EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages E-JournALL, Volume 11, Issue 2, December 2024, pages 74-83 ISSN 2376-905X http://doi.org/10.21283/2376905X.1.11.2.3072 www.e-journall.org © Uysal & Sayer 2024. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Human capital, social mobility, and TESOL: An interview with Peter Sayer HUSEYIN UYSAL The Education University of Hong Kong PETER SAYER The Ohio State University INTERVIEW Received 3 February 2024; accepted 22 October 2024 ABSTRACT EN This interview explores the intersection of social mobility and inequalities in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) through an interview with Peter Sayer. His research focuses on the complexities of TESOL within multilingual contexts, particularly in Mexico and the United States. He challenges the myth of international English as a force in alleviating poverty and promoting social change. Peter Sayer discusses the implications of Human Capital Theory on English education, critiquing its focus on skills acquisition. He advocates for a plurilingual approach through translanguaging by emphasizing the importance of leveraging students’ linguistic repertoires in the classroom. Peter Sayer envisions the directions of his future research in TESOL in practice and aims to bridge theory and practice while addressing the challenge of making English education more relevant and accessible to students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Keywords: HUMAN CAPITAL THEORY, POVERTY, SOCIAL MOBILITY, TESOL ES Esta entrevista explora la intersección entre la movilidad social y las desigualdades en TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) a través de una entrevista con Peter Sayer. Su investigación se centra en las complejidades de TESOL en contextos multilingües, particularmente en México y EE.UU. Peter Sayer cuestiona el mito del inglés internacional, poniendo en duda su papel en la reducción de la pobreza y la promoción del cambio social. Discute las implicaciones de la Teoría del Capital Humano en la enseñanza del inglés, criticando su enfoque en la adquisición de habilidades. Aboga por un enfoque plurilingüe a través del translanguaging, destacando la importancia de aprovechar los repertorios lingüísticos de los estudiantes en el aula. Peter Sayer imagina que las futuras líneas de investigación en TESOL deben estar arraigadas en la práctica, con el objetivo de cerrar la brecha entre la teoría y la práctica, y hacer que la educación en inglés sea más relevante y accesible para estudiantes de diversos contextos socioeconómicos. Palabras clave: MOVILIDAD SOCIAL, POBREZA, TEORÍA DEL CAPITAL HUMANO, TESOL IT Questa intervista esplora l'intersezione tra mobilità sociale e disuguaglianze nell’ambito di TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) attraverso un’intervista con Peter Sayer. La sua ricerca si concentra sulle complessità del TESOL in contesti multilingue, in particolare in Messico e negli Stati Uniti. Peter Sayer mette in discussione il mito dell'inglese internazionale, interrogandosi sul suo ruolo nell'alleviare la povertà e nel promuovere il cambiamento sociale. Discute le implicazioni della Teoria del Capitale Umano nell'istruzione in lingua inglese, criticandone l'accento sull'acquisizione di competenze. Promuove un approccio plurilingue tramite il translanguaging, sottolineando l'importanza di sfruttare i repertori linguistici degli studenti in aula. Peter Sayer immagina che le future direzioni di ricerca nel TESOL debbano essere radicate nella pratica, con l'obiettivo di colmare il divario tra teoria e pratica, affrontando al contempo la sfida di rendere l'istruzione in inglese più rilevante e accessibile agli studenti provenienti da diversi contesti socioeconomici. Parole chiave: MOBILITÀ SOCIALE, POVERTÀ, TEORIA DEL CAPITALE UMANO, TESOL  Huseyin Uysal, The Education University of Hong Kong huysal9@gmail.com http://doi.org/10.21283/2376905X.15.271 INTERVIEW WITH PETER SAYER: HUMAN CAPITAL AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN TESOL E-JournALL, 11(2) (2024), pp. 74-83 75 1. Introduction On December 21, 2023, Huseyin Uysal interviewed Peter Sayer via Zoom to explore the intersection of social mobility and inequalities faced by language learners. The aim of the current interview is to delve into the complexities of these topics and their implications for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and social change. The conversation touches on issues such as social class, TESOL, and translanguaging, aiming to disclose insights into the role English language education plays in facilitating socioeconomic mobility and addressing existing inequalities. Peter Sayer discusses his research in teaching English in Mexico and the Philippines, examining the myth of international English as a neutral and universal medium that provides equal opportunities. He highlights how this perception often masks the power dynamics and inequalities inherent in the spread of English, particularly its role in perpetuating poverty and limiting access to economic and social resources for marginalized communities. He explores hidden curricula in working-class schools and advocates for a plurilingual approach through translanguaging in TESOL. Peter Sayer serves as a Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University. He started his career as an ESL instructor in Oregon, and concurrently engaged in activism and community work supporting immigrant communities. After moving to Mexico, he spent eight years teaching at the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca and earned an MA in applied linguistics. Then, he completed his PhD in language and literacy at Arizona State University and then joined the faculty at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His academic focus lies in applied linguistics and educational sociolinguistics, particularly concerning language learners in bilingual and ESOL programs. He has worked in partnership with the Mexican Secretaria de Educación Pública on multiple projects in Mexico, conducted workshops and facilitated study abroad programs in Colombia, Peru, and Saudi Arabia. 2. The interview Huseyin Uysal: Thank you for accepting to participate in this interview and sharing your insights with us. I want to start by asking about your recent research interests. What are you working on right now? And how did your past research and teaching experience shape your current research agenda? Peter Sayer: Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you. You have seen that a lot of my work has come from working as an English teacher in Mexico back in the day, so that is where I got my start. As a researcher, I am particularly interested in the context of teaching English in Mexico. I see that Mexico is a very multilingual country, that is a post-colonial setting where there is a national language, Spanish. There are lots of local, indigenous languages, and then, of course, there is English as the preeminent international language. As a sociolinguist, I think that a context with that dynamic is really interesting for giving us insights into how TESOL happens in lots of other different contexts. I just got back from the Philippines a couple of days ago, which is sociolinguistically very different and has a historical relationship with English that is quite different from Mexico, but still, there are some of those same tensions and certainly the colonial history of the United States and Spain, in the Philippines. Those things are really interesting for me because I tend to conduct my research through the lens of language ideologies, which is a critical lens for looking at how something like the act of a teacher in a classroom teaching English happens in these very contested ideological spaces (see Sayer, 2012). That is my broader research agenda. Now I am based here in the United States, in Ohio. I was in Texas before. Wherever I am, I do ethnographic work. I am really interested in how a particular context and the dynamics of languages and multilingualism in that space shape the ways that we as teachers in class interact with students. That in a nutshell is my research agenda. In my position here at Ohio State, I have the opportunity to work with a lot of doctoral students. A lot of my research is collaborative with my doctoral students. More recently, our students in classrooms in Turkey, Indonesia, and in Chinese language classrooms particularly, are looking at issues of multilingual approaches, translanguaging and things like that. We find that there are a lot of connections across international TESOL contexts. For example, ideologies of native speakerism affect language teachers in many places. The specific dynamics are different maybe in Turkey or Indonesia than in Mexico, but by using an ethnographic approach and with a shared theoretical lens, we can examine how multilingual education is shaped by broader ideologies across different contexts. UYSAL & SAYER E-JournALL, 10(2) (2024), pp. 74-83 76 Huseyin Uysal: In what ways does the myth of international English challenge the belief that learning English can alleviate poverty? How is this myth connected to broader social change? Peter Sayer: At least in the sense that I think of the myth of international English, it goes back to the work of Alastair Pennycook (see Pennycook, 2006, 2017). It pushed us to think about questioning some of the assumptions we have about English as an international language. The idea that giving more people access to English and the spread of global English, at least in terms of how it reaches across countries and races across the socio- economic spectrum, was automatically a good thing, especially for poor people. If you want to help poor people, you should give them more English. That is not just a myth or an idea, but it has been a policy that has been pushed by particularly the World Bank when they talked about modernizing the education system of many so- called developing countries. A lot of that is going to push them to think about getting English further and further down the basic education curriculum. Within this idea, the solution is to teach them English, make their education system better or more modern. It has been a policy that has been pushed on various levels and has been actively taken up as part of the curriculum now in various places. So, that is what I see and understand about the myth of English. In my work, Mexico is a case study about how that happens. The costs associated with implementing these massive expansions of English education, especially for developing countries, is very high. I think the idea and myth that more English is automatically better is worth questioning (see Sayer, 2015a, 2015b). Huseyin Uysal: How does the hidden curriculum of work manifest in English lessons in working-class schools, and what skills and dispositions does it aim to inculcate in students? Peter Sayer: The idea of a hidden curriculum is not particular to language education. It comes from Marxist educational theorists like Paul Willis, and particularly Jean Anyon. The hidden curriculum does not just happen in working- class schools, it happens across the socioeconomic spectrum. What I was trying to show there was inspired by Jean Anyon’s work (e.g., Anyon, 1981, 2014). It is about the idea of how English opens doors, and how English is automatically going to help and give more opportunities to working-class kids or kids further down on the socioeconomic spectrum. If you are interrogating that myth, as you asked me in the previous question, what I want is to see what actually happens at the classroom level. I am interested in connecting across macro, meso or micro levels and understanding what happens. If you are talking about this at a policy level, like the World Bank and these kinds of broader neoliberal forces, then I am interested in understanding what that means when you are looking at the relationship and the interaction between students and teachers. How those broader forces translate to how we as individuals in our everyday lives go about things, and to what extent we have agency backed upon the world versus all the various often invisible or unconscious ways that the structures impose themselves on. I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Mexican Ministry of Education on their program, which was the expansion and implementation of English in their elementary or primary level schools. I had the chance to visit and observe about 100 different English classes in public schools in 12 different states and across a range of neighborhoods with different socioeconomic levels. When you walk into a school, you know right away what kind of neighborhood you are in and what resources are there. You get to know the demographics of the school, like where that school falls on the socioeconomic spectrum. The question that the ministry tasked us with was how well the English program was being implemented. I understood it later while looking at this whole giant database of all these videos. I would consider it to be very well-implemented in some ways in some schools, but in other schools, maybe not so much, in terms of what I consider effective pedagogy for teaching English. In some places, kids were actively engaged in meaningful tasks that built their communicative competence in English, but in other schools they spent the whole class copying sentences and grammar rules from the board. The key is, though, is that these differences were not random. It was not just based on the years of experience of the teacher, but many more variables that they gave us to look at in terms of how things were being implemented. I had the chance to interview the teachers who taught at multiple schools. Some were teaching at a more well-off school and some at a much less-resourced school. You hear it literally in the way that they would explain what they thought they were doing in their classes, particularly across the different types of classes. For example, as I explained in the AILA Review article (Sayer, 2019), it was really about the very rote activity of copying very accurately things from the board. If you do not have resources, INTERVIEW WITH PETER SAYER: HUMAN CAPITAL AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN TESOL E-JournALL, 11(2) (2024), pp. 74-83 77 the teacher will not be doing creative things, like small-group role plays and things that we consider more effective, at least based on the principles of Commutative Language Teaching. Often, you see students spending hours and hours on copying things, and when you think about why the teacher would do that, their rationale for it would be that they need to make sure they can master the basics first, the most basic elements down there, like repeat that mantra again. This is what Anyon argues about what Paul Willis said, that is for working- class kids, who are getting working-class jobs. The kind of skill that you are trying to inculcate is having the stamina to be able to copy something for hours and hours, doing something very dull and repetitious, but doing it very efficiently and very accurately. If you think about particularly the working class having this idea of being in a factory and doing a very repetitive job over and over again, but with a lot of stamina, that makes sense. They would think they are doing it quickly, efficiently, and accurately. It makes sense if you are thinking about how the work and the hidden curriculum is shaping the ways that the teachers are thinking about what they are supposed to be doing, even the expectations that they have for students versus when you compare that to what more well-off students were doing. They were doing these role plays and mostly using English in a way that focuses on them expressing their own meanings and using it for communicative purposes beyond just the copying and repetition. It is not just this random thing. It just happens that some teachers teach this way. You can see within this dataset a clear pattern that seems to match up with that idea of how the hidden curriculum operates across socioeconomic levels. Huseyin Uysal: How does Human Capital Theory view education as an investment in individuals? What implications does this theory have for the role English education plays in promoting socioeconomic mobility? Peter Sayer: I do not have an economics background. I am an applied linguist and work in education. That is my training. I do not claim to be an expert on understanding economic theories like Human Capital Theory, but as I said I am interested in connecting and explaining what’s happening in language classrooms to larger forces. My rather rudimentary understanding of Human Capital Theory, as an educational linguist, is that the goal of a country’s education system is to give students—its future workforce—the skills that the country’s companies and businesses need them to have. In terms of language, they need them to have certain linguistic skills, like English, because that is what will be needed to be competitive in the global marketplace. It is a neoliberal idea of, as you said, education as an investment in developing the individual’s skills with an aim to train them with what the future workforce will require. So, as a researcher when I was trying to understand this pattern I was seeing in the classroom, some students developing communicative skills in English, others copying grammar rules or doing rote learning. I was trying to understand why I see these kids practicing English or learning English in a particular way versus those other kids. There is a social class issue going on here. As a researcher, trying to understand your data there and analyzing and seeing these patterns, the next bit is, “How do I explain that now?”. If I have a theoretical framework coming into it of language ideologies and an awareness of social class, that is where I had to do a lot of background reading honestly to figure out how I make sense of this. Language ideologies, based largely on the work of linguistic anthropologists like Irvine and Gal (1995), are basically the ways that our personal thinking about languages is shaped by broader beliefs. I was doing background reading and looking at particularly applied linguists who were connecting the spread of global English to theories of neoliberalism, trying to understand what exactly neoliberalism is and how it works1. I was reading on the context of Mexico and tracing the history of how Mexico as a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which sets certain priorities for member states,, decided to invest 10’s of millions of pesos in English. They had to train about 100,000 English teachers now to be able to implement this program of English at the elementary school level. It is a huge investment, and why did they do that? It turned out there was this report that is connected to the international achievement standards of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), where they compare all the countries. This 2022 PISA report (OECD, 2023) just came out last week. If we rewind to 15 years ago, the PISA report came out and put Mexico at the very bottom of the OECD countries. They freaked out. They commissioned this report essentially by economists, and the economists said something about their education system being bad at producing human capital. I think that is bizarre. I did not think of our education system as trying turn children into human capital. I am not an 1 For a collection of papers on this topic covering Brazil, Puerto Rico, and the United States, see Alonso and Villa Galán’s (2023) special issue on raciolinguistic perspectives of labor in the Americas. UYSAL & SAYER E-JournALL, 10(2) (2024), pp. 74-83 78 economist, and I do not think about it that way. Again, if you are seeing it through a very neoliberal lens, that is how you frame it. In a nutshell, Human Capital Theory is the idea that you are training your workers to have the right skills in order to essentially maximize the profits of companies and corporations. That is what makes your country globally competitive in this global marketplace. When you read it like that, you are thinking about English as inculcating this certain set of skills. We are teaching kids English, but for working-class kids, teaching English is less about intercultural communication, or all the things that we as educators think of as the reasons for teaching English. In terms of Human Capital Theory, giving them this very particular set of skills. It is less about teaching the linguistic stuff that we as English teachers would think of, and more about this idea of being able to do these sorts of rote jobs very efficiently. So when you are looking at education through the lens of Human Capital Theory, we see it’s a very efficient way to train your working-class kids to do working-class jobs or middle-class kids to do middle-class jobs. As Bourdieu says (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), that is how social class reproduction happens, and how inequities are passed down to the next generation. So rather than disrupting it – this myth of English is somehow automatically alleviating poverty (Pennycook, 2006) – it ends up sort of feeding into that same cycle of reproduction rather than seeing English as this magic wand that helps social mobility, at least at certain level when you see it through that line. I want to believe, like the promise of English and this program in Mexico, for example, that investing in helping kids learn English actually will open doors for them. I want to see how that can actually work and how we fulfill that promise to actually provide opportunities for social mobility for kids through the teaching of English. Huseyin Uysal: Considering the rapid expansion of English language education in public schools in Latin America, how can TESOL educators balance the goal of providing greater access to English with the risk of perpetuating existing social inequalities? Drawing on critical theorists’ examinations of class, education, and social reproduction, how can TESOL educators address the challenge of social stratification in language classrooms? Peter Sayer: That is a really good question. When you start talking about Human Capital Theory and social reflection, we are all pawns of the neoliberal system. You get depressed, like that negative way of seeing it, which I think is the reality of things. On the other hand, I am an eternal optimist. As a critical applied linguist, I think that it is not enough just to critique and say, “Look at all these bad things and these are all the terrible ways that the system reproduces itself.” We should try to offer something positive and have our work help illuminate those sorts of situations in a way that other scholars and the teachers themselves can then say, “Actually that does help me to think about my work a little differently.” Through the Mexico project, we are trying to turn that into a series of professional development workshops and materials that would get teachers to reflect on the reality of it and think about approaching their teaching in a way that is not race-blind or social class blind. If you are approaching it from that way like “we are all equal,” then you do end up reproducing those social inequities. So, if you want to disrupt the system, and think about the extent that you have agency as a teacher in your classroom, even working within the curriculum, the materials and textbooks, you have a lot of what Nancy Hornberger (Hornberger et al., 2018) would call “implementational space” for your particular view of the world and language policy to help them see that they are empowered to do certain things. If you can, help them come at it with that critical consciousness. This is my teaching philosophy and greater goal. I do not have to go back to thinking of it like, “I need these poor kids to have the basics and therefore I am going to have them copy off the board.” If we can raise that awareness, that is part of the critical consciousness that we as educators can have and get them to think about how they teach in their particular context to their particular group of students, in a way that responds to what I consider social justice issues. In the Mexico project I was doing, we were observing dozens and dozens of classrooms. Also, we were doing these focus group interviews with parents. I talked to lots of parents to get their sense of the idea of multiple stakeholders. I was trying to understand it not only from the students’, teachers’, and administrators’ views, but also from the parents’ views because I think that is what gets left out a lot in that work. It was interesting to hear the parents talking about how they thought of English, why they thought it was important, and what they wanted from the English program. So, that phrase, “Inglés abre puertas” meaning “English opens doors,” just came up again. As the researcher, when you hear the exact same phrase being said through multiple interviews, there is your code, that is the pattern. So, “English opens doors” was just an obvious pattern, a thing to focus on just again, because I was hearing literally the same expression being used (see Sayer, 2018). Getting back to connecting that to the myth of international English and what I thought of it, it is that very particular expression that they are using that articulates the myth of INTERVIEW WITH PETER SAYER: HUMAN CAPITAL AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN TESOL E-JournALL, 11(2) (2024), pp. 74-83 79 international English. The myth that English is going to open doors for you, the myth of English automatically leading to social mobility. That is where I went with that idea of “English opens doors.” But when people are sometimes giving me examples like, “So and so, they learned English and now look they have got this great job,” it is not always a myth. For some people, that becomes a reality, and people were giving me these examples of the exception that proves the rule, but it was something that people latched on to. At least for them, it is proof that English does have the possibility of opening doors for you. So, then that reaches the question of when it actually works, for whom it works, and under what conditions. As educators, how do we try to facilitate that to the extent that we have agency and can control things in the classroom? I think it is very important for this kind of research to figure out how to translate that into something that is like professional development that is, in a practical sense, helpful for teachers. So, I would say in a general sense, critical consciousness is an important thing to try to do in your workshops. But if you are doing a professional development workshop with teachers or teaching a course or something with either pre-service or in-service teachers, you should think that it is going to be very context-specific and think again about what that means in a particular classroom or a particular context. Huseyin Uysal: I want to change the direction of our conversation a bit. How does the concept of translanguaging challenge and transform traditional perspectives on TESOL, moving from a monolingual to a plurilingual orientation? Why is this shift significant in recognizing and leveraging students’ linguistic repertoires? Peter Sayer: I approach things as a sociolinguist who is interested in questions of languages, ideologies, and things like that, so I naturally came to translanguaging through that approach. I was not trained in translanguaging, which has been around since the 90s. Everybody cites the Williams (1994) thing, but it was Ofelia García who brought it to our attention and theorized it more. It was late 2010 or 2011 and I had not read Ofelia’s work yet. I did not even know the concept of translanguaging. I had just moved to San Antonio, Texas, and I was doing a project and ethnographic work in classrooms in a neighborhood in San Antonio. I was interested in those sorts of multilingual approaches. I had been trained to analyze language mixing as code-switching, a very linguistic approach. I was in a bilingual classroom, lots of Spanish and English were being mixed. All of this is a good place to look at code-switching, because of course kids are code-switching a lot and the teacher code-switches, and English is going on and all that good stuff. I want to acknowledge that the work that sociolinguists did on code- switching was critical at the time and laid the foundation for what we now think of as translanguaging. I was analyzing it as a code-switch. I had my data, millions of examples, lots of observations, and recorded stuff. When I was working through my data, thinking of it through my orientation towards language ideologies, trying to think of what was going on as a pedagogical problem here in this classroom, I picked up Ofelia García’s book (García, 2009) and started re-thinking my approach to my data, which became the Sayer (2013) piece. I came to this idea of translanguaging and saw how she was defining it as bilingual meaning-making and things like that. That was my light bulb moment. When you find a concept that you did not know existed, but it fits your data as a researcher, that I guess is the light bulb moment. So that is where I came to this idea of translanguaging, and her way of explaining things through the students’ full multilingual repertoire was such a good fit for what I was seeing. It helped me understand the data in a new way. We have tried more and more to articulate this multilingual turn in TESOL and understand what that means beyond the role of L1, which is also important. That is not to say that it is not something on a practical level that we want to worry about, but we have been theorizing and developing this more. Ofelia García was working within bilingual education context, and lots of different international TESOL contexts. That is how I have been understanding more and more what the plurilingual turn in TESOL is about. I think translanguaging is a way of connecting things like ideologies and funds of knowledge. Even now, I am rethinking funds of knowledge through this translanguaging lens. It allows me to theorize and make these different connections in a way that helps me understand more what that idea of a multilingual turn should be about. UYSAL & SAYER E-JournALL, 10(2) (2024), pp. 74-83 80 Huseyin Uysal: Can you give us a specific example of how García’s work helps you look at your data in a new way? Peter Sayer: For example, during a science lesson I was observing, there was a group of second graders working on a diagram, labelling the parts of a spider. The diagram showed the spider carrying an egg sac, and one of the girls seemed confused about what it was and how to label it, since it did not appear in the picture of the spider in the book, and she says to her classmates: “No entiendo porque la araña carga arriba this little puffy thing.” [“I do not understand why the spider is carrying…”]. So, when I was initially analyzing my data, I coded that as an intrasentential code-switch, because she switched from Spanish to English in the same sentence. That code- switching lens helped me count up and organize my data neatly, but when I came across García’s work on translanguaging, I realized that it gave me a way to ask the questions that were, to me at least, more important about what was going on there, why and how the girl was using her linguistic resources to make meaning and solve this particular problem she had of making sense of the diagram. The shift from code-switching to translanguaging for me was a shift from looking at the language students used as the object of study to moving to understanding the students’ multilingual language practices as the main focus. Huseyin Uysal: How does this connect to the multilingual turn in TESOL? Peter Sayer: I think it is part of the same phenomenon. Probably the concept of translanguaging has really exploded among academics in applied linguistics in the last 10 years because it fits so well with the direction the field was already moving. I remember Lourdes Ortega gave a plenary talk at AAAL (American Association of Applied Linguistics) in 2010. I think it was on the “bilingual turn in SLA” (Second Language Acquisition). Then, a special issue in TESOL Quarterly on multilingual approaches in TESOL (see Taylor & Snoddon, 2013), and then Stephen May’s (2014) book The Multilingual Turn came out after that. So, there was already an impetus for scholars thinking and working in that direction, and translanguaging further called into question the strong English monolingual bias that has unconsciously influenced work in TESOL and second language acquisition. Huseyin Uysal: What are some new research directions that you would like to see in TESOL? How do you envision the new scholarship contributing to the advancement of the field and addressing existing challenges? Peter Sayer: Another area that I have worked on is the idea of linguistic landscape, which is a social semiotic approach to looking at how languages are represented in public spaces on signs or even graffiti (Gorter, 2006; Shohamy & Gorter, 2009). My interest in linguistic landscape is looking at it as a pedagogical resource for students (see Sayer, 2010). I have written and done ethnographic language learning projects through linguistic landscape (see Sayer, 2020). As a sociolinguist, when you are interested in the language that is happening around you, the linguistic landscape obviously fits into that way of looking at things. As I am thinking about it more, taking interest and sort of seeing, I remember years and years ago, in an interview with a teacher, they were talking about the difficulty of teaching English to their students in Mexico. As they described it, English is very distant to them. They used this metaphor of English being close to you and therefore relevant to your everyday life, versus English being very far away or very distant from you. I thought that was an interesting metaphor to capture why some students seem to like English. They saw it as something that they wanted. It was relevant to them because it is something they can do. On the other hand, for other students, it is a compulsory subject that they really do not care about. Thinking of it as a challenge for him, he said something in an interview at least 15 years ago, and it has stuck with me. For the teacher, the key is to take English and bring it close to the students. Teachers somehow need to relate it to their everyday lives. To me, that was the main takeaway there. For my research, I think about not just theorizing it on an abstract level, which is again helpful for us as scholars to understand that the problems are theorized from them, but the praxis part of it, and the theory to practice. So, I theorize from the practices and what is happening in classrooms, but also have my work be relevant to the practice itself. As far as your question about research directions, I like having that research praxis happen and keep it grounded in practice. I theorize from practice, and then also help form practice in a very direct and practical way. Then, I also help teachers with the challenge of what it means for them to make the language INTERVIEW WITH PETER SAYER: HUMAN CAPITAL AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN TESOL E-JournALL, 11(2) (2024), pp. 74-83 81 closer to the student, referring to that teacher’s metaphor, and closer to use in ways that make it more relevant. Linguistic landscape, funds of knowledge, and translanguaging… For me, these are a part of where I want to go with things. Huseyin Uysal: It was truly a great pleasure to chat with you, Peter. Peter Sayer: Thanks for the opportunity. References Alonso, Lara, & Villa Galán, Laura (2023). Raciolinguistic perspective on labor in the Americas: Introduction to this special issue [Guest editorial]. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2023(282), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2023-0051 Anyon, Jean (1981). Social class and school knowledge. Curriculum Inquiry, 11(1), 3–42. https://doi.org/10. 1080/03626784.1981.11075236 Anyon, Jean (2014). 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Language Teaching, 51(2), 152–186. https://doi.org/ 10.1017/S0261444817000428 May, Stephen (Ed.). (2014). The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and bilingual education. Routledge. Organization of Economic Cooperation Development. (2023). PISA 2022 results: The state of learning and equity in education (vol. 1). OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/53f23881-en Pennycook, Alastair (2006). The myth of English as an international language. In Sinfree Makoni, & Alastair Pennycook (Eds.), Disinventing and reconstituting languages (pp. 90–115). Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781853599255-006 Pennycook, Alastair (2017). The cultural politics of English as an international language. Routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315225593 Sayer, Peter (2010). Using the linguistic landscape as a pedagogical resource. ELT Journal, 64(2), 143–154. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccp051 Sayer, Peter (2012). Ambiguities and tensions in English language teaching: Portraits of EFL teachers as legitimate speakers. Routledge. Sayer, Peter (2013). Translanguaging, TexMex, and bilingual pedagogy: Emergent bilinguals learning through the vernacular. TESOL Quarterly, 47(1), 63–88. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.53 Sayer, Peter (2015a). “More & earlier”: Neoliberalism and primary English education in Mexican public schools. L2 Journal, 7(3), 40–56. https://doi.org/10.5070/L27323602 Sayer, Peter (2015b). Expanding global language education in public primary schools: The national English programme in Mexico. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 28(3), 257–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/0 7908318.2015.1102926 Sayer, Peter (2018). Does English really open doors? Social class and English teaching in public primary schools in Mexico. System, 73, 58–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2017.11.006 https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2023-0051 https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.1981.11075236 https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.1981.11075236 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203092965 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971131 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444817000428 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444817000428 https://doi.org/10.1787/53f23881-en https://doi.org/10.21832/9781853599255-006 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315225593 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315225593 https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccp051 https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.53 https://doi.org/10.5070/L27323602 https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2015.1102926 https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2015.1102926 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2017.11.006 UYSAL & SAYER E-JournALL, 10(2) (2024), pp. 74-83 82 Sayer, Peter (2019). The hidden curriculum of work in English language education: Neoliberalism and early English programs in public schooling. AILA Review, 32(1), 36–63. https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00020. say Sayer, Peter (2020). Ethnographic language learning projects through the linguistic landscape. In David Malinowski, Hiram Maxim, & Sébastien Dubreil (Eds.), Language teaching in the linguistic landscape: Mobilizing pedagogy in the public space (pp. 327–347). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030- 55761-4_14 Shohamy, Elana, & Gorter, Durk (Eds.). (2009). Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery. Routledge. Taylor, Shelley, & Snoddon, Kristin (2013). Pluralism in TESOL: Promising controversies. TESOL Quarterly, 47(3), 439–445. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.127 Williams, Cen (1994). Arfarniad o Ddulliau Dysgu ac Addysgu yng Nghyd-destun Addysg Uwchradd Ddwyieithog [An evaluation of teaching and learning methods in the context of bilingual secondary education]. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Wales, Bangor. https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00020.say https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00020.say https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55761-4_14 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55761-4_14 https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.127 INTERVIEW WITH PETER SAYER: HUMAN CAPITAL AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN TESOL E-JournALL, 11(2) (2024), pp. 74-83 83 Huseyin Uysal, The Education University of Hong Kong huysal9@gmail.com EN Huseyin Uysal holds a PhD degree in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in ESOL/Bilingual Education from the University of Florida. He is currently a Research Assistant Professor at The Education University of Hong Kong. His research interests are primarily centered on three areas: 1) fairness, justice and equity in TESOL, 2) English learner reclassification, and 3) plurilingualism at public schools. He is serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Education for Multilingualism, and the Associate Editor of the Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology. ES Huseyin Uysal tiene un doctorado en Currículo e Instrucción con una especialización en Educación ESOL/Bilingüe de la Universidad de Florida. Actualmente es Profesor Asistente de Investigación en la Universidad de Educación de Hong Kong. Sus intereses de investigación se centran principalmente en tres áreas: 1) equidad, justicia e igualdad en TESOL, 2) reclasificación de estudiantes de inglés, y 3) plurilingüismo en las escuelas públicas. Es Editor en Jefe de la Journal of Education for Multilingualism y Editor Asociado de la Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology. IT Huseyin Uysal ha conseguito un dottorato in Curriculum e Istruzione con una specializzazione in Educazione ESOL/Bilingue presso l'Università della Florida. Attualmente è Ricercatore presso l'Education University of Hong Kong. I suoi interessi di ricerca si concentrano principalmente su tre aree: 1) equità, giustizia e uguaglianza nel TESOL, 2) riclassificazione degli studenti di inglese, e 3) plurilinguismo nelle scuole pubbliche. È Direttore Responsabile del Journal of Education for Multilingualism e Vicedirettore del Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology. Peter Sayer, The Ohio State University sayer.32@osu.edu EN Peter Sayer is a Professor of Multilingual Language Education at The Ohio State University. His scholarly work is in applied linguistics and educational sociolinguistics, with a focus on language learners in bilingual and ESOL programs. From 2009- 2017, he collaborated with the Mexican Secretaria de Educación Pública on various projects related to the implementation of the Programa Nacional de Inglés, the national English program for public elementary schools, and in this capacity has worked extensively with schools and teachers throughout Mexico. He has also led workshops and study abroad programs for teachers in Peru, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico during the 2011-2012 period. ES Peter Sayer es Profesor de Educación Multilingüe en la Universidad Estatal de Ohio. Su trabajo académico se centra en la lingüística aplicada y la sociolingüística educativa, con un enfoque en los estudiantes de programas bilingües y de inglés como segunda lengua (ESOL). Del 2009-2017, colaboró con la Secretaría de Educación Pública de México en varios proyectos relacionados con la implementación del Programa Nacional de Inglés, el programa nacional de inglés para las escuelas públicas de primaria, y en esta capacidad ha trabajado extensamente con escuelas y profesores en todo México. También ha dirigido talleres y programas de estudios en el extranjero para profesores en Perú, Colombia y Arabia Saudita. Fue becario Fulbright en México durante el periodo 2011-2012. IT Peter Sayer è Professore di Educazione Linguistica Multilingue presso la Ohio State University. Il suo lavoro accademico si concentra sulla linguistica applicata e la sociolinguistica educativa, con un focus sugli studenti dei programmi bilingui e di ESOL. Dal 2009-2017, ha collaborato con la Secretaría de Educación Pública del Messico in diversi progetti relativi all'implementazione del Programa Nacional de Inglés, il programma nazionale di inglese per le scuole elementari pubbliche, e in questa veste ha lavorato ampiamente con scuole e insegnanti in tutto il Messico. Ha anche guidato workshop e programmi di studio all'estero per insegnanti in Perù, Colombia e Arabia Saudita. È stato borsista Fulbright in Messico durante il periodo 2011-2012.