1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Race and Equity in Applied Linguistics
The Routledge Handbook of Race and Equity in Applied Linguistics provides an authoritative overview of research on racial and epistemic inequities in TESOL and applied linguistics. It focuses on intersecting systems of oppression in institutional, pedagogical, curricular, and policy spaces.
Across 27 chapters, contributors critically examine everyday policies and practices, such as hiring bias and discriminatory job ads, which disadvantage multilingual learners and teachers, while amplifying agentive voices seeking change. Organized into four parts and spanning the geographic and epistemic Global South and North, the Handbook is both critique and praxis: it offers practical tools for valuing students’ full repertoires, challenging native-speaker norms, redesigning curricula and assessment, and linking classroom decisions to program and policy reform. It adopts diverse and groundbreaking lenses—linguistic racism, native-speakerism, commodified hiring, translanguaging, phenomenology, pedagogy of love, Ebùnlingualism, decolonial hermeneutics, intersectionality, and critical ethnographies—that counter linguistic, epistemic, racial, and institutional hegemonies.
This timely handbook charts a clear decolonial path for students and scholars in TESOL, Applied Linguistics, and Education, while equipping educators and policymakers with the tools to build more just and inclusive environments.
Foreword
Race, Power, and Epistemic Struggles in TESOL and Applied Linguistics: An introduction
Leonardo Veliz, Paul Meighan, Waqar Ali Shah, and Xuesong (Andy) Gao
Part I: Racial and epistemic inequities within institionalised settings
Chapter 1: Linguistic racism and discrimination in higher education
Stephen May and Mi Yung Park
Chapter 2: Native-speakerism and Employment Discrimination in Shadow Education Industry: Voices of English Language Teacher-Tutors in Kazakhstan
Anas Hajar
Chapter 3: Sexism, Ageism, and Lookism in Language Education: A Critical Examination of the Commodification of Teachers and Hiring Practices
Takako Kawabata
Chapter 4: Internationalization without multilingualism: the question of institutional care at Anglophone universities
Agnes Bodis, Leigh Swigart, Ji Chen, Apeksha Gandhi, Nhi Le, Karen McAuliffe, and Vivien Vien
Chapter 5: “…expected to take all of their courses alongside native English speakers”: Framings of U.S. Higher Institutions’ English Language Proficiency Requirements
Qudus Ayinde Adebayo
Chapter 6: “Does Oral Proficiency Make a Good TA”: A Phenomenological Study Interrogating Equity in the English Requirements for Asian IGTAs in Ohio Public Universities
Ionell Jay R. Terogo, Yun-Han Weng, Chia-Hsin Yin
Chapter 7: “Can you prove you are an EAL/D student?” Re-examining eligibility criteria for EAL/D ATAR courses in Australia
Toni Dobinson and Stephanie Dryden
Part II: Racial and epistemic inequities in pedagogy and practice: Challenges and innovations
Chapter 8: A pedagogy of love in hostile times: Immigrant teachers resisting with care
Victoria Norford and Leonardo Veliz
Chapter 9: Ẹ̀bùnlingualism: Decentering Racialization and Epistemic Injustice in African Language Praxis
Yetunde S. Alabede
Chapter 10: Rethinking Listening as an Anti-Racist Practice
Vijay A. Ramjattan
Chapter 11: The Teacher-as-Reading Subject: A Decolonial Hermenuetic Model for L2 Writing Assessment
Sitong Wang
Chapter 12: Decolonizing Academic English Writing: Pedagogical Strategies for Multilingual Students in Higher Education
Onur Özkaynak and Xinyue Lu
Chapter 13: What’s Your Idiolect? Promoting Linguistic and Epistemic Access in EMI & Anglophone Universities through Translanguaging (and Englishing) Strategies
Yaseen Ali
Chapter 14: Confronting Epistemic Inequities in TESOL in Chile: Curricular Nuclearization as an Experimental Tool to Conceptual and Professional Reappropriation.
Diego Cabezas Bravo and Tatiana Cárcamo Rojas
Chapter 15: Reimagining EAP through (Dis)comfort: Race, Identity and Emotion in Academic English
Olive Nabukeera
Chapter 16: Reimagining EAP Teaching in the Journey of Decolonization: Deconstructing and Disrupting
Trisha Dowling
Chapter 17: Voices of Multilingual Students: Examining an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Curriculum for Linguistic and Cultural Inclusion
Nurlaily Nurlaily, Gary Bonar, and Anne Keary
Part III: Racial and epistemic resistance for diversity and inclusion
Chapter 18: Translanguaging as an interactive scaffold for Australian Aboriginal students in TESOL classrooms
Sender Dovchin and Rhonda Oliver
Chapter 19: Transresistance Through Teacher-Activated School Transformation: Theoretical Foundations, Global Contexts, and Policy Implications for Translingual Learners
Madjiguene Fall
Chapter 20: The Role of Race in Bilingual Education: An Intersectional Perspective on Teacher Training in Brazil
Bruno Andrade
Chapter 21: Students’ epistemic resistance in adult basic education
Hải Nguyễn, Johanna Ennser-Kananen and Venla Rantanen
Chapter 22: Anti-Immigrant Racism: Perspectives from Three Asian English Language Educators
Peter I. De Costa, Lee Her, and Vashti Lee
Chapter 23: TESOL Teachers' Experiences of Discrimination and Resilience in Pakistan
Ameer Ali, Maya Khemlani David, Illahi Bakhsh, Shafqat Hussain, Muhammad Hassan Abbasi, and Angela Rumina
Part IV: Critical ethnographies of racial and epistemic injustice and resistance
Chapter 24: A Critical Autoethnography of an Emerging EFL Scholar from the Global South Confronting Racial, Linguistic, and Epistemic Injustices in TESOL
Jepri Ali Saiful
Chapter 25: The Marginalizations of Multicultural Faculty in Japanese Higher Education: Collaborative Autoethnography of Six ‘Non-Native’ Female Instructors
Aika Ishige, Elisabeth (Libby) Ann Williams, Oana Cusen , Mahboubeh Rakhshandehroo, Girlie Ann Herrera, and Yan Li
Chapter 26: Navigating academia with a racialized multilingual body: A multilingual woman scholar’s perspective
Grace Lee-Amuzie
Chapter 27: Countering epistemological and institutional racism in Applied Linguistics and TESOL: a decolonial intersectional perspective
Waqar Ali Shah, Paul Meighan, and Leonardo Veliz
Index
Biography
Leonardo Veliz is an Associate Professor in Language and Literacy in the School of Education at the University of New England, Australia. His research critically explores multilingualism, multiculturalism, and broader sociopolitical dimensions of language education, with a particular interest in equity, linguistic justice, and decolonial perspectives in diverse educational contexts, including Australia, Latin America, and the Global South.
Paul Meighan is a Gael sociolinguist, Indigenous to the Scottish Highlands and Islands. He is Research Project Manager for Learning from the Lands at the University of Guelph and an ESL Professor at Sheridan College, Canada. His research explores the intersections of language, land, identity, and power through Indigenous language revitalization, multilingual pedagogies, and Indigenous knowledge systems.
Waqar Ali Shah is an Assistant Professor at Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan. He has obtained his PhD in Applied Linguistics from University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. His research interests include critical applied linguistics, critical (multimodal) discourse studies, critical multilingualism, and decoloniality in TESOL. Waqar has published extensively in international peer-reviewed journals.
Professor Xuesong (Andy) Gao is a language teacher educator at the School of Education, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, University of New South Wales Australia. His research interests include language learner agency, language and literacy education, language education policy and language teacher education.
