Repositioning TESOL: Intercultural communication and multicultural awareness possibilities.

Given the increasingly globalised and technologised world in which transnational cultural flows and local cultural complexity are changing the environments in which individuals must appropriately and effectively play an interculturalised role, and given the role of English as the major lingua franca, TESOL practitioners (such as my MA participants) need to reflect on the ideological underpinnings of their practice and consider repositioning their work accordingly, i.e. to initiate a methodological paradigm shift. On the MA. TESOL programme at Manchester, the Language Education as Intercultural Practice (LEIP) course provides a space for such reflection and initial exploration of the repositional implications in the teachers' specific contexts. In particular, the LEIP course suggests that the dominant TEFL paradigm may benefit from enrichment from what we term the Teaching English as Intercultural Communication (TEIC) and Teaching English for Multicultural Awareness (TEMA) paradigms. My presentation will introduce these paradigms through two case studies of LEIP participants seeking to initiate a paradigm shift in their local contexts.