The Erasmus+ CIRCE project online seminar “Sounding Right to Teach Right? Accentism and the Racial Politics of Legitimacy in TESOL Teacher Education” will be held on 20 October 2025 at 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM (CEST). Speaker: Onur Özkaynak, The Ohio State University, USA
The free seminar, organised by the CIRCE project in collaboration with DFCLAM University of Siena, H2IOSC project and Cnr-Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, will be included in the H2IOSC Training Environment to enable all interested parties to access the event registration.
Speaker Bio
Onur Özkaynak is a Ph.D. candidate in Foreign, Second, and Multilingual Language Education at The Ohio State University. His research explores language ideologies, raciolinguistic hierarchies, and teacher identity formation in TESOL contexts. He employs mixed-methods approaches to investigate how linguistic legitimacy is constructed, contested, and racialized across institutional settings. Onur has taught in Turkey, Finland, and the United States and is passionate about developing equitable, multilingual approaches to teacher education. His work has appeared in journals such as L2 Journal, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and International Journal of Multilingualism.
Summary
This seminar explores how accentism shapes the preparation, perception, and professional legitimacy of TESOL teachers. Drawing on narrative and interview data from pre-service teachers in Turkey and the United States, as well as broader global research, I examine how “sounding native” continues to serve as a proxy for whiteness, authority, and employability in English language teaching. While many TESOL programs embrace multilingualism in theory, they often fall short of critically addressing the ideologies that delegitimize racialized and accented speakers.
I argue that TESOL teacher education must move beyond standard language ideologies and actively interrogate how raciolinguistic ideologies are reproduced through curricula, practicum experiences, and institutional silences. I hope to open up dialogue around how educators, researchers, and institutions can better support teacher candidates who do not conform to native-speaker norms but bring rich, multilingual, and multicultural resources to the classroom.