Abstract Digital multimodal composing (DMC), which includes digital storytelling and writing, has grown markedly with the increasing use of technology in the second language (L2) classroom. Although much of this research is grounded in sociocultural approaches, recent studies have taken a cognitive interactionist approach to explore how DMC can promote noticing and peer interaction. However, few studies exploring DMC have utilized technology‐mediated task‐based language teaching (TMTBLT) as a methodological and pedagogical framework. Addressing calls by previous scholars to explore multiliteracies with DMC task design, this study qualitatively explores how multimodal generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can support DMC and learners' task engagement. Drawing from a multiliteracies framework, this study examines how 10 upper‐beginning ESL learners used GenAI to generate visuals for meaningful, authentic DMC tasks in which they collaboratively designed artifacts for future students navigating life in Hawaiʻi. Task‐based interactions were recorded and coded for language‐related and prompt‐altering episodes. Additional data sources included chat logs and teacher reflections, which were used for triangulation with the task analysis. Findings suggest that GenAI chatbots can support multilingual learners in fostering critical engagement and enhancing agency in DMC. TMTBLT as a methodological and pedagogical approach promoted learner engagement through GenAI‐assisted DMC.
Abstract College and career readiness has been prominent in educational policy discourses in the United States for the past few decades. However, students classified as English learners (ELs) have rarely factored into these policy considerations and have faced considerable structural and systemic barriers that have limited their educational opportunities. This special issue brings together empirical work that centers ELs in college and career readiness. Importantly, these papers highlight barriers to ELs' college and career readiness and present potential directions for redressing these structural and systemic inequities.
Abstract This study examined how an experienced Thai instructor in a PhD‐level EMI course implemented linguistically responsive instruction (LRI) to support student learning, the rationales behind his practices, and students' perceptions of them. Data from classroom observations and instructor and student interviews were analyzed and interpreted through an LRI lens. The findings suggested that the instructor employed a range of LRI practices to help students meet the epistemic demands of PhD education and develop as competent members of their academic community. Participating students valued these practices and did not perceive them as English language support. Compared to prior LRI‐informed research, which primarily focused on undergraduate settings, the study suggests that LRI at the PhD level may have a broader scope and operate at the course level rather than solely at the lesson level. This study provides empirical support for conceptualizing LRI in higher education, which positions EMI instructors as teachers of both content and disciplinary language and suggests that effective instruction for L2 English‐speaking students in content courses may need to extend beyond general good pedagogical practices to include disciplinary language support. Practical implications for EMI pedagogy, faculty development, and PhD‐level course policy are discussed.
Abstract While providing affordances for digital multimodal composing (DMC), GenAI brings along various ethical concerns. Prior research has discussed algorithmic risks and technology‐related design issues, yet little attention has been paid to how learners collectively perceive and respond to ethical issues. This qualitative case study explored how eight English learners perceived and responded to ethical concerns over a semester of GenAI‐assisted academic poster‐making in a blended learning context. Data from classroom discussions, GenAI logs, and interviews revealed three key dimensions of ethical concerns: legal, social, and pedagogical. Students' ethical concerns progressed from abstract and superficial awareness to contextualized and task‐specific understandings. Their responses to ethical concerns evolved from reactive, individual, vague responses to proactive, collaborative negotiations, and shared responsibility. Cognitive, experiential, and social factors, including metacognitive awareness, practical engagement, and peer collaboration, contributed to the progression. The study sheds light on the evolution of learners' ethical awareness of and responses to GenAI in the DMC context and offers pedagogical implications for guiding responsible GenAI use. Ultimately, it highlights that AI ethics is not only about what learners can do with GenAI but also about what they should do and what kind of responsible person they aspire to be in GenAI‐mediated learning environments.
Abstract English learners (ELs) have high aspirations for postsecondary education, yet many do not complete a college degree, suggesting that they often encounter obstacles to fulfilling their goals in college. To better understand the factors that create barriers to postsecondary success among ELs, this paper draws on data gathered during an 18‐month critical ethnography of 16 ELs and 4 staff members at a community college in upstate New York. Through Bourdieu's framework of cultural capital, findings detail how participants often felt underprepared for both the academic and institutional challenges they encountered at college. Many students also experienced obstacles as they attempted to balance their education with a daunting work schedule. Despite these difficulties, participants leveraged varied forms of nondominant capital as they sought to overcome the obstacles they encountered. This paper calls attention to the resources and assets ELs possess while providing useful insights into institutional arrangements and policies which are needed to ensure that ELs are ready not only for college coursework but are also prepared to navigate the college process.
Abstract Although current pedagogical practices and research recognize that lexical stress errors can affect proficiency scores, they have thus far treated such errors as a single category. This paper explored the impact of various categories of stress errors, as proposed in the English Word Stress Error Gravity Hierarchy (Ghosh & Levis, 2021), on IELTS spoken proficiency. Fifty‐seven L2 speakers completed two communicative tasks and were rated by experienced and trained raters using the IELTS rubric. Speakers' performances were subsequently phonetically analyzed and classified into different categories according to the lack/presence of accompanying vowel changes and the directionality of the stress shift. Results revealed that stress errors with vowel changes were linked to lower proficiency, but categories without vowel changes did not show a statistically significant relationship. Notably, the ratio of impactful stress errors only showed a significant decline with higher proficiency levels, suggesting a hierarchy of importance whereby lexical stress is only apparent once macro‐level features are established. Overall, it is argued that the current representation of lexical stress errors is oversimplified, and a dynamic operationalization of stress errors that considers the interaction between segmental and prosodic properties of stress is needed for an enhanced assessment of proficiency.
Abstract Research on the distributed practice effect, that is the impact of different intervals between learning sessions, has investigated both intentional and incidental learning of second language vocabulary and grammar targets. This research is complex and has produced conflicting findings: whereas robust effects have been shown for intentional vocabulary learning, evidence for incidental and grammar learning are less clear. The present experiment combines intentional vocabulary and incidental grammar targets in L2 English, and compares participants working at 2‐ and 7‐day intervals on an online platform designed to provide contextualized and pedagogically sound learning activities. Results of vocabulary knowledge ( N = 72) and acceptability judgment ( N = 70) tests showed significant vocabulary learning under intentional conditions, but no significant incidental grammar learning. Experimental design and pedagogical implications are discussed.
Abstract Story continuation tasks, which require integrated reading and writing, have been adopted in China's National Matriculation Test in recent years. Most previous research centered on the writing phase yet overlooked the reading of the tasks. The present study explores the features of students' cognitive processes in the reading phase. Eight participants from a senior high school completed the task and participated in think‐aloud protocols as well as semi‐structured interviews. The data were analyzed using a causal network framework. Results revealed that students (i) mainly adopted a problem‐solving approach, (ii) made inferences about character traits and character emotions to maintain character consistency between the source and written texts, and (iii) constructed a causal network in the source text and extended the network in the writing with the purpose of achieving global causal coherence between the given and continuing parts. Comprehension of causal connections influenced alignment of the continued storyline with the source text. The present study revealed the importance of source text reading in the story continuation task and offered insights into the construct of narrative‐based testing tasks.
Abstract This study focuses on 17 in‐service language teachers who graduated from a social justice‐oriented MA program in Teaching Languages to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Teaching Foreign Languages (TFL) at a US higher education institution. Drawing on multiple data sources that connect participants' pre‐service and in‐service experiences, the study provides a longitudinal perspective on how they enacted social justice language education (SJLE) at least 1 year after completing their program. Findings show that participants' understandings of social justice were largely grounded in identity politics, and their social justice pedagogies primarily focused on diversity and inclusion. Their inclusive practices involved recognizing and affirming learners' identities, promoting awareness of cultural and identity‐based differences, and modeling inclusive language use. However, engagement with the politics of redistribution and broader forms of social responsibility—including community involvement, activism, and addressing systemic inequities—was limited. These findings underline the risks of overemphasizing identity‐based inclusion in teacher education programs while overlooking the deeper roots of injustice embedded in capitalism, colonialism, and related systems of power. This paper, overall, argues that the transformative potential of SJLE depends on building critical, community‐based and activist networks that support teachers in moving beyond classroom‐level inclusion toward addressing the systemic conditions that reproduce inequality within and beyond schools.
Abstract Student participation in L2 classroom interaction is paramount in foreign language learning, yet teachers often encounter silence after posing questions. When student contributions are minimal or absent, teachers deploy response‐pursuit practices to maintain pedagogical progressivity. Although there exists a significant amount of research highlighting the importance of response‐pursuit practices, to our best knowledge, there still exists a gap in terms of how and when extended response‐pursuit practices may or may not culminate in student responses. Thus, using multimodal conversation analysis, we aim to bridge this gap by documenting how and to what extent extended response‐pursuit practices may trigger student participation in an EFL listening classroom, a context relatively underexamined from a micro‐analytic perspective. The data consist of 41 hours of video‐recorded EFL classroom interaction in higher education. This study holds significant potential for advancing our understanding of the contingencies of response‐pursuit moves in an L2 listening classroom interaction and provides implications for Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC) and L2 teacher education.
Action research (AR) is a cyclical process where practitioners identify a problem, plan and implement a solution, observe the results, and reflect to improve practices. As AR is inherently geared toward change and improvement, impact becomes central to its significance. Traditionally defined as the influence, effect, measurable contribution, or benefits arising from research, impact can also be seen as the process by which research knowledge benefits recipients. In structuring this handbook around different dimensions of impact, Burns and Dikilitaş show how inquiry within AR is intrinsically impactful for practitioners. This edited collection explores AR's transformative role in language education, where impact is not just a by‐product but an integral part of knowledge construction, sharing, and application. It underscores AR's suitability for creating meaningful impact and highlights the interconnected processes of inquiry, teaching, and learning. The book is divided into five parts, addressing AR's professional, pedagogical, personal, and educational dimensions, and concludes with reflections from teacher‐researchers working in diverse contexts.
Abstract Fluency studies published in TESOL Quarterly have investigated processing aspects of various language skills and knowledge, such as reading, writing, vocabulary, and pragmatics. On the other hand, most of the published works on fluency have examined the temporal, pausing, and repair phenomena in L2 speech and its underlying cognitive mechanisms, which is the focus of the current article. This article overviews fluency studies by looking into their dominant theoretical frameworks (e.g., Segalowitz's triad model of fluency, task‐based language research and Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency [CAF], and usage‐based approach), varied methodological approaches (e.g., interventional, correlational, and descriptive research designs), and pedagogical applications. The article also addresses some of the methodological issues such as the operationalization of utterance fluency measures and correlation between L1 and L2 fluency measures, and future directions by synthesizing the research findings and gaps in the literature.
Abstract This paper examines how Palestinian English teachers (PETs) working at Jewish–Israeli schools navigate trauma in an educational space that both requires and negates them. Driven by labor market demands rather than efforts at educational integration, PETs operate under constant affective and political tension, forced to comply with colonial measures of silencing and surveillance while struggling to assert their dignity as Palestinians, professionalism as educators, and humanity in a securitized space. This situation has intensified since the outbreak of war on Gaza following the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023, reflecting the political persecution and severe crackdowns on freedoms of expression and assembly faced by the general Palestinian public in Israel. In light of escalating repression and silencing, this paper examines how PETs navigate erasure and surveillance while cultivating spaces of love, ethical relations, and political presence in their classrooms by drawing on Stroud's notion of linguistic citizenship and its intersection with love and sumud (Arabic for steadfastness) as Southern decolonial acts. Drawing on interview data with six Palestinian English teachers working at Jewish‐Israeli schools, I illustrate how English language teaching is at the nexus of affective‐discursive trauma shaped by structural conditions of political, existential, and economic subjugation.
Abstract With the rapid integration of digital technologies into second language (L2) learning, unavoidable “hyper cycles” that prioritize novelty over practical application and pedagogical realities necessitate critical re‐consideration of leveraging digital technologies to optimize the theoretical and pedagogical aspects of L2 learning. “Technology and Instructed Second Language Acquisition: Connecting Research and Pedagogy” edited by Shawn Loewen, Frederick J. Poole, Hyun‐Bin Hwang, and Matthew D. Coss provides a timely exploration of how L2 learning can be optimized with technology. This book demonstrates how technology can be systematically, ethically, and sustainably embedded in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). This review critically evaluates the theoretical and practical contributions of this book and its applicability in diverse contexts. The reviewers highlight the strengths of this book in bridging up computer‐assisted language learning (CALL) and ISLA research, offering practical insights for optimizing technology‐mediated L2 learning. Simultaneously, it identifies shortcoming, including the marginalization of learners' voices and limited transferability to under‐resourced pedagogical contexts constrained by teachers' digital literacy levels. Overall, the review suggests that this book is an indispensable contribution to the fields of CALL and ISLA, particularly for L2 teachers, researchers, program leaders, and teacher educators.
