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Invited Speakers: Plenary
Dr. Kornwipa Poonpon
Khon Kaen University
Thailand
Dr. Kornwipa Poonpon is an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at Khon Kaen University, Thailand. She previously held key positions as the Head of the English Language Department, Chair of the M.A. in English Program, and Director of the Center for English Language Excellence. Recently, she was honored with outstanding research and teaching awards from Khon Kaen University.
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Dr. Poonpon is the President of the Thai Association for Applied Linguistics (TAAL) and previously served as Vice President of Thailand TESOL. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Northern Arizona University, supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. Her research publications focus on areas such as language assessment, corpus linguistics, English language teaching, and technology-enhanced language learning.
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. ​