Listening as the field of language teaching speaks to itself - 7

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This is the seventh post in a series reading a single issue of JALT Journal, the May 2026 number, for what the field shows about itself when it speaks in its own pages.

Review of a Review

Antisocial Language Teaching: English and the Pervasive Pathology of Whiteness JPB Gerald · Multilingual Matters, 2022 Reviewed by Zoya Erdevig, Tokyo International University

Zoya Erdevig's review of JPB Gerald's Antisocial Language Teaching opens with a context familiar to many readers in Japan: the ELT industry's promotion of native speakers as the ideal teachers, bound to a racial hierarchy that favours whiteness. She is writing from inside that situation. By the end of the review, she speaks briefly from her own situation in Japan. That moment is the most direct in the review. In between, however, the review largely moves within Gerald's apparatus rather than asking how that apparatus works.

Gerald, we are told, describes the structure of the ELT industry as "a great pyramid scheme" of whiteness. The phrase is reported, but not developed very far. Yet it is a striking image, and it invites a further question. If the ELT industry is imagined as a pyramid, what kinds of authority are being exposed, and what kinds may remain less visible?

The review presents Gerald's critique as a challenge to whiteness and native-speaker privilege, but it does not fully pause over the academic structure through which that critique is being made. The language of critical analysis can itself create levels of access. It can make some people appear as those who are able to see, name, and explain the structure, while others are left closer to the position of those who need the structure explained to them.

This does not weaken Gerald's critique. It suggests only that the image of the pyramid may reach further than the review allows. A critique of hierarchy may also need to notice the forms of authority through which it speaks.

Something similar happens in the movement of terms through the review. Words such as critical, racism, ableism, pathologization, and multilingualism arrive with considerable weight, but very little explanation. They are not ordinary descriptive words. They belong to a particular way of seeing the classroom, the teacher, the learner, and the field. Yet the review largely receives them as if their meanings were already settled.

This matters because the terms do not simply add detail to the argument. They shape what can be noticed. Gerald, as Erdevig reports him, argues that the suppression of students' multilingualism is linked to uncaring pedagogies rooted in racism and ableism, and that these place unnecessary stress on students. That may well be an important claim, but the review moves quickly across several difficult words at once. What is meant by ableism here? How is it related to racism? Is pathologization the same thing, or part of a wider pattern? What kind of stress is being described — institutional, emotional, cognitive, interpersonal, or some mixture of these?

The difficulty is not that such terms should be avoided. It is that, when they pass too quickly, they can begin to function less as openings for thought than as signs that the reader is already expected to know how to think. A review can then appear to be explaining a book while also reproducing the book's terms of entry.

As far as can be inferred from the review, the change Gerald calls for is located mainly in the classroom: in what is taught, what materials are used, what practices are challenged, and what content is made visible. Less is said about the processes by which a teacher's own perception might change, except through exposure to the kind of content and analysis the book advocates.

This gives the programme a strongly directive quality. Teachers are asked to tackle racism, colonialism, and ableism head-on, to reject materials that reinforce harmful ideologies, and to demand more inclusive content from publishers. The concern behind this is understandable. These are not imaginary pressures, and the harms being named are not trivial. But the language remains the language of demand. It tells teachers what must be confronted, rejected, and required.

That may be necessary at times. Yet the review does not pause over the educational tension that appears when anti-oppressive pedagogy itself takes the form of obligation. If the teacher is positioned mainly as someone who must adopt the correct analysis and enact the correct practice, the structure of authority has not disappeared. The content has changed, but the underlying structure of authority is not examined.

Erdevig is most present as a person when she recalls her first job in Japan. She was hired, she says, not because of training or experience, but because of her first language and her passport. At that moment the abstraction drops. She is no longer only reporting Gerald's argument; she is standing inside the situation the book describes.

This is the strongest moment in the review, because it is hers. Yet it does not become the ground of an independent reading. Elsewhere she is more cautious. Some readers, she says, may find the book too American in focus; some may question its diagnostic criteria. These reservations are noted, but not developed. Her closing advice, to meet the book with curiosity rather than defensiveness, is humane and sensible. But it also changes the tone. The review reads less as critical engagement with the book than as alignment with the movement the book represents.

That is the revealing point. Erdevig seems drawn toward the book's moral and political world, but she does not yet find a language of her own from which to examine it. Her own situated experience briefly opens that possibility. Then it recedes.