TESOL practice in the schooling sector in England has implicitly assumed that ESL students are linguistic and social outsiders and that there is a neat one‐to‐one correspondence between ethnicity and language. This perspective has tended to conceptualise L2 learners as a linguistically diverse group (from non‐English‐speaking backgrounds) but with similar language learning needs. However, demographic and social changes in the past 30 years have rendered such assumptions inadequate and misleading, particularly in multiethnic urban areas. In this article we seek to (a) offer an alternative account of the classroom realities in contemporary multilingual schools where the linguistic profiles and language learning needs of ESL students are not easily understood in terms of fixed concepts of ethnicity and language; (b) draw on recent developments in cultural theory to clarify the shifting and changing relationship among ethnicity, social identity, and language use in the context of postcolonial diaspora; and (c) question the pedagogical relevance of the notion of native speaker and propose that instead TESOL professionals should be concerned with questions about language expertise, language inheritance, and language affiliation.

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