Negotiating Religious Discourses in English Language Teaching: Reorienting and Reframing Dominant English Ideologies

ABSTRACTABSTRACTEfforts to decolonise foreign/English language teaching involve recognising the importance of diverse meaning-making resources rooted in speakers' socio-cultural realities, traditions, and values alongside English practices. This focus highlights the value of multicultural and multilingual environments, particularly in dominant English-speaking contexts, and emphasises how languages and their embedded worldviews can enrich language pedagogy. Although progress has been made in acknowledging and affirming linguistic, cultural, and epistemological diversity, little attention has been given to the role of religious discourses in transformative pedagogies that challenge the finitude of Global English. Based on interviews conducted as part of a larger study, this research explores how religious discourses shape the professional practices of two English teachers in Indonesia. It argues that these discourses, as temporal occurrences, can disrupt the notion that religiously inspired education is dogmatic and closed. Conversely, a religiously-inspired English pedagogy can serve as a potent means to resist dominant English ideologies and the inherent dogmas they perpetuate.KEYWORDS: Religious discoursesEnglish ideologiesEnglish teaching and learninglanguage decolonisation AcknowledgmentsThanks to Brenton Doecke, Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini and John Yandell as the editors of this special issue. This essay is part of a larger study, and I am grateful to Alex Kostogriz and Jennifer Bleazby of Monash, who provided immense assistance during the study.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsMuhalim MuhalimMuhalim Muhalim earned his doctoral degree in TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) at the Faculty of Education Monash University, Australia. Muhalim's doctoral research is based on a dialogic approach to investigate religious discourses in English language teaching and learning. He is currently working as a lecturer at Universitas Negeri Makassar, Indonesia.