Learning English for Faith Work: The Australian Experience of Non-Anglophone Catholic Missionaries

ABSTRACT

The Catholic Church is the oldest religious institution in the West and the biggest Christian denomination in Australia. Its success is partly due to its sustained efforts to supply missionaries across the globe. While the traditional missionary paradigm involved Europe-born religious workers being sent to colonies, this flow has been reversed in recent years. Increasingly, priests from the Global South are serving in Global North churches. This reversal of mission flows involves shifting from learning peripheral languages to learning center languages. This shift has important, but little understood implications in this context where language learning has moral consequences. This qualitative study examines the English language learning experiences in Australia of missionaries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, highlighting their language socialization practices, challenges, and ideologies. Findings contribute to theorizing Catholic missionaries as a community of practice whose language learning strategies and views are partly shaped by their religious identity.

KEYWORDS:

• English as an international language
• identity
• language and ideology
• language learning
• language socialization

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the University of Santo Tomas—Research Center for Social Sciences and Education for funding this project; the Divine Word Missionaries in Sydney, Australia for their friendship, prayers, and support; Wenger and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University of Santo Tomas - Research Center for Social Sciences and Education.

Notes on contributors

Pia Patricia P. Tenedero

Pia Patricia P. Tenedero is assistant professor in the Department of English, University of Santo Tomas (The Philippines) and honorary postdoctoral associate in the Linguistics Department, Macquarie University (Australia). Her research interest includes language learning and the sociolinguistics of communication in globalized accounting, Catholic missionary work, and higher education.