Studying Religion and Language Teaching and Learning: Building a Subfield

In this opening quote, Brubaker (2015) made three observations: (a) Our understanding of nationhood is deeply permeated by particular religious traditions and their secular legacies, (b) the reversal of religion and language is central to, but politically contentious in, the public and private domains in social life in the West in the past several centuries, and (c) there has been a resurgence of public religion in recent decades. I believe that the first two observations underpin the need for applied linguists to take religion seriously. The third point offers an opening for the field of applied linguistics to study the intersection of language and religion systemically and rigorously, and even build a subfield.

Language and religion have interacted in different ways in various regions and over time with varied socioeconomic, political, linguistic, and religious consequences. For instance, religious orders have had a long history of providing health care, education, and social services worldwide. Since the 1960s, the racial and religious diversity has increased in secular institutions in many Western countries resulting from more relaxed (im)migration policies. At the same time religious institutions remain key players in various social domains. For instance, in Canada, Catholic schools are publicly funded, but in Ontario, other faith-based schools receive no public funding. Higher education in the United States has deep roots in and continues to be influenced by religion, particularly Protestantism (Gross & Simmons, 2009), and Catholic schools are serving religiously and racially evermore diverse populations (LeBlanc, 2017). Through state-funded faith schools and other provisions, Britain and many other European countries allow religion to play a role in education, and faith-based schools have continued to grow in England in the last few decades (Hemming, 2011).

On the other hand, language plays a prominent role in religion because “to know and interact with an otherworld tends to demand highly marked uses of linguistic resources” (Keane, 1997, p. 47). Language, in both written and spoken forms, is one of the most important mediums to access religious texts and beliefs and to practice religious rituals and routines such as reading and reciting scripture, preaching and responding, singing, praying, testifying, confessing, meditating, chanting, and so on. In fact, the “distribution of major types of writing systems in the world correlates more closely with the distribution of the world's major religions than with genetic or typological classifications of language” because the spread of a major religion often simultaneously introduced “the use of writing into a nonliterate speech community” (Ferguson, 1982, p. 95). As to the importance of spoken language, the Urapmin, a community with less than 400 members in Papua New Guinea, all of whom converted to Protestant Christianity without active Western missionizing in the late 1970s and completely discarded their traditional religion within a year, summarized their impression and understanding of their new faith as “God is nothing but talk” (Robbins, 2001). More importantly, in the process of colonization, language and religion became ever more entangled, which seems to at least partially coincide with the reversal of the roles of religion and language in the public and private domains of social life in the West that Brubaker (2015) observed. Both have significant consequences for language teaching and learning, and for researching language issues today. Religion is deeply entrenched in public life, and religious leakages, or residues and influences in secular institutions can be traced through language.

Given the importance of historical, political, social, and linguistic roles that religion has played in institutions, communities, and homes, there is surprisingly little research on this topic in the field of applied linguistics in general and in language teaching and learning in particular. Among many possible reasons that may have contributed to this gap, I highlight two. First, it has much to do with the influence of secularization, or the separation of church and state, in the democracies of the Western world. The prediction and declaration that “God is dead” has not made religion disappear. Instead, secularization has pushed religion largely to the private sphere (Stepick, 2005). Atheists are the smallest but are perceived as the most morally suspect group, even in secular states, and even in the view of atheists themselves (Gervais et al., 2017). Despite variations in fields and types of institutions, less than a quarter of university and college professors in the United States, including in elite research institutions, are complete nonbelievers in private (Gross & Simmons, 2009). Spolsky (2003) speculated that “many of the scholars interested in language contact were themselves so steeped in secularism that they did not easily become aware of the depth of religious beliefs and life” (p. 82). I am not aware of any empirical research on religious orientation or beliefs in secularization among linguists, or applied linguists, but secularization, along with the legal protection of the freedom of religion and a lack of knowledge of world religions, have contributed to the disinterest, unease, anxiety, and fear of dealing with or discussing religion in the West in general (Skerrett, 2014). Applied linguists probably are not an exception.

Another explanation for neglecting the role of religion are the narrow conceptualizations of language, the learner, and teaching and learning in the field of applied linguistics. Here I limit applied linguistics to refer to its Anglophone tradition, which is based mainly in North America and Britain, and to some extent Australia (e.g., Block, 2003). With second language acquisition (SLA) theory at its core, mainstream SLA has traditionally treated language as an autonomous linguistic system, and learning as cognitive processes (e.g., Johnson, 2004). Associated with this frame is a narrow focus on improving pedagogy as a major concern of applied linguistics, with social contexts and individual variations as mere interfering factors that need to be controlled or excluded to better study internal cognitive processes (e.g., Firth & Wagner, 1997). Secular language classrooms are the de facto research sites. While identity has been taken up enthusiastically by applied linguistics (see Block, 2007; De Costa & Norton, 2017) in line with “the social turn” in the field of SLA (Block, 2003), cognitively oriented SLA research is likely to report a participant's age, languages, and gender as variables, but not other identity markers, and certainly not religion. Today the dominant assumptions of language, learning, and learner in SLA remain narrowly framed. Few scholars research language learning and teaching in non-classroom settings, and traditional SLA research by and large continues studying secular language classrooms in the global North in ways as if societal forces and ideologies do not penetrate the classroom walls; and when they do, religion is often neglected.

Combining these two circumstances, it is not surprising that students and teachers alike are often assumed, or expected, to leave their religious beliefs, practices, and identities at the door when they enter secular language classrooms. In applied linguistics, empirical studies of religion and language teaching and learning in religious or secular institutions are relatively rare, and theoretically and methodologically rigorous ones are even more scarce.

THE TIME IS NOW

Recent social changes indicate that there is an acute need to understand religion in social life today, coupled with a growing awareness of its importance and complexity among some segments of the population. One telling example is the debate that erupted over labels such as “terrorist or disturbed loner” after an attack near a mosque in London in June 2017 (Fisher, 2017), and then again following the Las Vegas mass shooting in October 2017. Discussion of the media coverage of these events (Desai & Tessier, 2017) showed that some people have come to realize how religion and race, among other social categories, intersect to underpin labels such as “home-grown terrorists” and “radicalized youth” which have occupied news headlines and public consciousness since the September 11 attack in 2001.

On the surface, the debate over labels came about largely due to the increasing number and frequency of terrorist attacks around the world, but particularly on the home soils in secular Western countries in recent years, particularly since 2015 (Fisher, 2017). Of course, terrorism is not the only issue that links religion to contemporary life. Issues of abortion rights, contraception drugs, gender roles, creation or evolution, and sexuality in public school curriculum, and more recently vaccination, assisted death, and so on, have all ignited strong reactions from the religious right. Indeed, some religious traditions and their secular legacies have permeated public understanding of nationhood, and there has been a resurgence of public religion (Brubaker, 2015). But it probably took the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath, built on divisive ideologies of race, immigration, citizenship, gender, and religion among others, with Islam often under attack, to force more people to face the reality that religion continues to play important roles in secular Western societies, and that religion often intersects with other identity markers. These recent social changes and the associated awakening undoubtedly make the interdisciplinary study of religion significant and timely.

Understandably, the recent awakening regarding religion in the West in general is also reflected in the field of applied linguistics, in terms of interest and the state of knowledge. In the past couple of years, publishers and academic journals seem to have become more interested in and more open to topics pertaining to religion. However, the recency of this awakening also means that the study of language and religion is still emerging. As of now, with several edited volumes published, the most visible research on religion in applied linguistics seems to have focused on the controversy of (untrained) Christian English teachers proselytizing covertly under the pretense of teaching English. However, with the exception of a couple of non-Christian scholars (e.g., Johnston, 2017; Varghese & Johnston, 2007), empirical studies remain scarce and rigorous study is even rarer in this strand of research (see Kubanyiova, 2013, for a sympathetic critique). On the other hand, in the past decade or so, a number of empirical studies that centered on religion of our time, mostly ethnographic and mostly in the form of journal articles and dissertations (with the exception of one journal special issue, Avineri & Avni, 2016), have emerged in applied linguistics with the work of Patricia Baquedano–López, Loukia K. Sarroub, Carolyn Kristjansson, Leslie Moore, Huamei Han, and Martha Bigelow, among others. There are relevant publications in related fields too, including from Caroline Zinsser immediately following Shirley Brice Heath's seminal ethnography in the 1980s, and from Ayala Fader, Lucila Ek, Vally Lytra and colleagues, and Stephen Pihlaja. Together, these studies can be coalesced into a solid base upon which to build a subfield.

Undoubtedly, the first attempts at drawing a few strokes of a blueprint or laying down a few bricks for a foundation are likely to be clumsy or even ill-conceived. Nevertheless, I hope these attempts will help create conditions and opportunities for, or at least encourage or intrigue, more applied linguists to pay attention and contribute to this area of research. Time will tell whether it will grow, and how. Having conducted two ethnographies focusing on churches, I feel obligated to at least share what I have learned, and to call attention to this area.

CRITICAL REFLEXIVITY, SOME GAPS AND DIRECTIONS

I stumbled onto this line of research in 2002, when I started my dissertation research: I entered the field as an adult immigrant, a racialized person, a so-called nonnative English speaker, a PhD student, a woman, and an atheist who had no interest in any organized religion. I see the researcher as the most important research tool in a project (Han, 2009), and researcher reflexivity (England, 1994; Lawrence, 2017) as fundamental for rigorous research. With religion being thoroughly personal and social simultaneously—very much like language—it is particularly important for researchers to be transparent and critical about their subjectivity in this line of research. My trajectory to and interest in studying church and then religion more broadly, and my multiple identities, have shaped my views and approaches to this line of research, as well as my vision of a subfield, which I have tried and will continue to account for. I hope being transparent about my positionality helps readers to make a more informed interpretation of my account, and also helps scholars with other views, approaches, and visions on the widest spectrum possible to critique mine and see how they may contribute to this area of research.

So let me trace a bit further back. I am a Chinese person who was born, raised, and educated in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Growing up in a small village in Shandong province in the north in the 1970s, I followed my parents when they practiced ancestral worship, while to my father's dismay, his two sisters were leaders of underground house churches with quite a following in the extended family and in our two neighboring villages. At age 10, I was sent to the nearby city for better schools, then later went to Shanghai for university and graduate studies, where I eventually became a faculty member specialized in Chinese linguistics. Throughout my years in PRC, people around me practiced multiple religions, but I had an atheist inclination.

After immigrating to Canada in 1999, I soon discovered that there were few full-time or stable jobs teaching Mandarin in Toronto and in the rest of Canada despite the long history and the sizable population of diverse Chinese backgrounds. Still wanting to teach at the university level, I applied for and started a PhD program in 2000. In downtown Toronto, street evangelists often waved brochures at me or pushed flyers into my hand, and occasionally missionaries knocked on my apartment door to offer free Bible lessons in English, but I was not interested in religion. Faced with many challenges in the first year of my PhD program, with English as a major one, in 2001, I decided to focus my dissertation research on English learning among adult immigrants to Canada, to save myself but also to help immigrants like myself. At that time, PRC had been the largest immigrant source country to Canada for several consecutive years, with skilled immigrants as the core. However, skilled PRC immigrants had great difficulties finding jobs—for many complex and systemic social and economic reasons which I would learn in subsequent years through my research. But back then, all stakeholders, including PRC immigrants themselves, identified English as the problem, and indeed, as their problem. So naturally, I wanted to discover strategies to improve English oral proficiency. However, the traditional SLA research I read did not speak to the complexity of my lived experience as a skilled adult immigrant and my observations of others around me. I decided to try ethnography instead.

When I started my dissertation project in 2002, I had no interest in religion, but I happened to meet a group of atheist PRC immigrants who joined a free English conversation group organized by an American missionary. They ended up going to church, and gradually converting to Christianity. In retrospect, it happened because religious conversation among PRC immigrants in settlement has been common. I spent 3 years conducting fieldwork across secular and religious settings in Toronto, and discovered that minority churches, or the so-called ‘immigrant’ and ‘multicultural’ churches led and pastored by former immigrants and their grown children born or raised in Canada respectively, were the most supportive institutions in socializing many skilled PRC immigrants (Han, 2007a). With socioeconomic exclusion from mainstream educational institutions and workplaces, these minority churches supported their congregants’ linguistic, identity, and economic needs (Han, 2007b, 2009, 2011a). Their spiritual needs were met by a meaning system that rationalized being the racialized Other in the prosperous West as a part of God's plan (Han, 2011b). A large number of PRC immigrants converted to evangelical Christianity, embraced social values that were more conservative than the mainstream, and joined a booming transnational Chinese evangelical Christian community which comprises a large part of a global Protestant movement (Han, 2007a, 2011b). This movement has been underway for several decades in Africa, Asia, Latin America (e.g., Englund, 2011; Freston, 2001; Gifford, 2004; Hallum, 1996; Hefner, 2013) and in the diasporas in the West (e.g., Ebaugh & Chafetz, 2000; Nyiri, 2003; Yang, 1999; Yang & Tameny, 2006).

After relocating to western Canada to take up a faculty position, I was surprised to see several mainland Chinese churches, that is, churches largely ministered and run by formerly atheist PRC immigrants, for themselves and their children born or raised in Canada (Han, 2013). This means that, within a short time, some PRC immigrants not only converted to Christianity, but also become pastors and lay leaders, and some evangelized transnationally in addition to ministering their own congregations. I conducted an 18-month ethnography exploring multilingual development and religious participation among minority youths in a mainland Chinese church with three congregations (Han, 2013). In addition to confirming major findings from the previous project, this project led to critical reflections on issues of access, language, and religion (Han, 2014b) intersecting with race, racism, and nationalism (Han, 2011b, 2013, 2014a).

Through these two church ethnographies and other projects over the years, I have gradually centered my research on linguistic and socioeconomic inclusion of individuals and groups marginalized on a linguistic basis in the process of globalization, who often are simultaneously marginalized along the lines of religion, as well as race, class, gender, citizenship or immigration status, nationality, sexuality, and so on. It suffices to say that, having experienced my share of hardship and despair in settlement, my extended and at times intense engagement with my key participants helped me to sympathize with religious conversion, which unexpectedly helped me to become a more conscious atheist.

I argue that the subfield of religion and language teaching and learning should (a) focus on but also go beyond pedagogy and language classrooms at places of worship, such as churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples, or at religious schools, and into the wider religious and secular contexts in general; (b) treat language, religion, and economy as intertwining and political; and (c) simultaneously address local and global issues, contexts, and processes. These views stem from my work on churches as an atheist applied linguist, which also resonate with a body of scholarship on missions, which curiously has largely been neglected by applied linguists studying religion today.

LESSONS FROM HISTORY AND SOME OVERARCHING QUESTIONS

A robust body of scholarship on missions in colonial time, mostly in the field of linguistic anthropology but also in religious studies focusing on history, recovers and reveals how religion and language became deeply entrenched in colonization. It speaks powerfully about how economy, religion, and language were deeply entangled in the processes of colonization, how each was political, and how the religious and the secular were always entangled and inseparable. The main body of this scholarship focuses largely on European missionaries proselytizing Christianity in various contexts, but there were also encounters with Islam and indigenous religions (e.g., Brenner, 2000, 2001; Keane, 2007; Robbins, 2001). The following findings from this scholarship offer important insights for building the subfield.

First, language work was integral to colonization in that missionary linguists acted as the vanguards and missionaries as the willing or hesitant agents of colonization through their professional services. They compiled word lists and dictionaries which prepared for and aided colonial advances, created language description and Romanized orthographies for indigenous speeches, and demarcated and mapped indigenous languages (Errington, 2001; Fabian, 1986; Irvine & Gal, 2000). They disseminated and promoted their ideas about language through writing and debates (e.g., Meeuwis, 1999), ran schools to teach languages and other skills in colonies (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991; Fabian, 1986), the semi-colony of China (Si, 2009; Snow, 2013), and to indentured migrant workers in Canada (Wang, 2006). Missionaries and missionary linguists were essential in establishing and maintaining the power of colonial rule on the level of symbolic power, which was vital to collonial success. Fabian (1986) observed that “[w]atching over the purity of Christian doctrine and regulating correctness of grammar and orthography were intrinsically related as two aspects of one and the same project” (p. 83). Through the large variety of activities, the domain of language, literacy, and culture is where colonialism has left the most entrenched and most lasting effect on the colonized (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991).

Second, today's dominant language ideologies were formed during and through colonization in which religion was deeply entrenched. The presupposition of languages’ writablity undergirded early missionary linguistic work such as Spanish missionaries’ imposing an orthography of Mayan speech in the 15th to 16th century, and of Tagalog in the late 16th and early 17th century (cf. Errington, 2001). Over several centuries, colonial linguistic practices and policies that facilitated colonial rule in Latin America, Asia, and Africa also perpetuated linguistic ideologies, including the ideology of linguistic territoriality, sociolinguistic hierarchy, linguistic purity (Errington, 2001), and linguistic nationalism (Irvine & Gal, 2000), as well as emerging notions of modernity, time, space, and personhood (Keane, 2007; Robbins, 2001; Schieffelin, 2000). Today these enduring language ideologies continue to shape language policies, practices, and discourses in various Christian and non-Christian institutions and contexts at multiple levels, ranging from underpinning national language policies to regulating institutional and interpersonal language policies and practices (e.g., Han, 2011b, 2014a, 2014b).

Third, this body of scholarship demonstrates the importance of going beyond language classes and pedagogy in studying religion and language teaching and learning, and the insights this approach can offer for language studies and beyond. For instance, Fabian (1986) described how Belgian missions had to compete with British Protestants, which led to the suppression of English and the African varieties that British Protestants had already adopted. The Belgian missionaries ran schools in the colony in exchange for the rights and privileges to proselytize, which underscored why and how they decided on what levels of which language to teach children, and to train salaried colonial workforces and low-level administrative functionaries. These decisions eventually led to establishing one variety of Swahili, a lingua franca and a product of colonial contact, as the most important language in the region. This and other studies demonstrate the importance of going beyond language classes and pedagogy to provide nuanced accounts of the social, political, and economic contexts that are essential to understanding the intersection of religion and language beliefs, policies, and practices. Studying language classrooms and pedagogy alone may help to understand the what and how of language policies and practices, but would be unlikely to help us understand the why.

These insights shed important lights on the entanglement among economic, religious, scientific forces (in this case, the development of linguistics and anthropology), the role of individual agents, and the conditions allowing global circulation of commodities, ideas, and personnel, in the process of colonization.

I see applied linguistics as transdisciplinary (The Douglas Fir Group, 2016) and as an applied field concerned with real life issues in which language plays an important role (Brumfit, 1980). This means to draw on, but also intentionally aim to contribute to, other disciplines. Conceptualizing language and language teaching and learning broadly as not only linguistic, but also as socioeconomic practices and ideologies, fits nicely into such a vision of applied linguistics. Studying the intersections of language and religion demands drawing on, and has great potential to make a unique contribution to, other fields such as language studies, sociology and anthropology of religion, and migration and globalization studies, among others.

History is known for repeating itself, albeit often in (slightly) modified forms. For example, those who were missionized (by Western missionaries) often eventually became the missionizers in the colonies in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. South Korea made this transition in mere decades, and has further become the second largest missionary-sending country in the world, following the United States; and South Korean and Korean American missionaries have been actively missionizing in Africa (Han, 2015) and worldwide. In the meantime, immigrants have been missionizing their co-ethnic new arrivals in the United States, Canada, and Australia (e.g., Ebaugh & Chafetz, 2000; Ley, 2008; Woods, 2004; Yang, 1999). PRC immigrants in Canada have merely become new players in this larger phenomenon. More surprisingly, Chinese Christians in the officially atheist PRC are quietly becoming the missionizers too—like with any group, most missionizing activities are mundane and go unnoticed, but some make headlines. In May 2017, a young woman and man from the PRC were kidnapped in Pakistan, and were killed a month later. While the young man's mother thought that her son went there to teach Mandarin, the two went to “spread the word of Christianity in the unlikeliest and most dangerous of places in conservative Muslim Pakistan” (Ponniah et al., 2017). Therefore, it is not new for the missionized to become missionizers, but new players, new dynamics, and new mechanisms emerge all the time, with consequences found both locally and globally.

International missionary work raises the questions about the current capitalist globalization that is still unfolding and how language and religion intersect in the process. I suspect that it probably is not merely coincidental that language and religion have reversed their roles in terms of centrality and political contentiousness in the public and private domains in social life in the West in the past several centuries (Brubaker, 2015). The contrast between the steadily secularizing mainstream of the West and the increasing religiosity of the marginalized in the world is not a surprise, either. Therefore, in the complex web of globalization, how do individual agents, groups, and institutions of varied (non)religious inclinations and in different contexts, form or contest economic, religious, and scientific forces that help to set up conditions allowing global circulation of commodities, ideas, and personnel? How do religious traditions and their secular legacies permeate an understanding of nationhood in various contexts, in what forms, and how? How do religion and language, including applied linguistics as a discipline and language teachers in secular and religious classrooms as individual agents, feature in these processes, via what we say we do, what we really do, and the discrepancies among them? Applied linguists and language teachers can make a unique contribution to help tackle these questions, or can claim that we are too limited in our political horizons and subjective consciousness, and like missionary linguists and missionaries, hope to be excused.

A RESEARCH AGENDA: PRINCIPLES, STARTING POINTS

There are many interesting ways to study religion, as it is intertwined with language, of which language teaching and learning has been the major concern. I see religion broadly “as the field of cultural expression that focuses specifically on communication and relationship between human beings and those (usually) unseen spiritual entities and/or forces that they believe affect their lives” (Brenner, 2000, p. 164; also see Keane, 1997). Recognizing the importance of faith for individuals and for social life, I see each religion as inherently heterogeneous, and existing in an ecology with other religions as well as secular forces. I see religion as comprising both faith beliefs and practices, at both individual and institutional levels, which, along with secular beliefs and practices, constitute social processes.

I take a materialist and processual view that sees language as always embedded in power relations (Bourdieu, 1991; Han, 2011a; Heller, 2007). I see language as linguistic resources that are fluid and multiple, but are distributed unequally across individuals and groups, and the valuation of a particular form of linguistic resource is fundamentally related to its material conditions of acquisition, distribution, and circulation. I see interactional orders as constitutive of social orders, and linguistic practices underpinned by ideologies as constitutive of social processes (Han, 2011a; Heller, 2007). I see language ideologies, defined as cultural systems of ideas that serve as the link between language and social relations, which are loaded with political, socioeconomic, and moral interests (Woolard, 1998), as essential to understanding the symbolic power of language. Language ideologies can be expressed directly in discourses, or can be deciphered from what people do with or about language. Semiotic ideology (Keane, 2007) seems a very useful extension of language ideology that can be productively explored (Fader, 2008, 2016).

I view language teaching and learning from the lens of language socialization with a critical bent, e.g., as processes of socialization to use language, and socialization through language (Ochs, 1986), which inherently involves processes of identity and ideology formation. I see identity as relational, performed and co-constructed by interlocutors through interactions situated in specific social contexts that are shaped by power differentials based on various fault lines or social categories. I see learners and teachers as situated social actors who are enabled or constrained by their material and symbolic conditions and resources. I recognize that hegemony is never complete (Heller & Martin–Jones, 2011).

Authors along the (non)religious continuum have applied these guiding principles in a co-edited special issue (Han & Varghese, forthcoming): the process has been challenging, but rewarding.

I recommend a few options as starting points. First, it is important to start with and maybe focus on one institution or context at a time. I see institutions and spaces in secular states as ranging from explicitly religious to explicitly secular as self-stated, but it is a continuum of various combinations of both with neither end being pure. Religious institutions, including places of worship such as synagogues, churches, mosques, temples, and religious schools such as Muslim schools, Islamic academies, Catholic schools, Baptist universities, or Sunday schools at church are explicitly religious and doctrinal, but structurally they often contain secular elements or elements from other religions. For instance, churches routinely welcome non-believers (Han, 2009); church-based English classes intentionally recruit non-believers (Kristjánsson, forthcoming); with intensified migration, Catholic schools in Australia and the United States have been enrolling students from increasingly diverse religious and racial backgrounds (LeBlanc, 2017; Scarino, Liddicoat, & O'Neill, 2016). Secular institutions in secular states receive and serve religiously diverse populations, such as public schools and universities in the West that have seen an increasing enrollment of Muslim students (e.g., Bigelow, 2008, 2010; Mir, 2009; Rich & Troudi, 2006; Zine, 2001). Additionally, religion routinely seeps into secular institutions.

Individual studies can start from one institution or context, and then expand to another. Studies by Baquedano–López (1997), Zinsser (1988), McMillon and Edwards (2000) and Ek (2009a, 2009b) all offer examples of study designs that include at least one religious institution. As a subfield, rich and detailed ethnographies of different institutions offer the potential to examine patterns across a whole spectrum of institutions across religious and secular boundaries.

Another starting point could be individuals and/or groups, maybe a number of individuals at a time or one to two age groups at a time. Both religion and language socialization are age-sensitive domains. As to religion, socializing children into their parents’ religious beliefs and practices rarely registers much public concern. Faith among adolescents and young adults does concern clergies, parents, and some academics (e.g., Smith, 2009). The public has become concerned about the radicalization of this age group, particularly young Muslim males. However, socializing adults into a new religion often raises eyebrows when concerning immigrants converting to Christianity. The concern seems often centering on whether it is genuine, or truly spiritual, instead of motivated by material and pragmatic gains. The Chinese term “rice-bowl Christians” speaks volumes about this concern (Yang, 1999), which seems to be rooted in the belief that religion should be otherworldly, or spirituality should be separated from secular material needs and desires. At the same time, the debate over (untrained) Christian English teachers’ covert proselytization has dominated the study of religion and language in SLA for the past 25 years, but neither side distinguished targeted age groups, or analyzed the socioeconomic and political conditions that make English teaching and Christianity desirable, with what possible gains and consequences. For individual researchers, it is possible to examine the same or similar topic across different life stages through cross-sectional designs. As a subfield, various studies may be combined to gain insights about religion and language across the entire life span.

I see great value in ethnographic approaches when starting with either approach outlined above. My preference for ethnography also aligns with the way I see religion, teaching, and learning, outlined previously. The value in ethnography lies in actual observation of how interactions, practices, discourses, and relations unfold in real time, which can enable more informed, nuanced, and complex analysis. Ethnography provides rich information to contextualize and historicize practices, discourses, and beliefs of individuals, groups, and institutions at multiple scales and dimensions, ranging from present to historical and from local to national, regional, and/or global.

Detailed ethnographies have the potential to suggest and even reveal larger patterns or social processes (Fader, 2006; Han, 2007b). Richly detailed ethnography also makes it possible to examine common threads across individuals and groups in different settings, and from different religious traditions. For example, reading studies by Zinsser (1986), Moore (2006, 2008), Fader (2006, 2008, 2016), Peele–Eady (2011), and Baquedano–López (1997, 2008), we can see how young children were socialized into linguistic and religious performances in different religious traditions that all valued memorization, which entailed identity formation, particularly religious and linguistic identities across all cases, but also, for some, gender (Fader, 2006, 2008, 2016) and ethnic/racial and national identity (Baquedano–López, 1997). We see language socialization through interactions of a teenage girl (Ek, 2009a) and an adult immigrant couple, particularly the wife (Han, 2007a), that constituted gender identity formation processes that involved both conformation and negotiation.

My nonexhaustive review of scholarly work done to date that included religion and language socialization, broadly defined, has thus far focused on pedagogy, identity, language policy, political economy of language and religion, and religion in secular settings. I see each as underpinned by ideologies and each as needing expansion.

CONCLUSION

Given the historically and presently deep relationships between the religious and the secular across all aspects of society, I suggest that we broaden the scope of the study of religion and language teaching and learning to not only focus on language classrooms and pedagogies in places of worship and religious schools, but also to situate them in relation to the secular sector and the larger society, bearing in mind that the social processes of the current capitalist globalization are unfolding as we speak. I believe we would benefit from recognizing and analyzing the social, political, and economic conditions of linguistic and religious practices, discourses, and beliefs. Indeed, socioeconomic and political analyses of religion and language learning and teaching may help us investigate the dynamics between the reversal of religion and language in the public and private domains in local and global contexts and processes. I argue that this work has the potential to make a unique contribution to both applied linguistics and to other fields.

While we have scholarly work that includes religion and/or language, we must not leave out ideologies that are connected to these topics which also include pedagogy, politics, and economy, including in the secular contexts in which so many of us do our work. When we have built a bit more empirical research along these lines, we will be closer to being able to discuss how to approach teacher training regarding religion for language teachers of all (non)religious inclinations, and possibly for others too.