AN EXPLORATION OF THE ROLE OF EFL EDUCATORS IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD

The globalization of the 21st century has created questions about and difficulties in the current role of EFL educators because of the many accommodations needed to new cultures, people, and differences in ideologically constructed representations of our roles in terms of culture, class, gender, race, and religion. To address these difficulties, six EFL educators at a private school in Turkey were interviewed for this analytic and auto-ethnographic research to investigate their perceived roles as EFL educators and the relation of these roles to globalization. The theoretical framework was formed from Bourdieu’s postcolonial theory and Bhabha’s notion of “third space.” Interviews, a reflexive journal, and critical incidents were used as means of data collection. The results revealed that EFL educators’ hybridity is forced as they navigate this in-between space as products of their prior socialization (i.e., their religious, class, and linguistic capitals). They are simultaneously colonized and colonizers as they “sell” English in Turkey, and they are “border crossers” in the ELT field. Keywords: Globalization, hybrid, English as a Foreign Language (EFL), post-colonial