Alastair Pennycook
Biographic Data
| ID | 224954 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alastair Pennycook |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alastair |
| FAMILY NAME | Pennycook |
| SIGNATURE | PENNYCOOK A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Technology Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4656-6187 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 84 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 988 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 83 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Posthumanism and Critical Applied Linguistics
Posthumanism can be understood in terms of three overlapping domains: a concern with the tenets of humanist political philosophy (the exclusivity and particularity of the understanding of the human), transformations to what it means to be human as a result of changing technologies (a transhumanist interest in converging technologies that enhance human capacities through a range of augmentations to mind and body), and a new materialist orientation…
On being heard: English, voice, and linguistic authority
This position paper explores the relationship between voice and different ways of understanding English. By emphasizing that English is dispersed, local, and variable, the World Englishes and English as a lingua franca (ELF) frameworks suggest that locally recognized varieties may be an avenue for diverse voices. This paper argues, however, that recognizing varieties of English does not go far enough (and indeed may be a regressive step) in openi…
Language, deconstructivism, and the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
In a series of articles critical of aspects of the idea of translanguaging, MacSwan (e.g. 2022) has suggested that deconstructivism has derailed the translingual project. This paper draws attention to a number of weaknesses in this argument that are important for taking critical questions about language seriously. The term deconstructivism operates more as a derogatory label than a description of a theoretical stance, an appeal to popular notions…
Rethinking Research in Applied Linguistics: An Interview With Alastair Pennycook
During the 1st International Congress of Critical Applied Linguistics (ICCAL) - held in Brasilia-DF, Brazil, from October 19 to 21, 2015, by the “Group for Critical and Advanced Language Studies” [Grupo de Estudos Críticos e Avançados em Linguagens) - Alastair Pennycook (University of Technology, Sydney/Australia and the MultiLing Center at the University of Oslo, Norway) gave the event’s opening lecture entitled Critical Applied Linguistics Chal…
Translingual Practices: Playfulness and Precariousness
Language Assemblages
What are languages? An assemblage approach to language gives us ways of thinking about language as dynamic, constructed, open-ended, and in and of the world. This book unsettles regular accounts of knowledge about language in several ways, presenting an innovative and provocative framework for a new understanding of language from within applied linguistics. The idea of assemblages allows for a flexibility about what languages are, not just in ter…
After Words: There Is No Language without Materiality
Posthumanist thought brings a set of ethical and political concerns to the (socio)linguistic table to do with human relations to the planet and its other inhabitants. This opens up a space for reconsideration of language and materiality. In some accounts, language is an immaterial medium whose relation to the material world is only symbolic or representational. New materialist accounts of language, by contrast, view it as embodied, embedded and d…
Toward the total semiotic fact
This paper explores the quest for an account of the total linguistic or semiotic fact. Speech act theory, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and social semiotics have all attempted, in various ways and at various times, to find a way to describe as much as possible what is going on around any speech event. While this search for the total linguistic fact will always be a chimerical goal, this paper draws on the inspirational work of Jan Bl…
From Douglas Firs to Giant Cuttlefish: Reimagining Language Learning
Critical educational linguistics
In the first paper inaugurating this journal, Bernard Spolsky makes a case for critical educational linguistics. Reviewing both the critical tradition going back to the Frankfurt School and many of the strands of work that can be seen as part of critical applied linguistics, he concludes that there is an important role for critical educational linguistics as long as it follows in the liberal tradition and avoids so-called wokeism. He also argues …
Entanglements and Assemblages of English
This paper takes up the concepts of entanglements and assemblages of English as a way to understand the multiple ways in which English is connected to, and part of, social, cultural, political, and material worlds. This way of thinking is more useful than approaches to English that focus primarily on the language in isolation (even if pluralized or diversified) or alternatively look at English as a mere reflection of already-defined relations of …
Street art assemblages
This discussion paper explores street art from the point of view of assemblages: What different elements and artefacts converge to give meaning and politics to art works? How do we understand the interactions of artworks, streets, viewers, politics, and discourse that render a work of art a happening rather than an object? Processes of artification depend on material, contextual and symbolic relations that bring together style, place, artists, vi…
Critical applied linguistics in the 2020s
Critical applied linguistics remains deeply relevant today, arguably more than ever, but it needs constant renewal. This paper returns to these concerns to assess where this project has got to and where it may be headed. I review first both long-term and short-term political trends, from the rise of neoliberalism to the COVID pandemic. Next, I discuss responses to these conditions - questions of pessimism or hope - and their relevance for applied…
Critical Applied Linguistics: A critical re ^introduction
Now in its second edition, this accessible guide and introduction to critical applied linguistics provides a clear overview of the problems, debates, and competing views in language education, literacy, discourse analysis, language in the workplace, translation, and other language-related domains. Covering both critical theory and domains of practice, the book is organized around five themes: the politics of knowledge, the politics of language, t…
Jan Blommaert, linguistic landscapes and complexity
This tribute to the work of Jan Blommaert discusses his complex relation with the field of linguistic landscape studies. Blommaert was interested in the insights an understanding of the linguistic landscape could bring to better appreciate the ways people lived their diverse lives. This appreciation of the importance of his work focuses on his insistence on ethnographic work in order to understand complexity
From SPEAKING to Semiosis: In Search of the Total Linguistic Fact
This paper explores the quest for an account of the 'total linguistic fact'. Speech act theory, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics have all attempted, in various ways and at various times, to find a way to describe as much as possible that is going on around any speech event. While this search for the total linguistic fact will always be a chimerical goal, this paper proposes a framework based on the acronym SEMIOSIS a…
Metrolingualism
Metrolingualism is a term used to describe relations between language and the city. By focusing on everyday, grassroots, multilingual language use in urban workplaces (rather than top‐down approaches to ethnolinguistic groups), it explores the ways in which different people, different interactions, and different semiotic and linguistic resources come together at different times and in different places in the city. Metrolingualism challenges commo…
Translingual family repertoires: ‘No, Morci is itaiitai panzita, amor’
Drawing on data from a longitudinal linguistic ethnographic study of a trilingual (English, Japanese, Spanish) family in Australia, this paper suggests that rather than looking at their language use in terms of family language policy, better insights can be gained by exploring the translingual family repertoire. This repertoire is a central apparatus in the operation of this family, part of what holds the family together, both as an everyday mean…
Translingual entanglements of English
Arguing that the social semiotic trajectory of translingual approaches - transcending what is generally seen as language - is equally, if not more, important than translingual approaches that seek to transcend divisions between named languages, this paper takes up the idea of entanglements of English as a way to understand the multiple ways English is connected to, and part of, the material world. World Englishes can usefully focus not just on th…
Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South
Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South provides an original appraisal of the latest innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the perspective of the Global South. Global South perspectives are encapsulated in struggles for basic, economic, political and social transformation in an inequitable world, and are not confined to the geographical South. Taking a critical perspective on Southern theories, dem…
The landscape returns the gaze: Bikescapes and the new economies
This paper looks at bikescapes – and particularly dockless share bikes – with a focus on their rapid proliferation and subsequent partial demise in Sydney. Four principal themes emerged from this study: first, bikes are an important part of the cityscape, and studies of urban semiotics need to take greater account of modes of transport. Second, the rise of docked and dockless share bikes has changed the ways the city is felt and perceived: as bik…
Mundane metrolingualism
Drawing on data from a Bangladeshi-run mixed-goods store in Tokyo – a site of diversity in terms of customers, the products and interactions – we argue in this paper that in order to understand translinguistic ordinariness, or what we call mundane metrolingualism, we have to explore both the ideas of ordinariness and of diversity in greater depth. Ordinariness, or the cluster of other terms that have been similarly used (everyday, unremarkable, m…
Tim McNamara, Language and subjectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Pp. xiv, 250. Pb. £32
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Applied linguistics as epistemic assemblage
Any discussion of transdisciplinary applied linguistics needs to engage with three central questions. First, while inter disciplinarity may allow for disciplines to stay in place and engage with each other, trans disciplinarity implies a space beyond or above disciplines. As a result, we have to consider whether applied linguistics is seen as a discipline (in which case it is not transdisciplinary) or whether it is seen as a transdisciplinary fie…
The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language
A much-cited and highly influential text by Alastair Pennycook, one of the world authorities in sociolinguistics, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language explores the globalization of English by examining its colonial origins, its connections to linguistics and applied linguistics, and its relationships to the global spread of teaching practices. Nine chapters cover a wide range of key topics including: international politic…
Disinventing and (Re)Constituting Languages
In this paper we argue that although the problematic nature of language construction has been acknowledged by a number of skeptical authors, including the recent claim in this journal (Reagan, 2004) that there is no such thing as English or any other language, this critical approach to language still needs to develop a broader understanding of the processes of invention. A central part of our argument, therefore, is that it is not enough to ackno…
Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux
By extending the notion of metroethnicity, this paper proposes the notion of metrolingualism, creative linguistic practices across borders of culture, history and politics. Metrolingualism gives us a way to move beyond current terms such as ‘multilingualism’ and ‘multiculturalism’. It is a product of modern and often urban interaction, describing the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities t…
Global Englishes, Rip Slyme, and performativity
In this article I suggest that while recent sociolinguistic work focusing on crossing, styling the Other or language boundaries is raising significant questions concerning how we relate language, identity and popular culture, these insights have largely passed by the sociolinguistics of world Englishes. This latter work is still caught between arguments about homogeneity and heterogeneity, between arguments based on liberal accommodationism, ling…
Translanguaging and semiotic assemblages
This paper asks what translanguaging could start to look like if it incorporated an expanded version of language and questioned not only to the borders between languages but also the borders between semiotic modes. Developing the idea of spatial repertoires and assemblages, and looking at data from a Bangladeshi-owned corner shop, this paper suggests on the one hand that it is important to include a wide range of semiotic possibilities in any ana…
Metrolingual multitasking and spatial repertoires: Pizza mo two minutes coming
Drawing on data from two restaurants in Sydney and Tokyo, this paper describes the ways in which linguistic resources, everyday tasks and social space are intertwined in terms ofmetrolingual multitasking. Rather than the demolinguistic enumeration of mappable multilingualism or the language-to-language or language-to-person focus of translingualism, metrolingualism focuses on everyday language practices and their relations to urban space. In orde…
Performativity and Language Studies
Drawing analogies with the crisis in understandings of culture that led to the development of cultural studies, I suggest in this article that a similar crisis in the understanding of language may give an important impetus to the development of language studies. Arguing for the need to rethink the notion of language as commonly formulated in linguistics and applied linguistics, I take up the notion of performativity as a way of thinking about lan…
Fish, phone cards and semiotic assemblages in two Bangladeshi shops in Sydney and Tokyo
By focusing on assembling artefacts (particularly, fish, phones and phone cards) – objects that mediate across geographies, environments, culinary traditions and histories – in two Bangladeshi-run stores in Sydney and Tokyo, we argue in this paper that these objects need to be taken very seriously as part of the action. It is clear that assembling artefacts such as fish draw the attention of customers to the freezers where they are stored, and to…
Language, Localization, and the Real: Hip-Hop and the Global Spread of Authenticity
This article addresses the relationship between the call for authenticity, its relocalization in other contexts, and the use of English. Hip-hop forces us to confront some of the conflictual discourses of authenticity and locality, from those that insist that African American hip-hop is the only real variety and that all other forms are inauthentic deviations, to those that insist that to be authentic one needs to stick to one's "own" cultural an…
The Modern Mission: The Language Effects of Christianity
Christian missionaries have played a crucial role not only in assisting past and current forms of colonialism and neocolonialism, not only in attacking and destroying other ways of being, but also in terms of the language effects their projects have engendered. The choices missionaries have made to use local or European languages have been far more than a mere choice of medium. On the one hand, missionary language projects continue to use and pro…
Multilingual, multisensory and multimodal repertoires in corner shops, streets and markets: Introduction
The research described in the papers in this special issue is situated in a diversity of contexts: a street market and small shops in Mumbai, a subway in Cape Town, a greengrocer in Copenhagen, Ban
Language Policy and Ehe Ecological Turn
Critical pedagogy and second language education
The Concept of Method, Interested Knowledge, and the Politics of Language Teaching
Examining the concept of Method in second language education, this paper argues that both a historical analysis and an investigation of its current use reveal little conceptual coherence. Ultimately, the term seems to obfuscate more than to clarify our understanding of language teaching. While this may seem at first a minor quibble over terminology, there are in fact far more serious implications. By relating the role of teaching theory to more g…
Borrowing Others' Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism
In this article, I attempt to deal with some of the complexities of text, ownership, memorization, and plagiarism. Arguing that plagiarism cannot be cast as a simple black-and-white issue, the prevention of which can be achieved via threats, warnings, and admonitions, I suggest that it needs to be understood in terms of complex relationships between text, memory, and learning. This is part of an attempt to explore more generally different relatio…
Critical applied linguistics in the 2020s
Critical applied linguistics remains deeply relevant today, arguably more than ever, but it needs constant renewal. This paper returns to these concerns to assess where this project has got to and where it may be headed. I review first both long-term and short-term political trends, from the rise of neoliberalism to the COVID pandemic. Next, I discuss responses to these conditions - questions of pessimism or hope - and their relevance for applied…
Styling the periphery: Linguistic and cultural takeup in Bangladesh and Mongolia
Focusing on online interactions among young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia - two countries located politically, culturally and economically on the Asian periphery - this paper looks at how young adults use linguistic and cultural resources in their online interactions as part of a complex and emergent stylization of place. On the one hand, they appropriate the cultural and linguistic flows according to their locations and engage in a playful s…
Introduction: Critical Approaches to Tesol
This introductory article aims to pull together the unifying concerns in the varied articles, reports, and discussions in this special issue. I focus on three main themes that may be said to constitute critical approaches to TESOL: (a) the domain or area of interest (To what extent do particular domains define a critical approach?), transformative pedagogy (How does the particular approach to education hope to change things?), and a self-reflexiv…
Translingual family repertoires: ‘No, Morci is itaiitai panzita, amor’
Drawing on data from a longitudinal linguistic ethnographic study of a trilingual (English, Japanese, Spanish) family in Australia, this paper suggests that rather than looking at their language use in terms of family language policy, better insights can be gained by exploring the translingual family repertoire. This repertoire is a central apparatus in the operation of this family, part of what holds the family together, both as an everyday mean…
Mundane metrolingualism
Drawing on data from a Bangladeshi-run mixed-goods store in Tokyo – a site of diversity in terms of customers, the products and interactions – we argue in this paper that in order to understand translinguistic ordinariness, or what we call mundane metrolingualism, we have to explore both the ideas of ordinariness and of diversity in greater depth. Ordinariness, or the cluster of other terms that have been similarly used (everyday, unremarkable, m…
Glocal Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop Culture(s), Identities, and the Politics of Language Education
Beyond Plagiarism: Transgressive and Nontransgressive Intertextuality
The debate about what constitutes plagiarism and how it should be dealt with in the academy continues to gain momentum. The response from many higher education institutions is to channel ever-increasing amounts of resources into plagiarism detection technologies, rather than trying to ascertain why plagiarism might be occurring in the first place. In this article, drawing on a wide range of data from student assignments and interviews with staff …
Translingual entanglements of English
Arguing that the social semiotic trajectory of translingual approaches - transcending what is generally seen as language - is equally, if not more, important than translingual approaches that seek to transcend divisions between named languages, this paper takes up the idea of entanglements of English as a way to understand the multiple ways English is connected to, and part of, the material world. World Englishes can usefully focus not just on th…
Swimming with sharks, ecological feminism and posthuman language politics
The critical project the authors propose overturns the assumptions of human centrality that have underpinned much educational thought and practice, questions the ways in which the human and nonhuman are defined, and opens up new forms of engagement with the material, corporeal, and affective world. The authors ask how critical language studies can be rethought to incorporate a better understanding of the place of humans in the more-than-human wor…
Transglossic language practices of young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia
The paper explores the use of varied semiotic resources in the linguistic, social and cultural practices of young adults in the context of Bangladesh and Mongolia. Based on a translinguistic analysis (including pre-textual history, contextual relations, sub-textual meaning, intertextual echoes and post-textual interpretation) of these practices, and linking this to other recent calls to reconceptualise the notions of bilingualism and multilingual…
Teaching English as a Missionary Language
Surveying the massive current project of teaching English as a missionary language, this article raises concerns about the scale and cultural politics of this work, as well as issues of trust and disclosure, and the implicit support it provides for furthering the global spread of English. We discuss various responses to this work, from the Christian evangelical and Christian service positions, to the liberal agnostic, secular humanistic and criti…
Actions Speak Louder Than Words: Paralanguage, Communication, and Education
This article examines the importance of paralanguage (kinesics, proxemics, and paraverbal features) in communication. Gestures, facial expressions, interactional synchrony, eye contact, use of space, touching, aspects of voice modification, and silence are shown to play a crucial role in human interaction and to be highly culture-specific. The implications of this broad paradigm of communication are discussed with respect to language development,…
The Concept of Method, Interested Knowledge, and the Politics of Language Teaching
Examining the concept of Method in second language education, this paper argues that both a historical analysis and an investigation of its current use reveal little conceptual coherence. Ultimately, the term seems to obfuscate more than to clarify our understanding of language teaching. While this may seem at first a minor quibble over terminology, there are in fact far more serious implications. By relating the role of teaching theory to more g…
Critical pedagogy and second language education
The Diremptive/Redemptive Project: Postmodern Reflections on Culture and Knowledge in International Academic Relations
In his extensive study of notions of development and Third World, Worsley suggests that the concept of culture has been virtually ignored by those social scientists who reduce study of society to political economy or study of social structure. 'M If this is a major shortcoming of sociological and political economic studies, it is clearly an even greater one, indeed a dangerous and unacceptable lacuna, in issues concerning international academic r…
Incommensurable Discourses?
This paper is an attempt to come to terms with different understandings of the term discourse. By comparing the common use of discourse analysis in applied linguistics with its use both in critical discourse analysis and in a Foucauldian use of the term, I try to show how these different approaches imply profoundly different understandings of the relationship between language, the individual, ideology, and society. Ultimately, I argue that there …
Alternatives in Tesol Research: Descriptive, Interpretive, and Ideological Orientations
Alister Cumming, Elaine Tarone, Andrew D. Cohen, Ulla Connor, Nina Spada, Nancy H. Hornberger, Alastair Pennycook, Elsa Auerbach, Alternatives in TESOL Research: Descriptive, Interpretive, and Ideological Orientations, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Winter, 1994), pp. 673-703
Power, Politics, and Language Rights
The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. Language in Social Life Series. Alastair Pennycook. Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Contributions to the Sociology of Language 67. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson (Eds.) Power and Inequality in Language Education. Language in Social Life Series. Alastair Pennycook
Borrowing Others' Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism
In this article, I attempt to deal with some of the complexities of text, ownership, memorization, and plagiarism. Arguing that plagiarism cannot be cast as a simple black-and-white issue, the prevention of which can be achieved via threats, warnings, and admonitions, I suggest that it needs to be understood in terms of complex relationships between text, memory, and learning. This is part of an attempt to explore more generally different relatio…
Language Policy as Cultural Politics: The double-edged sword of language education in colonial Malaya and Hong Kong
(1996). Language Policy as Cultural Politics: the double‐edged sword of language education in colonial Malaya and Hong Kong. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 133-152
The right to language: Towards a situated ethics of language possibilities
In This Issue
Introduction: Critical Approaches to Tesol
This introductory article aims to pull together the unifying concerns in the varied articles, reports, and discussions in this special issue. I focus on three main themes that may be said to constitute critical approaches to TESOL: (a) the domain or area of interest (To what extent do particular domains define a critical approach?), transformative pedagogy (How does the particular approach to education hope to change things?), and a self-reflexiv…
English, Politics, Ideology: From Colonial Celebration to Postcolonial Performativity
Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction
This accessible guide and introduction to critical applied linguistics provides a clear overview, highlighting problems, debates, and competing views in language education, literacy, discourse analysis, language in the workplace, translation and other language-related domains. Covering both critical theory and domains of practice, the book is organized around five themes: the politics of knowledge, the politics of language, the politics of texts,…
English and the Discourses of Colonialism
Essay Review
Language in Development Constrained: Three Contexts
Roslyn Appleby, Kath Copley, Sisamone Sithirajvongsa, Alastair Pennycook, Language in Development Constrained: Three Contexts, TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 3, Language in Development (Autumn, 2002), pp. 323-346
Mother tongues, governmentality, and protectionism
This paper questions the essentialist status of the mother tongue as the cornerstone of language policy. One reason for doing so is the need for a constantly skeptical questioning that must be at the heart of any critical project. More specifically, it is important to raise questions about what we mean by "language" and what different concepts, ideologies, or discourses we mobilize by particular constructions of the term. The substance of the arg…
Global Englishes, Rip Slyme, and performativity
In this article I suggest that while recent sociolinguistic work focusing on crossing, styling the Other or language boundaries is raising significant questions concerning how we relate language, identity and popular culture, these insights have largely passed by the sociolinguistics of world Englishes. This latter work is still caught between arguments about homogeneity and heterogeneity, between arguments based on liberal accommodationism, ling…
Teaching English as a Missionary Language
Surveying the massive current project of teaching English as a missionary language, this article raises concerns about the scale and cultural politics of this work, as well as issues of trust and disclosure, and the implicit support it provides for furthering the global spread of English. We discuss various responses to this work, from the Christian evangelical and Christian service positions, to the liberal agnostic, secular humanistic and criti…
Language Policy and Ehe Ecological Turn
The Forum
Beyond Plagiarism: Transgressive and Nontransgressive Intertextuality
The debate about what constitutes plagiarism and how it should be dealt with in the academy continues to gain momentum. The response from many higher education institutions is to channel ever-increasing amounts of resources into plagiarism detection technologies, rather than trying to ascertain why plagiarism might be occurring in the first place. In this article, drawing on a wide range of data from student assignments and interviews with staff …
Performativity and Language Studies
Drawing analogies with the crisis in understandings of culture that led to the development of cultural studies, I suggest in this article that a similar crisis in the understanding of language may give an important impetus to the development of language studies. Arguing for the need to rethink the notion of language as commonly formulated in linguistics and applied linguistics, I take up the notion of performativity as a way of thinking about lan…
Performing the Personal
(2005). Performing the Personal. Journal of Language, Identity & Education: Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 297-304
Sociology (66 works) · Linguistics (63 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (54 works) · Philosophy (54 works) · Political science (31 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Second Language Learning and Teaching (23 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (19 works) · Politics (19 works)