Welcome to the course

In this video Will Baker and Sonia Moran Panero welcome you to this course in Decolonising English Language Teaching.

There are millions of teachers and learners of English across the world. The English language has the potential to connect and empower people, but it can also act as a means of marginalisation and disempowerment for certain groups of students. In this video, we outline the topics that will be covered during the course and introduce ourselves and the wider, international course team.

This course arises from an international project that was funded by the British Council called Decolonising English in Higher Education (DEHE) . We investigated the role of English and English language teaching in relation to empowerment and access in higher education in five linguistically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse settings where the importance of English has recently grown significantly (Colombia, Mexico, Iraq, Thailand, Vietnam).

We will engage with you in the comments areas throughout the course and end-of-week videos. We are supported by our course mentor Amina Lechkhab.

You will also hear the voices and experiences of our global project team in this video and throughout each week. Here are the team:

• Dr Sami Alhasnawi, Professor in Applied Linguistics, University of Al-Qadisiyah, Iraq
• Dr Yusop Boonsuk, Associate Professor, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand
• Dr Norbella Miranda, Associate Professor, Universidad del Valle, Colombia
• Dr Gloria Josefina Ronzón Montiel, Lecturer, Universidad Veracruzana, México
• Dr Phuong Le Hoang Ngo, Lecturer, Hue University, Hue, Vietnam
• Dr Maritza Maribel Martínez Sánchez, Associate Professor, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Quintana Roo, México
• Dr José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia, Professor in Applied Linguistics, Universidad del Valle, Colombia

In this course, we will explore such issues as: what do decoloniality and decolonialism mean? What is their relation to ELT? What does this mean in practice?