As the open science movement has gained momentum and the emphasis on study quality has increased in applied linguistics, transparency has become both a methodological necessity and an ethical imperative across the field. However, systematic evaluations of transparency in applied linguistics remain limited. Drawing on previous synthetic work, this systematic review examined the transparency practices in quantitative second language (L2) (quasi-)experimental research being carried out in China. We coded 393 studies drawn from 330 peer-reviewed articles published between 2020 and 2024 in 19 major applied linguistics journals for 108 indicators of transparency. These features spanned the entire research cycle, from the formulation of research questions to the documentation of participants, experimental manipulations, measurement procedures, data collection and analysis, and results reporting. The findings revealed both strengths and persistent limitations across these domains. We conclude by discussing the implications for enhancing transparency within the context of Chinese L2 research and in the broader discipline of applied linguistics, and by providing recommendations for multiple groups of stakeholders.
ABSTRACT This commentary proposes AI for Applied Linguistics, hereafter AI4AL, as a framework for studying how artificial intelligence is changing language use, language learning and applied linguistic inquiry. Rather than treating AI primarily as a tool for automation, we argue that applied linguistics should examine AI through four connected lines of work. These are AI as a research instrument, AI as an object of applied linguistic inquiry, AI as a site of conceptual renewal and AI as a problem of pedagogy, policy and social justice. We ground this framework in applied linguistics’ long‐standing concern with language as situated social practice, while recognising that contemporary AI systems now participate in writing, translation, feedback, assessment, interaction and knowledge production. The commentary clarifies the scope of AI by distinguishing between predictive, classificatory, assistive and generative systems, with particular attention to the conceptual significance of generative AI. It then develops four domains of inquiry in writing and literacy, genre and discourse, pragmatics and interaction and multilingualism and inequality. AI4AL is presented as a disciplinary agenda through which applied linguistics can study, evaluate and shape AI‐mediated communication.
Recent studies exploring mixed heritage language (HL) and second language (L2) classes have documented how these classes tend to prioritize the needs of L2 students while positioning HL students' linguistic knowledge as a resource for their L2 peers. While pedagogical solutions have been suggested to address these tensions, less attention has been paid to the broader structural forces shaping these dynamics. This article engages with theorizations of racial capitalism and neoliberalism in education to shift the focus toward how these inequities are produced and sustained. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with four HL students and three L2 students contextualized through classroom observations in a university-level Arabic world language course, I argue that this course, and world language education more broadly, function as a site for the extractivism of linguistic capital from racialized HL students. These extractivist logics are enacted through questioning racialized students' right to learn their home language and assigning them roles of racialized labor in the classroom. These dynamics contribute to what I term a raciolinguistic ceiling effect, a condition in which systemic processes and instructional practices prevent racialized students from advancing their language proficiency beyond their White L2 peers. The findings offer insights to reframe how the relational tensions and inequitable learning dynamics in mixed HL-L2 classes are understood, theorized, and addressed.
This study examined how online writing behaviors aggregated at the pair level were related to writing outcomes in computer-assisted collaborative writing and how task complexity moderated these relationships. The participants were 56 Chinese university students with advanced English proficiency. They were randomly organized into 28 pairs. Each pair performed two versions of a reading-to-write task in a face-to-face collaborative writing setting using Google Docs. Task complexity was manipulated as whether there was a clear text structure to follow when writing a summary. The simple task version involved summarizing a complete text, whereas the complex task version required summarizing information from three separate texts. Each participant's online writing behaviors recorded by the keystroke logging software were coded for speed fluency, pause length and frequency, and revision frequency. Individual data were then aggregated as pairs' writing behaviors. Pairs' writing products were assessed for linguistic quality and text quality. Linear mixed-effects regression analyses identified that, longer P-bursts, shorter pauses between sentences, and more frequent pre-contextual revisions were associated with improved text features in some respects. Task complexity played a small but non-negligible role in the relationship between between-sub-sentence pause frequency and contextual revision frequency, and certain text characteristics. These results highlighted the diverse nature of the relationship between pairs' online writing behaviors and writing products in collaborative writing of tasks with varying complexity.
Informed by third space theory, this study examines how Chinese characters are visually reinterpreted and combined with cultural references in the drawings produced by French secondary school students through participation in Dessine le chinois! (Draw the Chinese Character!), an annual drawing competition held as part of the Chinese Characters Festival in France. A total of 452 student submissions from the 2022 competition were analyzed using an analytical framework focusing on (a) modes of Chinese character presentation, (b) cultural hybridity, and (c) individual variation and creative expression. The findings suggest that learners engage with Chinese characters not only as orthographic symbols but also as visual-semantic resources within multimodal compositions. The artworks reveal two primary representational strategies-standard form preservation and structural transformation-through which characters are integrated into broader visual scenes. Across the dataset, the artworks combine character forms with diverse cultural references and display recurring patterns in visual configuration. Building on these findings, the study suggests that extracurricular multimodal cultural activities may provide productive contexts for learners to explore Chinese characters as visual-semantic symbols and to engage in intercultural meaning-making through creative visual expression.
Although school-based mentors perform core language teacher educator functions, such as modelling pedagogy, scaffolding professional learning, and mediating between theory and practice, they remain largely absent from the literature on language teacher educator identity. This study examines how 11 foreign language teacher mentors (English, Spanish, and French) in the second phase of German teacher education (Vorbereitungsdienst) conceptualize their work and position themselves within school-based and broader institutional contexts. Using narrative-episodic interviews analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis and positioning theory, the study identifies four interconnected positioning patterns. Mentors "slide into" their role through structural necessity rather than a deliberate professional transition, enacting language teacher educator identities before claiming them. They position themselves as pedagogical guides who make tacit knowledge visible, while constructing mentoring as a reciprocal learning relationship. Their personal pedagogies function as an implicit curriculum. Finally, mentors occupy a structurally liminal position-pedagogically central but institutionally marginal-from which they exercise what is termed "liminal agency". This study contributes to research on language teacher educator identity by extending existing frameworks beyond formal teacher education settings. It also highlights the hidden curriculum operating in the gap between institutional instruction and school-based mentoring practice.
Language teachers in marketized educational contexts face identity tensions that generate sustained motivational struggles, yet how teachers monitor and regulate motivation through the cognitive-emotional dialectic (perezhivanie) remains undertheorized. This qualitative multiple-case study examined the identity tensions that 11 language teachers in Chinese private vocational colleges experienced and how perezhivanie refracted these tensions to shape metamotivational responses within their social situations of development. Data from semi-structured interviews, field observations, and informal interactions were thematically analyzed, revealing four interconnected identity tensions: college teacher vs. corporate employee; language educator vs. skill-oriented trainer; novice researcher vs. teaching-intensive instructor; and contingent faculty vs. career professional. Teachers' perezhivanie refracted structural conditions into cognitive-emotional unities, shaping divergent metamotivational responses that unfolded from internal adjustment through boundary management to career reorientation, with relational-buffering seeking across all stages. The study reconceptualizes teacher metamotivation as identity work, extends metamotivation toward socioculturally embedded processes grounded in the cognitive-emotional dialectic, and foregrounds the social situation of development for understanding how structural contradictions become psychologically real. The findings call for structural support for marginalized language educators rather than reliance on individual resilience.
This paper examines how children's affective investments in K-pop generated sustained multilingual literacy practices in an arts-based bookmaking project. Drawing on Pennycook's concept of language assemblages and Norton's investment framework, and informed by Paris and Alim's distinction between heritage and community practices, we analyse what happened when children from diverse backgrounds, none with Korean heritage, began incorporating Korean words, scripts, and cultural references into their writing. Twenty children aged 9-11 participated in a 7-week bookmaking project at a Melbourne primary school. Data include children's multimodal artefacts, field notes and interviews. Findings reveal that K-pop fandom constituted symbolic capital within peer networks, driving engagement with Korean language that conventional frameworks struggle to explain. What emerged was not language acquisition in any conventional sense but assemblages of affect, media, peer culture and pedagogical recognition. The pedagogical move enabling this was recognition and extension rather than instruction. We argue that affective investment generates sustained literacy practice that skills-based assessment cannot see or value, and that creating conditions for children's desires to become visible, rather than designing exclusively toward predetermined outcomes, opens space for meaningful literacy engagement.
This study revisited the commonly held view that the use of multiword sequences (MWSs) is a reliable predictor of L2 speaking proficiency in monologue, by extending the investigation from monologic to dialogic speaking contexts. We accessed dialogic performance data from 127 test-takers of the Test of English for Educational Purposes assessed at six different proficiency levels. The use of bigrams and trigrams was measured in terms of proportion, frequency, and association of strength. Results showed that none of the n-gram measures were associated with levels of speaking proficiency. When analysing pair-level use of MWSs, the results of a linear mixed-effects modeling suggested that pair-level effects explained about 40% and 30% of the total variance for bigram and trigram proportion, respectively. Follow-up analyses revealed that lower-proficiency speakers in a nationality-matched pair tended to produce a greater proportion of bigrams and trigrams than those in a nationality-unmatched pair. These findings challenge the central role of MWSs documented in monologic task performance and suggest a complex interplay of phraseological competence and speaking performance when dialogic processing is considered.
Language pedagogy activity (LPA) is central to the functioning of language classrooms worldwide, and this article (re)defines LPA. While prevailing applied linguistics conceptualizations of "activity" are often theoretical and anthropocentric, our definition of LPA is empirically supported and foregrounds material agency. This new definition of LPA is needed to investigate how varied language teaching materials (e.g., textbooks and teacher resources) affect language classroom interaction, often unpredictably. To achieve such an understanding of language pedagogy activity and materials, we deployed a multi-method research design, including multimodal analysis of classroom interactions from a national study of U.S. Spanish language classes. This article's main disciplinary contribution is defining LPA as: a sociomaterial assemblage of language teaching happening(s), which is semi-bounded and involves one or more language learners. Close analyses of LPA examples illustrate this. Example 1 elucidates activity-as-assemblage, with example assemblages of task, pedagogical materials, and classroomscape. Example 2 deconstructs activity-as-happening-meaning, occurrences and language pedagogy events shaped by material, distributed, and human forms of agency. Example 3 explores the complex boundaries of an LPA. We draw on constructs from our new definition of LPA to examine how the language teaching materials shaped these example activities and classroom interactions in unpredictable ways.
