Chapter 15: Working as a Journal Editor

When the chair of the search committee for TESOL Quarterly (TQ) asked me to consider applying for the position as editor, I didn’t take her seriously. I knew that the position was open, but never gave thought to applying for it. Even after two decades in the language teaching profession, I still deviated idiomatically and grammatically from the privileged varieties of English. Though I knew all the sociolinguistic reasons why my Sri Lankan English was not ungrammatical or inferior, I was mindful of the fact that academic publishing was governed by what scholars call the Standard Written English (SWE). More importantly, I had always been a critic of the biases and inequalities in academic publishing. Journals seemed to give preference to Eurocentric research practices and genres of writing, and scholars from first language backgrounds dominated academic publishing.