Teaching, education, and the politics of English

One of our ambitions as Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE) editors has been to foreground the Asia-Pacific in the journal and by extension, to embrace the possibilities that lie beyond just one country, in this case, Australia, bearing in mind that APJTE is the journal of the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA). To this end, across our editorials and invited pieces, have been contributions that engage with English and in particular, its role in academic publishing. One issue that has been highlighted is the power of English in excluding research articles that do not comply with the conventions and expectations associated with Standard English (Saito, Citation2022). The exclusionary power of Standard English and by association, the valorisation of the so-called English “native speaker” in academic publishing as well as teacher recruitment in higher education, and institutional language policies has been well-documented over the years (Kaplan, Citation2001; Widdowson, Citation1993). As English has moved to become a global lingua franca, that is, the linguistic conduit for international transactions and interactions in trade, media, sport and education, to name a few, so has its reach into the everyday lives of people living in what have been called English as Foreign language (EFL) countries, or in the famous model of Kachru (Citation1985), the Expanding Circle of English language users.