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This article outlines a researcher's struggles with conducting "ethical" research when her case study reveals racializations faced by a minority teacher in a Canadian ESL program. How might becoming privy to research participants' experiences of inequity in ESL education complicate the notion of research ethics when "doing the right thing" runs counter to a researcher's ethical duties of ensuring trust, commitment, and confidentiality? The article speaks to the complexities of research ethics in the light of issues of negotiating researcher/researched identities, conducting anti-racist research, and addressing larger issues of power and inequity in ESL education.

Roberge defines the 1.5 Generation as "those who immigrate as young children and have life experiences that span two or more countries, cultures and languages" (2009, p. 4). In US and Canadian higher education, the term has gained considerable recognition, with the scope of the term broadening among some educators to include bi/multilingual students in general. In this article, we present selected data on students of Chinese ethnicity (322 survey respondents and three interviewees) from a broader two-year study of the languages, literacies, and identities of multilingual undergraduate students in Vancouver, where, in the 2011 census, one in five of the people living in the city reported being of Chinese ethnicity (Statistics Canada, 2011). Our aim was to analyze how key social, cultural, and linguistic defining features of the term Generation 1.5 that we found in the literature were represented in participants' survey and interview responses to open questions about their languages and identities. Five themes emerged: (a) being foreign-born and finishing secondary school in Canada, (b) being an international student, (c) being somewhere in between here and there, (d) (in)competence and language use, and (e) perceiving deficit in cultural knowledge. Participants' responses illustrated complex, transnational interweavings of languages, identities, and literacies around these five themes, leading us to question our institutional use of the homogeneous term Generation 1.5 to describe a heterogeneous group of multilingual, transnational students of Chinese ethnicity.

While current conceptualisations of the inextricable connection between language and culture in English language education are largely informed by complex sociocultural theories that view culture as constructed in and through social practices among people, classroom practices continue to be influenced by mainstream discourses of culture that simplistically construct essentialised cultural/racialised identities. This article will present data excerpts from a case study of a Canadian university-based English as a second language (ESL) programme that specifically emphasised in its pedagogical and curricular design the significance of learning language through culture and a process of cultural analysis. In various classrooms observed, however, the programme's dialogic approach to culture most often manifested as cross/intercultural comparisons of cultural difference. The potential danger of this pedagogical approach to culture in the ESL classroom, however, arises with a contextualisation of the English language in broader identity politics--namely, the equating of the English language with Whiteness--where discourses of "culture" can become a proxy for "race". Seemingly innocuous everyday common-sense discussions of "culture" in second language education may thus construct identities in problematic ways. It is therefore imperative for us to critically reflect on how our pedagogies may be "doing race" through "doing culture" in the ESL classroom.

Traditional definitions of multilingualism have reified and divided individuals' many languages and literacies into separate compartmentalised worlds of existence--worlds that are oftentimes theorised in the literature as fraught with struggle. In this article, we illustrate how multilingual struggle is not always the case by presenting data (interview and writing sample excerpts) from a study of the multilingualism and literacy practices of undergraduate students enrolled in an academic literacy course (ALC) at Pacific Coast University (PCU), located in Vancouver, Canada. The narratives of our transnational, translinguistic participants recount a more seamless multilingual life where rich repertoires of language practices and literacies lead seemingly--at first glance--"normal" co-existences. We analyse our participants' stories in terms of monolingualism as a social construct, negotiations of hybrid identities and "new ethnicities", multi-layered language use in a rapidly globalising world, and diversely "performed" multilingualism in--and constituted through--the discursive spaces of students' lives. (Contains 4 notes.)

Drawing on Pennycook's frameworks for understanding the global role of English, we discuss the paradoxes of English language usage in what Canagarajah terms "periphery communities" internationally. This analysis is complemented by Canagarajah's work on a "politics of location", which provides powerful insights into a periphery community's local and global investments in English. This notion is explored with particular reference to Norton's work in South Africa and Pakistan, which suggests that creative responses to the dominance of English, whether through codeswitching, appropriation, or subversion, defy essentialist analysis. We argue further that the notion of a politics of location can provide insights into English language usage not only in periphery communities, but also in center communities as well. In this regard, there is urgent need for the ongoing research of such scholars as Cummins, who has sought to better understand the challenges to bilingualism and multilingualism in center communities. (Contains 6 notes.)

There has been increasing recognition of the need to pursue critical research in the fields of ESL/EFL; however, the role that race plays in our research practices has not been frequently discussed. In-depth explorations of how a racialized identity shapes (and is shaped within) complex interactions between the researcher and researched can uncover the ways that race affects all aspects of our investigations, from collecting data to reporting. This article presents personal narratives of two ESL/EFL researchers, White and Asian, who critically reflect on the implications of racialized identities in conducting their respective studies. Both authors' accounts share a common theme of tensions around researcher positionality, locatability, (self-)reflexivity, and how best to represent those we are researching and writing about. However, while the first author brings to the fore the complexities of race and racism in ESL/EFL research through her narrative of studying "the other," the second author attempts to further complexify these issues by highlighting the distinctly unique tensions which arise when a researcher of color attempts to study "her own kind." The report will thus contribute to an enhanced understanding of the intersections of postcolonial identities, race, and critical research methodologies and ideologies in the TESOL field. (Contains 7 footnotes.)