teach or mea…
The Place of World Englishes in Composition
Contesting the monolingualist assumptions in composition, this article identifies textual and pedagogical spaces for World Englishes in academic writing. It presents code meshing as a strategy for merging local varieties with Standard Written English in a move toward gradually pluralizing academic writing and developing multilingual competence for transnational relationships.
In This Issue
In This Issue
Tesol at Forty
This overview delineates the direction of pedagogical developments since the 25th anniversary issue of TESOL Quarterly. Three tendencies characterize our professional practice: (a) a continuation along the earlier lines of progression (i.e., in opening up the classroom to learning opportunities, integrating skills, and teaching for specific purposes); (b) a radical reorientation along new paradigms (i.e., in understanding motivation and acquisiti…
Lingua Franca English, Multilingual Communities, and Language Acquisition
Firth and Wagner (1997) questioned the dichotomies nonnative versus native speaker, learner versus user , and interlanguage versus target language , which reflect a bias toward innateness, cognition, and form in language acquisition. Research on lingua franca English (LFE) not only affirms this questioning, but reveals what multilingual communities have known all along: Language learning and use succeed through performance strategies, situational…
The Ecology of Global English
Sociology (74 obras) · Linguistics (67 obras) · Multilingual Education and Policy (61 obras) · Second Language Learning and Teaching (39 obras) · Pedagogy (35 obras) · Political science (35 obras) · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning (34 obras) · Psychology (32 obras) · Philosophy (30 obras) · Computer Science (29 obras)