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Invited Speakers: Plenary
Dr. Wilkinson Daniel Gonzales
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China
Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales (Wil) is an Assistant Professor of Applied English Linguistics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. As a sociolinguist, his research explores World Englishes, sociolinguistics, language variation and change, multilingualism, and corpus linguistics, with a particular focus on the Philippines and Southeast Asia. His expertise extends to Sino-Philippine languages, particularly Lánnang-uè, as well as East Asian languages, including Putonghua/Mandarin, Hokkien, Colloquial Singapore English (“Singlish”), Hong Kong English, and languaging practices of neurodivergent individuals.
His research highlights the interplay between language, identity, and society, providing insights into the sociolinguistic complexities of multilingual communities and marginalized communities. Additionally, his recent work investigates the intersection of sociolinguistics and education, exploring how language variation, multilingualism, and identity shape educational experiences and language pedagogy.
His book-length contributions include Our People's Language: Variation and Change in the Lánnang-uè of the Manila Lannangs (John Benjamins, 2025) and Philippine Englishes (Routledge, 2017). Additionally, he has compiled linguistic corpora, including the Lannang Corpus, the Twitter Corpus of Philippine Englishes (TCOPE), and the Twitter Corpus of English in Hong Kong (TCOEHK).
He currently serves as the principal associate editor of the Journal of English and Applied Linguistics and is the Director of The Lannang Archives and Lannang Stories, where he works to raise awareness of Sino-Philippine languages and their sociolinguistic significance.
TBA
In this talk, I explore the development of Global Englishes as a field of study, and its implications for TESOL, through a fairy tale. Why a fairy tale? Well, they are often tales of betrayal, greed, threats, conflict and resolution. This is all too familiar to those examining the globalization of the English language and the associated pedagogical implications. There is often a sense of conflict in a fairytale, a challenge that the hero/heroine (the teachers?) has to solve, something that often seems impossible to solve until the very end, when there is a triumph. Global Englishes is certainly not the happy ending or the triumph. Nor is it to be seen as the swan and it’s predecessors (World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca and English as an International Language (EIL)) as the Ugly Ducklings. There are also no magical dwarves in this tale that have triumphed in the battle against the dominance of standard language ideology and native speakerism and other barriers to Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT). Indeed, these barriers represent the conflict or the challenge in the City of ELT. Some may see the development of GELT as a triumphant move. Others may consider it to be a competing paradigm, the villain if you like, that poses a threat to existing paradigms.
Global Englishes emerged as a field in response to the need to overcome the GELT barriers and help the TESOL practitioner instigate change and bridge the theory-practice divide in the field. Fairy tales often affect what people see as real and as possible. They often give a sense of hope and optimism, something that I feel a sense of in the past decade with flourishing research exploring Global Englishes and TESOL. The uniqueness and impact of fairytales is evident throughout history, so I hope that this talk may capture your attention, leave an impact and perhaps leave you with a sense of optimism in relation to Global Englishes and TESOL. Most of all, I hope to provide a backdrop to the establishment of the field, clarity over terms and their origin, an overview of research developments and directions and ultimately with a direction towards teaching English as an international language.