PREreview de School internationalization, teacher linguistic inequality, and linguistic social justice in the redesign of an online English course for Brazilian Basic Education teachers

Summary

This paper examines the critical redesign of a face-to-face English course for Brazilian Basic Education teachers into an online format within the broader context of school internationalization. Rather than treating teachers’ limited access to English as an individual deficit, the paper conceptualizes the issue as “teacher linguistic inequality,” arguing that institutional processes can produce unequal access to the English-mediated demands associated with internationalization, including institutional documents, curricular terminology, and professional development opportunities.

Drawing on perspectives from Critical Applied Linguistics and multiliteracies, the study adopts a qualitative and situated approach, examining course materials, reflective records, and institutional documents. Its stated aim is to develop a set of design principles for the online course redesign, particularly around access, recognition, institutional responsibility, gradual publicness, and the diagnostic mapping of linguistic demands.

Major Issues

The theoretical framing in the introduction is strong and provides a clear rationale for the concept of teacher linguistic inequality. However, at this stage, the paper has not yet provided sufficient evidence of how the proposed redesign actually emerged from the study. The abstract suggests that the paper will demonstrate the strengths and limitations of the original face-to-face course and derive specific design principles from this analysis, but the material available here has not yet reached that part of the discussion. It is therefore difficult to determine whether the principles are genuinely grounded in the empirical material or are primarily being proposed on theoretical grounds. This distinction will need to be made clear in the later sections.

The concept of “teacher linguistic inequality” is introduced thoughtfully, particularly through the explicit rejection of an individual-deficit interpretation. This is one of the paper’s strengths. However, the concept would benefit from being tested more explicitly against alternative explanations. For example, the paper could consider whether the difficulties experienced by teachers are specifically linguistic or whether they also reflect broader forms of institutional underinvestment in teacher professional development, access to resources, or support for internationalization. The later analysis should therefore clarify what distinguishes teacher linguistic inequality from more general forms of institutional or resource inequality. Establishing this boundary would strengthen the conceptual contribution of the paper and prevent the concept from becoming too broad.

Minor Issues

At this stage, I would not raise additional minor issues.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The authors declare that they did not use generative AI to come up with new ideas for their review.