Books for English Language Teachers: Our 2026 Summer Reading List for TESOL & ELT Educators
- The Teacher Think-Aloud Podcast
- Jun 14
- 5 min read
It's that time of year again! We're back with our second annual summer reading list, and we'll save you the suspense: no, we still haven't learned to pick beach reads 😅 This year's list leans a little heavier into nonfiction, memoir, and "idea" books, which feels right for where we are. The world is a lot right now, and we've been reaching for books that help us make sense of it.
While we do have a few fun picks at the end of this list, we’re focusing this year on reflecting on the world around us. If you're into books that challenge how you see the world, your teaching, and yourself, read on.
We talk through all nine books for English language teachers in Episode 85 of The Teacher Think-Aloud Podcast, including what drew us to each book and the ELT connections we keep coming back to. Here's the short version.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Everyone's been reading this one for years — Anna finally picked it up this year, and it delivered. Zauner's memoir about losing her Korean mother to cancer is also a book about losing your most direct connection to a heritage culture. Grief and identity are completely intertwined here, and it's more emotionally precise than you might expect from a debut book by a musician.
Classroom connection: Personal narrative writing, the immigrant experience, food and memory as cultural touchstones.
My Broken Language by Quiara Alegría Hudes
A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright grows up in Philadelphia's Barrio with a Puerto Rican mother and a Jewish father and spends her time moving between Spanglish and English, prayer circles and Ivy League theater. The "broken language" of the title isn't a deficiency; it's the hybrid tongue she had to build because no single existing language could hold her full experience. For anyone in language education, that argument is worth sitting with.
Classroom connection: Code-switching, multilingual identity, and what it means when students' real communicative lives don't map onto the language we're teaching. Want to dig deeper? Check out our Episode 81 - The Monolingual Bias: Advocacy for English Language Teachers with Dr. Lillian Ardell.
How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr
The U.S. history most of us weren't taught: military bases, exploited territories, the Philippine-American War, and the random islands acquired just for bird poop-based fertilizer. Immerwahr argues the U.S. has long functioned as an empire well beyond its 50 states, and the case he builds is hard to put down and harder to unknow.
Classroom connection: Essential context for educators thinking about positionality, power, and what it means to teach across borders.
Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami
Lalami holds the passport, speaks the language, has the credentials, and still gets treated like a guest who might overstay her welcome. Using her own story alongside history, law, and cultural criticism, she makes the case that for many people in the U.S., belonging isn't a status; it's a performance, constantly under review.
Classroom connection: Conversations around belonging, citizenship, and the limits of language acquisition as a path to full participation. Pairs well with Episode 66 - “Being a native speaker isn’t a qualification” with Meri Maroutian on native speakerism and accent bias.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
A love story set in a nameless war-torn country, with a magical realist twist: doors that transport people across borders. What Hamid builds around that conceit is one of the most humane explorations of displacement in recent fiction, including a quietly beautiful vignette about two elderly men from different countries who find connection without a shared language.
Classroom connection: Migration, empathy, and the geopolitics of belonging with enough fictional distance to open up honest conversation.
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz
A journalist traces the history and psychology of error, our deep attachment to being right and our conviction that certainty equals competence. Schulz's central insight: the experience of being wrong feels exactly like the experience of being right. You don't know you've run off the cliff until you look down. Shé first found this through Schulz's TED Talk 15 years ago and ordered the book halfway through. It's been on her recommended list ever since.
Classroom connection: A reframe for how we think about error correction and intellectual humility, in our students and in ourselves.
How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists by Ellen Hendriksen
A clinical psychologist takes the inner critic seriously — acknowledges that it developed for a reason, that it's probably made you good at your job — and then gives you tools to talk back to it. This pairs beautifully with Being Wrong: the fear of being wrong and the fear of not being enough are basically the same thing wearing different outfits.
Classroom connection: The book worth handing new teachers, or bringing into any PD conversation about perfectionism and self-doubt.
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Set in a near-future California that has seceded from the U.S., this novel follows a group of sentient robots who get abandoned by their owners and decide to open their own restaurant. It sounds silly (and it is, a little) but Newitz uses the setup to tackle gender, trauma, labor rights, and whether robots deserve autonomy with real wit and warmth. It's not high literature, but it's a genuinely fun read.
Classroom connection: Rich debate material on rights, identity, and personhood—and because it's robots, not a specific cultural group, every student has room to engage.
The Humans by Matt Haig
An alien inhabits the body of a Cambridge mathematician and arrives completely disgusted by all things human: our appearance, our food, our capacity for violence. But over time, through wine and poetry and peanut butter, he starts to see something worth protecting in human imperfection. He becomes human not by mastering rules, but through vulnerability, confusion, and connection. A heartfelt and delightful little read!
Classroom connection: The alien is the ultimate language learner: technically knows the words, completely lost on the pragmatics. A funny, moving argument for imperfection as the actual condition of belonging.
Every book on this list reminded us, in some way, that being human is complicated work… and so is teaching humans. We're shaped by the empires we inherit, the languages we're told are broken, the inner critics we can't quite silence. If that's true for us, it's true for every student who walks into our classrooms. Reading widely is one of the best ways we know to stay humble, and we hope you’ll join us on this path to better listening and care for ourselves and others.
Listen to the full episode for the conversation, the thematic connections between picks, and a few reflective questions to take into your summer.
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AI Statement: AI was used to generate an outline for this article based on episode content from The Teacher Think-Aloud Podcast. A human author then revised the outline and fleshed out the paragraph content.
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