Jacqueline Ng, our guest blogger this week, is an associate professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics and the director of the Open Learning Center at York University, Canada. She has extensive teaching and research experience in the EAP context. She is interested in exploring effective pedagogical practices to support ELL learners to improve academic literacy skills by investing their linguistic, cultural, and intellectual knowledge and identity through multimodal practices and experiential educational learning opportunities.
I used to experience this on the first day of my class: When I entered the classroom, most students were looking at me with their curious eyes and whispering with their blathering voices which seemed to express their doubt of having a non-native English instructor teaching an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course in a Canadian university.
Taking their possible worries into consideration, I immediately introduced myself as a Chinese-Canadian, born and raised in British colonial Hong Kong with relevant educational and work experience in the EAP context. I intentionally highlighted that I myself was an English language learner (ELL) which would enable me to better understand the learning needs and expectations of my ELL students. I was even more excited to exchange perspectives of constructing transnational identities across geographic, cultural, social, and national borders with my students in order to help them unfold their dual or multiple identities (Zhang & Guo, 2015) and explore new possibilities of positioning themselves in a multicultural society.
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