| Summary: | <p>This thesis aims to promote a critical-ethical politics for transnational commercial English language teaching. This type of politics seeks to liberate TESOL researchers and practitioners from the ‘totalising system’ (Dussel, 2013) that continues to model English language education after the ‘hegemonic ontology’ or normative ideal: the white/Anglo-American/native English speaker, which reflects deep-seated colonial and racial logics and inflicts a range of material, epistemic, and affective injustices on language-minoritised racialised communities. The study that I present here focuses on a particular community of English language users, i.e., Filipino English teachers, the cost-effective and cost-efficient lifeline of the lucrative multi-billion dollar English language education market in East and Southeast Asia. These teachers tread a very fine line between privilege and marginalisation, and experience day-to-day exclusion and oppression by virtue of their ‘non-nativeness,’ nationality, racial background, and skin colour.</p>
<p>The study was carried out via year-long online fieldwork in the Philippines, which involved compiling and analysing a corpus of online publicity, marketing, and lesson materials from 37 ELT platforms, and semi-structured interviews with 50 Filipino English teachers. I adopted an abductive and interpretive approach to data analysis that I call critical-ethical semiotics, which involves the metasemiotic construal of the teachers as a starting point or site of ideological work (Gal & Irvine, 2019). This approach, commensurate with de-coloniality (Quijano, 2000a,b; Grosfoguel, 2011), Marxist (Simpson, 2023), critical post-structuralist (Chong, 2009; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Tajima, 2018), and trans-ontological perspectives (Dussel, 2013; Táíwò, 2022a), allows for the critical and ethical examination of the hegemonic ontology, as it were, from the outside (Mills, 2018). It is my hope that the critical-ethical perspectives and approaches developed in this study will help forge a new pathway forward in TESOL – one that will lead us towards a more just and sustainable future for language education.
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