AAAL 2024 Plenary Speakers

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In my plenary, I will revisit the notion of EFL as a cultural discourse that I developed in previous work by engaging with it from a Southern locus of enunciation. I offer nuanced insights for understanding how EFL can serve as a framework of voice, action, and empowerment through which minoritized language speakers in troubled educational contexts act as transformative agents. Developing transformative agency has been identified in the last two decades as a central goal EFL education must achieve. Yet, EFL pedagogies can still reproduce hegemonic and exclusionary ideologies, particularly in multilingual contexts dominated by colonial power relations between languages and their speakers. In Israel, for example, EFL has been shown to either grant minoritized language speakers a voice, or offer a neo-colonial register compatible with colonial forces (Awayed-Bishara, Netz, & Milani, 2022). Specifically, the Palestinian Arabic-speaking community studies in a segregated schooling system which is, nevertheless, dominated and administered by Israel’s Ministry of Education. Previous research has underpinned the educational apparatus of Palestinians as a colonized education showing how it acts to limit what Palestinian students and teachers can express about their identity and experiences, particularly inside EFL classrooms (ibid.). Based on ethnographic studies that I have conducted inside and outside the formal educational system in Israel, I demonstrate how Arabic speakers are employing English in their everyday lives to open new meaning-making spaces for contesting the politics of silencing and crafting new subjectivities of political speakerhood. Engaging with Stroud’s notion of Linguistic Citizenship (LC), I show how EFL practices of minoritized speakers in troubled educational contexts are examples of LC as a decolonial pedagogy. With its Southern focus on transformative practices for crafting autonomous subjectivities, LC offers the field of EFL education newconceptual, methodological, and semiotic spaces for including Southern voices and advancing epistemic justices.   

Muzna Awayed-Bishara is a senior faculty member in the Program for Multilingual Education, School of Education at Tel Aviv University. Her main research interests are: multilingualism and minority education, Southern applied/socio linguistics, EFL education within local-global contexts, Freirean language pedagogies, language and intercultural communication, and language policy and planning in conflict-ridden contexts.
Muzna had three distinguished postdoctoral positions in: the Center for the Study of Multiculturalism and Diversity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Paulo Freire Institute at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA); and the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Muzna has authored articles in leading peer-reviewed journals such as
TESOL Quarterly and Applied Linguistics and book chapters in edited volumes. She is the author of EFL Pedagogy as Cultural Discourse: Textbooks, Practice, and Policy for Arabs and Jews in Israel (Routledge, 2020).

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Currently educational labels like “English Language Learner” and “Student with Disabilities” are understood/viewed as necessary components to ensuring that marginalized students receive important services, modifications, and accommodations within schools. However, these labels, which originate from the Bilingual Education Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, respectively, are rooted in colonialism, racism, and ableism. They may, ultimately, function as methods of racializing and pathologizing linguistically-minoritized students and their families, including Latinx/e communities in the U.S. These labels are also used to limit racialized children’s access to inclusion and bilingual education programs. This significantly impacts their opportunities to learn, and in turn, their socio-academic development and upward mobility. In this presentation, I will first situate current conceptualizations of languages, language learning, and linguistic practices within oppressive structures stemming from coloniality -namely anti-blackness and ableism. I will then show how the lived experiences of racialized and pathologized Latinx people – in the context of their positioning with(in) public school institutions - are critical to understanding issues relating to racial integration, opportunities to learn, and social stratification. Finally, I will share how humanizing approaches can be used to inform larger systems approaches while supporting the development AND enactment of equity and justice in applied linguistics across policy, research, and practice.

Dr. María Cioè-Peña​ earned her PhD in Urban Education from The Graduate Center - City University of New York, where she was also an Advance Research Collaborative fellow and a Presidential MAGNET Fellow. She is a bilingual/biliterate education researcher and educator who examines the intersections of disability, race and language within school-parent partnerships and education policy. Taking a sociolinguistic approach and stance, she pushes and reimagines the boundaries of inclusive spaces for minoritized children. Stemming from her experiences as a former bilingual special education teacher, María’s research focuses on bilingual children with dis/abilities, their families and their ability to access multilingual and inclusive learning spaces within public schools. Her interests are deeply rooted in political economy, raciolinguistic perspectives and critical dis/ability awareness within schools, families and communities. María is currently an Assistant Professor of Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

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While education historically has been used as a deliberate and effective tool in the destruction of Indigenous epistemologies and in the disruption of intergenerational language transmission, education is also now a place where Indigenous Peoples turn to recover, reclaim, revitalize, and maintain their Indigenous languages. Despite foreign perspectives and lingering ideologies that continue to hinder communities from living their respective lives, Indigenous Peoples are reasserting their sovereignty and self-determination to champion community-led and -centered initiatives and programming with the intention to build language capacity. Through the engagement of cultural traditions, communities are actively restoring their Indigenous languages through embodied cultural practices. As a Kanaka Hawaiʻi scholar-educator who is a continuing learner of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language), I will share how hula is an example of multimodality and multiliteracies that not only perpetuates Hawaiian traditions, but also is used as a method to document and revitalize HI/stories and culture, to learn/teach about, of, and/or through language, and to express meaning through embodied language practices. As such, hula embodies the connection between Hawaiian language, culture, place, song, dance, chant, student, teacher, and so forth, as well as decolonial resistance and imagined futures for Kanaka Hawaiʻi and Hawaiʻi.

This presentation will also invite AAAL and its members to critically reflect on and uncover their past and present relationality with Indigenous Peoples (beyond a perfect stranger), to recognize and respect the knowledges that are deeply embedded and embodied in Indigenous cultures and the lands that they reside, to cultivate an understanding of the significance of revitalizing and reclaiming Indigenous languages, and to transform their (scholarly) role as allies and advocates of and for Indigenous human rights and justice.

Dr. Candace Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla (Kanaka Hawaiʻi) is an Associate Professor in the department of Language and Literacy Education (Faculty of Education) and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies (Faculty of Arts) at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarly work has sought to emphasize and contribute to Hawaiian language and Indigenous languages at the intersection of education, revitalization, digital technology, and cultural practices and decolonizing and Indigenizing the academy to create pathways for Indigenous thinkers and scholars. She is currently co-developing the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Indigenous Policy, Planning, Implementation and Assessment, and will be a co-instructor of the MOOC for the inaugural offering in Fall/Winter 2023. Prior to joining UBC, she served as the Program Coordinator of the American Indian Language Development Institute at the University of Arizona and taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaiʻi in Hilo. 

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Language learners can vary along a wide range of cognitive, affective, social, educational, and contextual dimensions. Second language acquisition research has long acknowledged the importance of cognitive factors in the effective learning of additional languages but cognitive diversity among learners is rarely considered from the perspective of inclusion and access in our field. The concept of neurodiversity views individual variability along cognitive and neurological dimensions as integral to how people experience and interact with the world around them. Neurodiverse language learners can face several challenges in instructed language learning and assessment contexts, most of which could be alleviated if the barriers to their success were identified and principles of inclusive education were implemented.  In this presentation, I will give a narrative overview of the series of research projects I have conducted over the past 15 years to enhance neurodiverse students’ access to language learning and to promote inclusive language teaching and assessment practices.  Research findings, derived from interviews, questionnaires, observational studies and the analysis of second language performance, yield insights into the complexities of cognitive and affective challenges neurodiverse students are confronted with. The studies also highlight that policy-level, institutional, curricular, and pedagogical factors and practices can constitute significant barriers for neurodiverse language learners.  The talk will also describe how, based on these findings, I have initiated several teacher education programs on inclusive language teaching, and I will identify the measurable impact of these initiatives on language teachers. I will also summarize the results of our recent research projects in the area of accessible language assessment and the benefits of testing adjustments for test-takers with diverse cognitive abilities. The presentation will conclude with an action plan for future research and implications for inclusive multilingual pedagogies and educational policies.  Judit Kormos is a Professor in Second Language Acquisition at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on the cognitive processes involved in learning and using additional languages. She has published widely on the effect of dyslexia on learning additional languages including the book “The Second Language Acquisition Process of Students with Specific Learning Difficulties” (Routledge, 2017). She is also the author of several research papers that have investigated the accessibility of language tests for young learners. She was a key partner in the EU-sponsored Dyslexia for Teachers of English as a Foreign Language and the Comics for Inclusive Language  Teaching projects both of which won the British Council’s ELTon award. She is the lead educator of the Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching massive open online learning course offered by FutureLearn and has run teacher education workshops and webinars on inclusive language teaching in a large variety of international contexts.