Multilingual Matters recently published Antisocial Language Teaching: English and the Pervasive Pathology of Whiteness, by Language Magazine contributor JPB Gerald. The centering of Whiteness in English language teaching (ELT) renders the industry callous, corrupt, and cruel—or antisocial. Using the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder as a rhetorical device, this book examines major issues with the ideologies and institutions behind the discipline of ELT and diagnoses the industry as in dire need of treatment, with the solution being a full decentering of Whiteness. A vision for a more just version of ELT is offered as an alternative to the harm caused by its present-day incarnation. With a unique linkage of discourse on Whiteness, language, and ability, this book will be necessary reading for students, academics, and administrators involved in ELT around the world.
Scott Thornbury, formerly of the New School in New York, commented on the book, “Writing in a forceful but engaging style that is just as often memoir as it is polemic, Gerald pulls no punches and joins a growing and increasingly assertive community of critical scholars who are challenging the very foundations on which the ‘teaching of standardized English’ is constructed. This makes for compelling, even if (for some of us) unsettling, reading.”
www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781800413269
