All of us – nomads, immigrants, refugees, teachers, students, company executives, academics and farmers – are in flow, in motion and on the move, argues International TESOL Teachers in A Multi-Englishes Community. This is true even if physically we stay put. Methodologically innovative, scholarly grounded, and intellectually dareful, this book tells the story of this mobility, its challenges as well as its possibilities, especially how it looks like when it meets such a nice field as TESOL. It dares to ask, what does it mean to live in a time and a place that are neither neutral nor without history? At some point, especially for TESOL teachers and learners, we would not know if the stories told in the book belong to the authors or to the reader. This is the poetic of this book, you can’t put it down until the end. It is highly recommended, namely for those who are interested in that space of métissage between TESOL, mobility, historicity and negotiability.

In this exciting and incredibly accessible manuscript, written consistently with an international readership in mind, authors Phan Le Ha and Osman Barnawi have produced what I see as a brilliant, regionally contextualized approach to bridging theory and practice in the “multi-Englishes” TESOL context of Saudi Arabia. Making great use of scripts of conversations between the authors for the preface and opening to the introduction, in the twelve chapters, the authors cover a comprehensive range of topics, targeting international mobility, as well as realities, practicalities, and limitations of how far new approaches influencing TESOL in the region can go. They raise critical arguments from the international scholarship, along with excerpts from a series of insightful interviews they conducted with international teachers. This book is a must-read for all TESOL researchers and practitioners interested in contexts where international teachers are the cornerstone of ideological developments and reshaping of not only TESOL theory and practice, but of the region itself.

The authors skillfully expose, unpack and interpret complexities of contextualized professional identity negotiations of international TESOL teachers in the broader waves and entanglements of neoliberalism, transnational mobility, globalization, hybridity, and superdiversity. This book will set the tone and serve as an inspiring example for future projects focusing on the diversity and complexity of realities and perspectives in other parts of the world.

International TESOL Teachers in a Multi-Englishes Community provides a compelling analysis of socio-cultural, political, and economic implications of transnational TESOL teachers working in Saudi Arabia. For those who are interested in the on-the-ground work realities of English teachers, this is a must-read book. The increasing demand of TESOL professionals in the Global South makes this exceptional account of teachers’ engagement with Saudi Arabia’s Higher Education system and their navigation of local tensions, challenges and demands more pressing than ever. Power, tensions, challenges, but also hope, resignation, and trust feed the multiple stories documented in this book written by two exceptional scholars who are clearly ahead of their discipline. This piece of writing provides a unique understanding of the inner workings of the international TESOL industry and makes a genuine contribution to a more politicized and ethnographically informed field of TESOL and Applied Linguistics.

International TESOL Teachers in a Multi-Englishes Community is an excellent overview of the shifts taking place in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in relation to English language education [...] This book is a precious source for readers hoping to understand the current climate in Arabian countries; it shows the underlying demands for English and English-medium instruction in Arab regions [...] Audiences who might most benefit from this book include policymakers, native or nonnative English language teachers, and language institute or university administrators in charge of teacher recruitment.

Phan Le Ha is Senior Professor in the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei Darussalam, and in the Department of Educational Foundations, College of Education, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. She is the author of books including Transnational Education Crossing ‘Asia’ and 'the West': Adjusted Desire, Transformative Mediocrity, and Neo-colonial Disguise (2017, Routledge).

Osman Z Barnawi is Associate Professor at Royal Commission Colleges and Institutes (Education Sector), Yanbu, Saudi Arabia. He is the author of books including TESOL and the Cult of Speed in the Age of Neoliberal Mobility (Routledge, 2020).

Acknowledgements
Preface: Putting Curiosities in Action: An Uneasy Journey of Exploration
1: International TESOL Teachers: What’s Missing on the Ground?
2: International Teachers of English in the ‘New’ Middle East: Saudi Arabia in Focus
3: Engaging (with) Flavors of TESOL: Mobility, Space, Place, Neoliberalism, Multilingualism and Emotion Labor
4: Unpacking Mobility Drive: Geographical, Personal, Financial, Professional and More
5: Unpacking Often-Hidden Layers of Factors behind International Mobilities
6: English, ELT and Perceptions of Peers and Students
7: On-the-Ground Realities: From Training, Experience and Perception to Actual Classrooms
8: Every Teacher is Different, Every Classroom has its Own Dynamic
9: Sulaiman Jenkins: Examining the (Im)mobility of African American Muslim TESOL Teachers in Saudi Arabia
10: Unpacking Hardly-Ever-Revealed Emotions, Pains and Complexities
11: Abdullah Alshakhi and Phan Le Ha: A Much-Needed Conversation with Native-English-Speaking Caucasian Teachers: Emotion Labor and Affect in Transnational Encounters
12: International TESOL Teachers Working in the Saudi ‘Trust House’: (Re)Conceptualization of Key Constructs
Ryuko Kubota: Afterword
References
Index