As Wallerstein (2005) put it, humankind tended to get used to certainties that were ultimately offered by the so-called scientific findings. Truth (e.g. scientific findings) could only be revisited and modified when new findings added more true and valid arguments to a customized truth. Yet, there was a sort of belief that the scientific method and scientific research were the only valid form to apprehend and comprehend facts mainly external to the subject. Probably, it could be asserted that, throughout their education years, most scholars, as well as undergraduate and graduate students, learned to follow well-organized and consistent research steps, and to use reliable instruments that enabled them to extract and analyze data, in order to obtain univocal conclusions expressed in universal analytical categories. This research approach clearly was a less iterative and a more linear way to conduct research. Thus, truth obtained through scientific research processes that followed the book appeared to be universal, univocal, immanent and perhaps inevitable. In my view, this approach constitutes a sort of methodological prison with important epistemological and ontological implications. However, I realize that those restrictions imposed by the scientific methods have nested most of the knowledge that humankind possesses, while paving a luminous way for scientists and researchers to follow. As a result, “... for many, the labels ‘scientific’ and ‘modern’ became almost synonymous, and for almost everyone, those labels were commendable” (Wallerstein, 2005, p. 15). I dare to say that ELT Education also got caught in this luminous way. Thus, in this chapter, or rather brief reflection paper, I mean what I mean drawing on the scientific and modern language I possess. Such language is part of the educational tradition mentioned above. The desire, however, is not to radically oppose to a methodological tradition, since I have been living / researching using it. There is a desire to multi-signify such tradition using a decolonial spirit.

In this paper, a decolonial perspective is proposed as a complementary way out from the methodological imprisonment that scientific approaches and modern labels have imposed to research in ELT Education; based on a deliberate practice of what I have called thinking-on-motion. this chapter proposes that a decolonial perspective could free ELT research out from its methodological imprisonment; a discussion of how such imprisonment has turned English language teaching and learning into a rigid and monolithic practice is included. The ideas that I discuss here, should be considered an ideological, speculative and subjective exercise evolving from Wallerstein’s arguments (2005). Yet, they are incipient and not fully developed. Questions and reflections, more than answers, are the contents of this chapter. They are mirroring the uncertainties that have emerged along the way of my own collective and polyphonic research experience in the ELT arena. The underlying assumption is that, even nowadays, a myriad of colonial mechanisms still exists, which support certainties that should be put into question under a decolonial perspective. A second purpose of this chapter is to envision how an ideological and subjective decolonial experience would look like in the local ELT. The chapter finishes with a voice of caution to critically embrace some methodological decolonial assumptions related to ELT Education.