About

Suresh Canagarajah is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor in Applied Linguistics, English, and Asian Studies, and serves as the Director of the Migration Studies Project at Pennsylvania State University. His educational background includes a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin, obtained in 1990. Having completed all his schooling and taught English in Sri Lanka, he has extensive experience with the promise and challenges of English in postcolonial communities. His research adopts a sociolinguistic orientation, drawing from cultural studies and postcolonial discourse to interpret the use and development of English across diverse contexts. Canagarajah's scholarship explores the social and educational prospects of English for periphery communities, emphasizing local strategies of language appropriation and resistance against linguistic imperialism. His notable works include 'Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching,' which argues against deterministic views of language power, and 'A Geopolitics of Academic Writing,' which advocates for recognizing diverse rhetorical traditions in academic knowledge construction. His recent work focuses on globalization, hybrid identities, and codes in diaspora and transnational relations, with an emphasis on multilingual communities and the heterogeneity of English. He has edited volumes on language policies and practices, redefining concepts like identity and speech community to reflect multilingual realities. In addition to his research, Canagarajah is dedicated to pedagogical innovation, transforming classroom practices in diverse settings such as rural Sri Lanka and urban New York City. His work on accommodating nonnative dialects and discourses has resulted in influential publications, including 'Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students.' He is also the editor of TESOL Quarterly, where he promotes research on Global Englishes. His ongoing projects include transcribing interviews with Tamil immigrants to understand new identities in English and developing a comprehensive work on Tamil diaspora communities. His research interests encompass World Englishes, rhetoric and composition, and critical pedagogy.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Pedagogy
• Linguistics
• Epistemology
• Anthropology
• Law
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Trauma and language learning: ELT classroom practices in Sri Lanka

  ELT Journal · 2026-03-20

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Scholarship in the Global North has traditionally treated trauma as an individual pathological condition that needs medical intervention. However, Global South communities such as Sri Lanka approach trauma differently. Since the whole community has lived through centuries of colonization and decades of civil war, trauma is collective. For this reason, the community has developed everyday practices for a supportive environment. Such community-sponsored cultural and relational practices do not pathologize trauma. Survivors are treated as exhibiting forms of neurodiversity that come with their own strengths such as resilience, patience, and dependency. Their communication is not treated as fragmented and incoherent, but as meaningful when others co-construct meanings with them, adopting diversified semiotic resources, and going beyond normative assumptions. English language teachers have adopted pedagogical strategies influenced by such relational orientations. This article will discuss the intuitive strategies Northern Sri Lankan educators and students have adopted since the civil war.

  PublisherDOI

• Academic Communication and World Englishes

  2025-03-11

  otherSenior author

  The central concerns of the field of world Englishes have influenced research into academic communication and literacy in several ways, giving rise to a dynamic area of inquiry. After an overview of the expansion of understandings of academic communication, the entry looks at the different ways that linguistic diversity has been conceptualized, demonstrating a shift from earlier attempts characterized by a cross‐cultural perspective to more recent translingual studies that highlight the fluidity of language boundaries and feature a focus on practice. The entry then discusses the central issues at the intersection of world Englishes and academic communication and the implications of studies for classroom pedagogy.

  PublisherDOI

• The Politics of “Meaning” in Translingual Practice

  2025-11-20

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Representationalism has been theorized as a Eurocentric episteme (see Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Representationalism values objective propositional truths apprehended through reason and conveyed through language. Such meanings are treated as more valid and quintessentially human. This representationalist bias has influenced linguistics considerably despite different movements that have worked toward diversifying meanings and the semiotic resources that convey them. Most analyses rely on the signifier/signified relationship even when diverse semiotic resources and modalities are treated as generating meanings. Wortham and Reyes (2015) point out in their influential book on discourse analysis, “Discourse analysts must identify patterns in discursive interaction, showing what participants themselves respond to as they contextualize and entextualize their utterances. Discourse analysis is thus empirical, because an interpretation can only be supported by pointing to signs that participants themselves use” (pp. 15–16). I will draw from decolonization, disability studies, and new materialism to demonstrate how meanings go beyond this signifier/signified relationship. I focus specifically on affective meanings in this article as an example of nonrepresentational meanings. Affect has been theorized as functioning beneath or beyond linguistic and semiotic representation. Thus it poses considerable challenges for sociolinguistic analysis. I will analyze videotaped data to illustrate affective meanings that are significant in the interactions of international and multilingual scientific scholars within English. I will argue that the actual potential of translingualism will be realized when it addresses meanings that go beyond language. I will conclude with a discussion of the challenges in studying and reporting such nonrepresentational meanings in translingual research.

  PublisherDOI

• Studying Transnational and Translingual Professional Communication

  Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices · 2025-07-15

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the modern world of globalization, there is a need to establish a multilingual communication environment in the work process of transnational corporations for more efficient execution of tasks and organization of negotiations. As a result, a completely new polylingual space appears with its own internal dynamics of linguistic phenomena, the study of which requires the formation of new approaches to research. In this paper, the processes that arise as a result of the transition of business to a transnational space are analyzed from the point of view of Interactive Sociolinguistics. The influence of global processes and technologies on communication and inter-action between participants in work and contractual processes within corporations and between them is considered. The formation of a multilingual communication system due to the participation of users of different languages in communication is studied. The factors that result in the establishment of a particular multilingual system in the workspace are identified, and its manifestations are considered. The internal dynamics of this system are studied as it develops. The work is based on theoretical and practical researches by authoritative authors in the field of sociolinguistics, such as J.J. Gumperz, R. Wodak, J. Blommaert, and others. The study analyzes the effectiveness of the application of the Interactive Sociolinguistics approach to describing the work process in the context of the need to establish multilingual communication in transnational business.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• KEY THEORIZATIONS ON LANGUAGE EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABILITY: AN INTERVIEW WITH SURESH CANAGARAJAH

  Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Since the publication of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, proposed by the United Nations in 2015, the term sustainability has gained increasing visibility across various sectors. However, as we write this text - with only six years remaining before the established deadline to achieve these goals - it is evident much remains to be done. This paper, presented in the form of an interview, offers a critical Applied Linguistics perspective on language education for sustainability. The overall aim is to reflect on whether and how we have addressed the SDGs in our research, in theoretical frameworks, and mainly, in language education. The discussion focuses on how decolonial, Indigenous ontoepistemologies inform us on ways we can transform the neoliberal, naturalized perceptions and knowledge into thinking and acting otherwise in a collapsing world. Such perspectives challenge the dualistic views of the Modern European logic that operates through binary, hierarchical concepts such as human/nature, human/nonhuman, reason/affect, materiality/spirituality, thus fostering co-existence and mutual wellbeing. Some key aspects addressed in the conversation are the devastating effects of colonialism, the persistence of linguistic racism, and the importance of delinking from current colonial language traditions while relinking to Indigenous principles and methods. Moreover, as the UNESCO orientations on education for sustainable development are reviewed, concepts such as “dispositions” in place of competences, and learning as lifelong and lifewide are proposed.

  PublisherDOI

• (Im)migrant women’s translingual literacy practices as problem-solving and learning resources: perspectives from a community-based English literacy program

  International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism · 2024-06-04

  articleSenior author

  This paper calls for an expansion of translingual studies to include the examination of learners beyond university contexts to further our understanding of translingual literacies and practices. The authors present findings from a larger ethnographic study about practices and repertoires that (im)migrant women mobilize and employ when learning how to write in a community-based English literacy program. The study provides insights into the intersections of their identities as mothers and professionals and their literacy learning. Findings show how these women drew on diverse modalities and literacies to navigate new conventions for writing and challenges they face as (im)migrants in the United States, illustrating how their practices are linked to their professional and gendered identities. The findings illustrate the need to expand translingual studies to further theorize multilingual lives, language learning, and literacy practices cultivated in non-traditional education programs.

  PublisherDOI

• Enregistering Plural Academic Languages

  2024-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Communication for Specific Purposes as translingual

  Ibérica · 2024-06-05

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Recent theoretical developments suggest that meaning making involves the relationality of human and nonhuman agents and diverse semiotic resources working together. “Translingual” is an inclusive term to refer to how different languages and modalities work together in communication. I draw from enregisterment perspectives in linguistic anthropology to demonstrate how a corpus of semiotic features becomes sedimented to identify specialized communicative activities. I illustrate from the Research Group Meeting of international STEM scholars in a midwestern American university. Despite their variable grammatical proficiency in English, the international scholars communicate effectively because they draw from a translingual assemblage that is diversified, and collaborate for joint outcomes adopting reciprocal communicative strategies. Outcomes are not defined by the grammatical mastery of individual speakers, but how participants collaborate through embodied translingual semiotic resources in their setting and community, facilitated by suitable ethical dispositions. The pedagogical alternative proposed will focus on cultivating the dispositions to negotiate translingual repertoires, material ecologies, and social networks for more inclusive outcomes in communication for specific purposes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Translingual negotiation in mixed‐gender communication: An analysis of the interactions in research group meetings in engineering

  Journal of Research in Science Teaching · 2024-12-30 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract As a practical theory of language, translanguaging refers not only to speakers' use of multiple languages, but also to the deployment of other semiotic resources and artifacts in communication. To examine the use of semiotic resources and translingual negotiation strategies in STEM communication, this study explores the intersectionality of translingual communication and gender in a research group consisting of international engineering scientists (including doctoral students, postdoc and faculty) at a public university in the Midwestern United States. Using a translingual approach, we analyze the semiotic resources and translingual negotiation strategies adopted by these engineering scientists to resolve trouble‐in‐interaction and claim agency in group interaction. Data include eight audiovisual recordings of research group meetings (RGMs), transcribed following the conventions in conversation analysis for verbal and nonverbal communication. A turn‐by‐turn analysis of the chosen excerpts reveals: (1) members of the group adopt negotiation strategies to collaboratively resolve trouble‐in‐interaction, including entextualization (visualization in particular), recontextualization , and various verbal and nonverbal interactional strategies. In employing these strategies, they also skillfully integrate various semiotic repertoires such as gestures, body movements, environmental artifacts, and board work to facilitate the resolution of trouble‐in‐interaction and (2) female scientists adopt envoicing and interactional strategies to regain the floor to speak and display resistance when interrupted or ignored by their male colleagues. These findings suggest that while we embrace the affordances of a translingual orientation to STEM communication as it values the entire linguistic and semiotic repertoires of international STEM scientists, we should also acknowledge the existence of microaggressive acts against female members in RGMs. A more equitable and inclusive environment for intellectual engagement and group communication in STEM fields can only be created through the collaborative efforts of individuals, groups, and institutions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Foreword

  Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2024-02-14

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Critic: So, why this glorification of talk?Is it all connected to the 'language turn' in diverse fields these days?Isn't talk simply instrumental to conveying our thoughts?Language is a tool to convey what's in our minds already.Thinking is more important; talk comes later.That's why whenever someone goes on talking, I say,'Blah blah blah.' Fan: I think that's a very poor understanding of the significance of talk.I think of talk as an activity.The notion of activity is best captured by the term 'languaging' as coined by some linguists.That is talk is a verb, not a noun.And when we talk or engage in languaging, we also explore, question, reformulate, and regenerate ideas.Talk clarifies and engenders thinking, rather than being disconnected from cognition or serving only as a pliable tool for the mind. Critic:Okay, but talk can do nothing to change social life.That's why when some scholars start theorizing, I cut them short by saying,'Just talk, and no action.'Talk can't accomplish anything practical.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Edwin Erle Sparks

  Pennsylvania State University

  85 shared

• Peter I. De Costa

  Hologic (United States)

  84 shared

• Emrah Cinkara

  Pennsylvania State University

  81 shared

• Tabitha Kidwell

  American University

  81 shared

• Choi Min-Seok

  Michigan State University

  81 shared

• Ufuk Keleş

  81 shared

• Kyung Kim

  81 shared

• Danning Liang

  Huazhong University of Science and Technology

  81 shared

Awards & honors

• MLA’s Mina Shaughnessy Award (2000)
• Gary Olson Award from the Association for the Teachers of Ad…