AAAL 2026: Invited Colloquium

Nomadic knowledging and nomadic languaging: Reimagining ELT through Mongolian nomadic tradition 

Sender Dovchin, Curtin University, Australia 

The recent decolonial turn has critiqued English Language Teaching (ELT) for privileging Anglocentric and native speaker norms, often relying on decontextualized and fixed Western standardized ideologies (Galante et al., 2024; Pennycook, 2007; Sah & Li, 2024). This Western model is fundamentally incompatible with Indigenous ways of knowing and being, which value collective and relational lifelong learning that is deeply connected to the land (Meighan, 2025; Venegas & Leonard, 2023). This decolonial turn, therefore, urges that we must move beyond surface-level inclusion to actively centre Indigenous voices that honour relational and reciprocal pedagogies. 

This discussion is essential and overdue, but it must also be expanded. While Indigenous knowledge is rightly being centred, there is less recognition of nomadic knowledge systems, such as those practices by Mongolian nomadic traditions, which is deeply rooted in a strong connection to the land (Dovchin, 2018).  Because Mongolian nomadic communities are not formally recognized as “Indigenous” by institutions such as the UN, their knowledge systems are often excluded from global conversations about decolonization and Indigenization. This is despite the fact that Mongolian nomadic culture represents one of the few surviving large-scale nomadic traditions in the world, with a history spanning thousands of years.

During my ethnographic research - ᠬᠠᠭᠤᠴᠢ ᠬᠥᠭᠡᠷᠬᠦ [Xууч Xөөрөх] - which roughly translates into English “nomadic reminiscing circle”, it was clear that the Mongolian nomadic herders were determined for their children to learn English, recognizing its importance. However, their idea of ELT was deeply rooted in a nomadic knowledge system, which I call “nomadic knowledging” and “nomadic languaging”. In this nomadic cosmology, everything is fluid – life cycle, nature, time and identity. Nothing is fixed, and permanence is an illusion. This cosmology teaches us that survival depends not on resisting change, but on adapting to it. To live well, we must move with the land, not against it. This cosmology offers a powerful lesson for ELT: learning, like life, is not linear or fixed. Just as nomads adapt to ever-changing environments, ELT educators must be responsive to diverse linguistic backgrounds and shifting identities.

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Multilingualism and Indigenous language revitalization in English-language dominant higher education

Stephen May, Waipapa Taumata Rau / University of Auckland, New Zealand
Mi Yung Park, Waipapa Taumata Rau / University of Auckland, New Zealand
Peter Keegan, Waipapa Taumata Rau / University of Auckland, New Zealand

 

Recent scholarship on linguistic discrimination in English language dominant higher education (HE) highlights how monoglossic English-language teaching, assessment, research, and publication processes consistently ignore and/or problematize the language repertoires of bi/multilingual students whose first language is not English (Dryden & Dovchin, 2022; Kubota et al., 2023; Wang & Dovchin, 2023). Much of the work on linguistic discrimination in HE to date, however, has been confined to the North American context (Barrett et al., 2023; Clements & Petray, 2021; Hellerman, et al., 2024; May & Caldas, 2023; Wolfram et al., 2023), with only a few notable exceptions (Dovchin, 2025; Park & May, 2024). 

In this presentation, we expand these discussions of linguistic discrimination in HE by drawing on empirical survey, focus group, and interview data, as well as related policy analyses, from a two-year mixed methods research project in a comprehensive university in Aotearoa New Zealand.  Aotearoa New Zealand is a British settler society, where English dominates in all public and education domains, despite New Zealand’s increasingly ethnically and linguistically superdiverse population. However, New Zealand is also an exemplar of Indigenous language revitalization internationally. Te reo Māori, the Indigenous Māori language, was societally marginalized and educationally proscribed for much of New Zealand’s colonial history. However, since the 1980s, a Māori language revitalization movement has catalyzed its increasing normalization in the public domain, and its expanded use in education, including HE (May, 2025; May & Hill, 2018). 

Given this context, we explore how, as with related work on linguistic discrimination in HE internationally, the bi/multilingual language backgrounds of the university’s linguistically superdiverse students and staff continue to be consistently overlooked in both the university’s policies and teaching and learning practices. However, we also juxtapose this with the university’s active commitment to acknowledging and accommodating the use of te reo Māori in its policies, pedagogies, and assessment practices. The recognition of Indigenous languages within HE internationally remains rare (De Korne & Leonard, 2017). As such, we highlight both the significance of this still nascent recognition of Indigenous language use, as well as how it might provide a basis for a broader incorporation of students’ bi/multilingual repertoires in English-language dominant HE teaching and learning contexts.

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Plurilingual Pedagogies: Australian language education and intercultural understanding as social justice pedagogies

Ruth Fielding, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

In Australia the education system has been developed as a result of colonisation and immigration. It is a system that prioritises English-only in spite of the multilingual reality in which many citizens live. Researchers have long problematized this situation using the term “monolingual mindset” (Clyne, 2005, Gogolin, 1994; Slaughter & Hajek, 2015; Slaughter & Cross, 2021) to indicate the enduring and challenging monolingual bias within Australian educational policy and school systems. As the school population becomes increasingly plurilingual, so the need to realise the potential of the curriculum becomes increasingly urgent (ABS, 2022). In this paper, I briefly outline the context in which this research takes place outlining the policy and historical context. I then use a document analysis of educational documents (curricula) and interview extracts from pre-service teachers to unpack the potential of inclusive plurilingual pedagogies to address issues of social justice in the Australian context. 

The national curriculum in Australia has eight cross-curricular General Capabilities. One of these is Intercultural Understanding which has been embedded within the learning of languages in Australia since 2003. Language learning in Australia therefore offers a space within which identity-construction, reflection, intercultural encounters and the development of self have been assumed learning within the curriculum for over twenty years (Fielding, 2021). It is within this space that there is clear potential for intercultural learning to become social justice learning within the plurilingual classroom. My prior research in this setting has shown that there is potential for identity affirming pedagogies in language education (Fielding, 2021; Fielding et al 2024). It has also shown that the potential of the curriculum may be limited by teacher professional learning - or a lack of available learning - in the realm of intercultural understanding and plurilingual pedagogies (Fielding et al, 2024; Fielding & Harbon, 2024). Drawing on curriculum statements and interviews with pre-service language teachers this paper argues that quality intercultural experiences within language education can also be seen as social justice pedagogies. It also suggests ways in which this potential can be further developed.

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Translingual pedagogy for decolonisation of English language teacher education programmes in Bangladesh 

Shaila Sultana, BRAC University & University of Dhaka 

English language teacher educators are rarely aware of epistemological and ontological innovations introduced in applied linguistics and English language teaching research. They are not well equipped to support students who suffer from a sense of marginalisation and potential inequality in education too. The classroom realities at grassroots level indicate that the translingual movement is still a utopian idea. Hence, it is important to explore if future English language teacher educators may be enlightened about the current innovations and encouraged to engage in the reconceptualisation of English through teachers’ preservice programmes.  

The presentation focuses on a qualitative research study done on 15 English language pre-service teachers (PSTs) enrolled in the MA in TESOL program at a private university in Bangladesh. The PSTs were introduced to the notions of linguistic ideologies, linguistic imperialism, multilingual ecology, and trans notions of language, specifically in relation to language education, and the correlation between English language education and social justice and equity.    The data were collected from 3 sources: (1) portfolios of 15 PSTs containing weekly journals, instructional materials such as worksheets and lesson plans, and reflection reports, (2) the course teacher’s diary entries and (3) intensive one-to-one interview sessions of 5 PSTs (1 male and 4 female).  

The presentation demonstrates that PSTs become agentive teachers and make informed decisions regarding the purposeful use of multiple languages to ensure students’ language learning.  They start their new trajectories of ‘language-activist-scholars’. An openness to the ideas of collaboration, solidarity, respect for all languages, and the necessity of multilingual resources for classroom teaching brings significant changes to classroom teaching and resolves problems with a strong focus on practicum courses. However, the research demonstrates that any innovations are difficult to appropriate according to teaching contexts. Some PSTs may become frustrated by the realities of their teaching contexts and leave the educational institutes, which are already deprived of good teachers. Thus, the teacher education programmes cannot fulfil the target of changing the community through language teaching, provided that the institutes keep nurturing colonial legacies and linguistic ideologies handed down by the colonisers. In the end, the presentation shares some possible solutions that need further research initiatives for reimagining and humanising teacher education programmes for social justice and equity.

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Towards pakikipagwikaan: Plurilingual identities and practices of Filipino immigrant language users in Montréal

John Wayne N. dela Cruz, McGill University

The dynamism of plurilingual identities and practices is central to plurilingual pedagogies (Coste et al., 1997/2009; Moore & Gajo, 2009). However, there is often a focus on fluidity (e.g., language mixing/switching), and less on fixity (e.g., language separation/naming)—which are seen as mere opposites (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010). Yet, research shows that additional language (AL) users do not always automatically engage in plurilingual practices (Dovchin & Wang, 2024). Thus, more research on “how, why, and with what outcomes laypeople... (dis)align themselves” with fixity and fluidity (Jaspers & Madsen, 2019, p. 16) is paramount to better inform how plurilingual pedagogies can leverage and foster AL users’ plurilanguaging (Piccardo, 2019), especially in officially mono/bilingual educational contexts. 

As such, this paper reports on an eight-week linguistic ethnography with four adult Filipino immigrant AL users in Montréal, Canada. The study asked: (1) how and why do these AL users co-construct their plurilingual identity and language practices across communicative contexts? (2) How and why do they perceive and express their plurilingualism in fixed or fluid ways? (3) How can these AL users’ experiences and perspectives inform plurilingual pedagogies in officially mono/bilingual contexts? Data from the Plurilingual Identity Wheel and semi-structured interviews were analyzed via thematic and interpretive content analyses, while data from field notes, linguistic artifacts, and ethnographic interviews were analyzed via postcoding analysis (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014)⎯and triangulated. Findings highlight how these Filipino-Montréalers use their plurilingual repertoires to engage in pakikipagwikaan⎯agentive, creative hybrid of fixed and fluid language practices⎯to construct dynamic plurilingual identities, which they may (not) manifest outwardly. Moreover, they engage in pakikipagwikaan to resist, re-appropriate, or reproduce monolingual policies, and create interpersonal connection or distance. The study underscores how AL users’ agentive plurilingualism goes beyond a simple fluid-fixed divide, carrying implications for applying linguistic justice-oriented critical plurilingual pedagogies.

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