BC TEAL 2025 Annual Conference

English language teaching has long been dominated by normative assumptions surrounding which varieties of English and which groups of English users are more legitimate than others. It has also been driven by the expectation that acquiring the majoritarian ways of communicating promises social and economic success. These assumptions and expectations have forced racialized English users of non-standardized varieties to culturally and linguistically assimilate. Furthermore, the same assimilationist ideology has caused longstanding colonial oppression of Indigenous people. However, since the 1980s, these beliefs have been challenged by anti-normative paradigms, such as world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, translanguaging, advocacy for nonnative speakers, antiracism, and decolonization. While these frameworks disrupt normative ideologies, transforming the status quo in the real world requires enactment of criticality in everyday practices. This is not easy to do, since critical actions for change require (1) overcoming entrenched neoliberal systems of competition, accountability, and complicity; (2) negotiating diverse cultural, political, and ideological positions in situated ways, and (3) disrupting the siloed nature of academic work through knowledge mobilization in broader terrains. This presentation will outline critical approaches to affirming linguistic and human diversity, examine the challenges delineated above, and offer ideas for knowledge mobilization with critical engagement by sharing some examples from the documentary film, World Englishes: Voices in Canada, which addresses the global diversity of English and English users.