Research on the affective dimensions of multilingual experience has focused predominantly on language anxiety as a measurable individual trait located in the target language and studied through self-report surveys and interviews. These verbal methods capture what students can articulate but not how they materialise emotion through semiotic design, and the embodied, socially produced character of fear and shame across the wider repertoire has received comparatively little attention. This paper addresses both gaps through a multimodal social semiotic analysis of eight language mapping artefacts produced by Year 11 EAL/D students with refugee and migrant backgrounds in a Melbourne secondary school. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual grammar, Busch’s (2017, 2018) lived experience of language, and Ahmed’s (2004) affect theory, it examines how design choices, colour, spatial composition, drawn bodies, and textual-visual orchestration, materialise fear and shame across students’ repertoires. Fear and shame circulate across the whole repertoire, produced wherever linguistic norms are enforced by interlocutors with evaluative authority, and students construct them as spatially distributed, embodied, and repertoire-wide in ways verbal data alone rarely makes visible. The paper extends multimodal social semiotics into the affective domain and demonstrates the value of language mapping for accessing the lived experience of language in education.
Disciplinary literacy has gained more recognition in STEM education as understanding subject is inextricably linked to mastering specialised ways of communicating science to different audiences. In project-based learning (PBL), STEM students must apply such literacies across multiple communicative contexts. However, current pedagogies often prioritise high-stakes academic communication while overlooking the everyday interactional processes through which student disciplinary literacy and identities are developed. This study explores the communicative practices of a group of engineering students during a PBL course in Sweden. Using a linguistic ethnography and case study approach, the study followed the group’s project trajectory, drawing on self-reflection journals, student documents, observations and interviews to examine how these students navigated disciplinary literacy in learning. A mid-course academic failure, a “crisis moment,” served as an analytical entry point to trace shifts in the students’ multilingual and multi-sited communication and identity construction. The findings reveal the students’ communication and identity struggles across academic, workplace, and interpersonal domains were closely interconnected, and that students constructed a “vulnerable student” identity through multilingual and multi-sited communicative practices to navigate institutional uncertainty and access support. The study highlights disciplinary literacy as an interactional, identity-mediated practice and emphasizes the need for STEM education to move beyond text-centric approach to support students’ identity work and communicative competence across contexts.
Negotiation of meaning (NoM) is central to task-based language teaching (TBLT), yet studies of young learners often report strategy frequencies without examining how negotiation unfolds and reorganizes the activity in which it occurs. This study examines NoM across eleven storytelling sessions designed in alignment with TBLT and Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP), with ten second-grade children and four parent facilitators. Analysis of audio and video recordings, artifacts, and field notes proceeded in two connected stages, combining deductive coding of established NoM strategies with sequence-based analysis of task demand, local trigger, uptake, reconstruction, and consequence. Children drew on a stable repertoire of strategies across both phases, yet the same moves varied in interactional consequence with task modality. In traditional storytelling, negotiation made narrative meaning, form, and the legitimacy of a contribution publicly accountable in talk that then dissolved. In digital storytelling, the same moves settled how meanings could be built in materials and fixed them in a durable artifact, where coherence and authorship became open to negotiation. Building on the established account of NoM as communicative repair, the study broadens the analytic scope to what negotiation reorganizes within the activity, an emphasis captured by treating NoM as task-mediated reconstruction, with task modality bearing on what children negotiate and what their negotiation leaves behind.
In this article, we explore how international students from diverse linguistic, racialized, and educational backgrounds at a U.S. university make sense of race and language and how these understandings shape their communication practices across academic and social spaces. Drawing from qualitative data collected as part of a larger project, we analyze interviews with 24 international students enrolled at a predominantly white, research-intensive U.S. institution, whose reasons for studying in the U.S. and anticipated trajectories vary. Thematic analysis suggests that participants frequently oriented to dominant ideologies that associate whiteness with linguistic legitimacy, developed raciolinguistic subjectivities shaped by transnational experiences, and described self-othering practices such as accent modification, social distancing, and strategic silence in efforts to navigate dominant linguistic norms. These language practices reflect not only responses to external marginalization but also the emotional and ideological labor of navigating deeply embedded norms. By centering the voices of international students, this study contributes a transnational lens to raciolinguistic scholarship, highlighting how raciolinguistic ideologies are interpreted, negotiated, and reproduced across diverse geopolitical and educational contexts.
Language instruction extends well beyond the simple conveyance of grammatical principles. Through it, states cultivate their self-image and affirm their status within the international order; language instruction, in this sense, functions as an instrument of statecraft. Türkiye serves as a notable illustration in this context. Over the course of roughly two decades, Türkiye's cultural diplomacy has transitioned from an “EU-centered integration” goal to a paradigm of “strategic autonomy.” This paper examines how that transition has shaped Turkish teaching materials at the C1 level. The study utilizes a specialized dataset of approximately 86,000 tokens, integrating Multimodal Analysis and Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis to compare C1-level textbooks produced by Türkiye's principal cultural diplomacy organizations: the Yunus Emre Institute (YEI) and the Türkiye Maarif Foundation (TMV). The findings point to a conceptual divergence between the two corpora. In the YEI corpus, Europe serves as an implicit reference point, while the student is largely positioned as a consumer within the global market. The TMV corpus, by contrast, articulates a different geopolitical outlook: it foregrounds technology, production, digitalisation and migration, and frames the student as a “techno-nationalist” producer rather than a consumer. The divergence, however, is carried by theme rather than by geography: place-names are if anything denser in the YEI corpus, so what sets TMV apart is the producer and migration axis. The visual evidence reinforces this pattern. Sites of production and ideals of community replace the “tourist gaze” and consumption spaces that characterize YEI. The paper argues that textbooks can be read as instruments of national identity construction that reshape “mental maps” alongside shifts in Türkiye’s foreign policy discourse. Keyness (log-likelihood) analysis locates this divergence not in geographic vocabulary, which is comparable across the two books, but in a dense and statistically robust cluster of technology, production, digitalisation and migration terms that distinguishes the 2023 TMV corpus (all p < .001). A page-level analysis of the images shows the same split, while a civilisational and Silk-Road vocabulary turns out to be heavier in the 2015 YEI volume.
In Ghana, postcolonial early-childhood language-in-education policies supported by international donor funding exclude Safaliba—an understudied Indigenous language spoken in the rural Savannah region—and subordinate its speakers to Gonja, the officially funded regional language. This critical ethnography examines Safaliba teacher-activism as decolonial resistance to linguistic marginalization and erasure within public schooling, focusing on the material-discursive strategies through which activists intervene in policy, classroom instruction, and classroom materials development. It also investigates how everyday classroom literacy practices, understood through Barad’s framework of intra-action, reconfigure what counts as language, literacy, and legitimate knowledge in school. The study employs critical ethnographic methods triangulating field notes on classroom instruction, conversations with elders, observations of ancestral communication practices, and audio-recorded activist meetings, analyzed through critical discourse analysis and theory. Findings show that Safaliba resistance is adaptive, iterative, and serpentine—working within schooling through translanguaging, bilingual Safaliba–English book production, innovative orthographic practices, and proposed integration of song and local Safaliba cosmological knowledge into Safaliba language instruction. These practices function as agential cuts that redraw boundaries of school legitimacy by reshaping who can be authorized as knowers (including children, elders, and ancestors), which semiotic modes carry curricular authority, and what constitutes legitimate literacy for Safaliba activists. Rather than simply opposing the postcolonial regime, activists “Safalibanize” classroom life from within, demonstrating decolonial practice as ongoing intra-actions that continually remake the conditions under which linguistic erasure is produced.
In U.S. higher education, who is most exposed to linguistic discrimination, students from lower-class backgrounds, or students positioned as transnationally mobile? Drawing on raciolinguistic ideologies as the primary analytic lens and Bourdieusian linguistic capital theory as a competing prediction, we use a mixed-methods design combining logistic regression models with thematic analysis of open-text discrimination descriptions from 1434 students at a large U.S. public research university. Contrary to the Bourdieusian prediction, first-generation status, low income, and Pell Grant eligibility are imprecise predictors of both experienced and witnessed linguistic bias. International student status is instead the dominant predictor of experienced bias, while multilingual status is the strongest linguistic predictor of witnessed bias. The institutional settings where bias occurs differ by outcome. Social events are the primary site of experienced bias, while classrooms dominate for witnessed bias. Thematic analysis of 220 open-text responses reveals that accent mockery, differential treatment by authority figures, language-based social exclusion, and overt linguistic policing are the primary mechanisms through which linguistic discrimination operates, with Chinese/Mandarin-speaking and East Asian students most frequently identified as targets. These findings indicate that linguistic discrimination in U.S. higher education is structured by raciolinguistic ideologies targeting transnational mobility rather than by domestic class hierarchies; the operative axis of targeting differs across racial groups, with neo-racism best fitting the Asian-identified pattern and domestic raciolinguistic ideologies better fitting the Hispanic-identified pattern, where racial-categorical effects persist even with international student status controlled.
Teacher Language Awareness (TLA) is an essential component of effective language teaching and enables teachers to make informed decisions about language instruction. This systematic review aims to evaluate the state of research on TLA, considering the current area of focus, and outline gaps that should be explored in future studies. Following PRISMA guidelines, major journals and databases were searched, and 58 empirical research studies were selected for analysis. The methodological aspects, theoretical frameworks, and major findings of these studies were analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings revealed a significant increase in research on TLA, with a rise in investigations over the past two decades. Qualitative research methods were most commonly used in TLA studies, with a focus on English language instruction. The findings showed that TLA has a significant impact on teachers’ instructional practices and interactions with students. Moreover, TLA encompasses an understanding of the cultural and social dimensions of language, including its role in reflecting and perpetuating societal inequalities. Professional development programs and training can foster the development of TLA, thereby enhancing the quality of instruction, enabling teachers to cater to the linguistic needs of their students, and continuously helping them increase their own language knowledge and skills.
In response to the global spread of English, China has promoted a competence–based agenda in English curricula to cultivate students who will become well–rounded, adaptive and inclusive on the international stage. This study examines the ideological negotiations of two preservice English teachers in a rapidly developing public school in a suburban area of Beijing. Drawing on language ideologies and dialogic theory (Bakhtin, 1981), we investigated how the participants navigated through the conflict between holistic competence and high–stakes examination ideologies around language learning standards and objectives while pursuing equalizing and transformative educational opportunities. Analysis of individual interviews, field observations and written documents underscored the multi–voiced and precarious nature of the preservice teachers’ ideological stances, emergent within the complex demographics, accountability measures and restrictive policies regarding school tracking and employment practices at the study site. This study highlights the use of dialogism to support teachers as agents of change and advocacy in transforming and contested educational contexts.
Paraphrasing English manuscripts is a demanding task that requires high academic standards. To achieve this, many non-native English speakers seek assistance from English professionals who act as literacy brokers (LBs). This study investigates LBs' paraphrasing strategies. We analyzed the paraphrasing practices of eleven Iranian EFL teachers functioning as LBs across forty-five manuscripts from various disciplines that required substantial paraphrasing. Drawing on insights from Sun and Yang's (2015) paraphrasing strategy frameworks, we compared the authors' drafts with brokers' paraphrased versions and developed a seven-category taxonomy consisting of substitution, expanding, condensing, reordering, combining, separating, and citing changes. The findings revealed that using synonyms as a lexical substitution and reordering were the most commonly used paraphrasing strategies. Additionally, this study found that the introduction and discussion were the most requested sections for re-paraphrasing, containing the highest frequency of paraphrasing strategies. Beyond identifying these patterns, the findings suggest that broker-mediated paraphrasing primarily functions as a form of textual mediation shaped by publication-oriented concerns, particularly textual similarity reduction and linguistic acceptability. By foregrounding literacy brokers as providers of linguistic mediation rather than disciplinary co-authors, the study advances a conceptual distinction between surface-level and deeper forms of paraphrasing in ERPP contexts. In doing so, it reconceptualizes broker-mediated paraphrasing as a role-conditioned and institutionally situated practice shaped by publication-oriented demands.
Using Conversation Analysis, this paper examines how instructions for embodied exercises are constructed in a non-professional theatre rehearsal and an online improvisation workshop. We analyse how the leaders in both settings orient to the spatiomaterial environment when delivering the instructions and demonstrating the exercises. Thus, we aim at identifying the spatiomaterial affordances and constraints for instructing embodied exercises in each setting. In the rehearsal hall, the leader flexibly used affordances provided by the spatiomaterial environment. The instructive turns were designed to be immediately followable, and the leader’s movement, in combination with her verbal conduct, made the spatial targets projectable, enabling the participants to align movement trajectories. In the virtual setting, the instruction sequences were segmented as successive actions. The leader demonstrated the exercise while the participants were watching, and used verbal directives to mark the starting and ending points of the participants’ turn to perform the exercise. The leader anchored the instructional activity to the visually available screen, the location of which was inevitably known to the participants. When his embodied actions oriented away from the screen, he used declaratives to frame his embodied actions as part of the pedagogical activity. Across both settings, the leaders tailored the instructions of the embodied exercises to the participants’ embodied positioning and their shared visual access, thereby building on situationally shared contingencies of the spatiomaterial ecology.
The "(non)native speaker" dichotomy is not merely a linguistic classification but an ideological construct that shapes pedagogical authority, cognitive worth, and professional opportunities in language education. Despite decades of critique, its persistence in academic literature continues to shape and, often, limit the perceived identities and professional participation of learners and educators. This corpus-based critical discourse analysis of 594 journal articles investigates how "(non)native speaker" labels are employed in contemporary research. Integrating quantitative corpus techniques-including collocation analysis, frequency distributions, dispersion patterns, and document-level framework tracking-with qualitative concordance interpretation informed by Fairclough's (2003) dialectical-relational framework, we reveal: (1) a pervasive, uncritical retention of these labels, which are naturalized through genre conventions and often lack operational definitions; (2) the emergent recontextualization of "(non)native speaker" as a contested term, signalling a growing disciplinary unease; and (3) a fundamental contradiction between researchers' critical stances and their actual language practices. We argue that this persistence is rooted in institutional norms that privilege dichotomous categories, creating a trade-off between communicative convenience and terminological precision. The scarcity and limited uptake of robust alternative frameworks means that even critical scholarship often inadvertently reinforces the very paradigm it seeks to dismantle. This study contributes to disrupting monolingual ideologies by demonstrating how scholarly discourse itself becomes a site of ideological reproduction, and it advocates for urgent terminological reform and contextually grounded frameworks to advance equity in language education.
In conflict-ridden postcolonial nation states, policymakers have instituted programs to teach students the language of the other ethnic group(s). Over the past two decades, the Sri Lankan government has sought to promote peace and national integration with its Official Languages Policy, which declares Sinhala and Tamil to be official languages and English a link language. The Official Languages Commission implemented programs to teach public servants the other official language, Sinhala to Tamil speakers and Tamil to Sinhala speakers. This article incorporates long-term ethnographic research (2007-2023) in Sri Lanka to examine how the government's efforts to create a Tamil-as-a-second-language (TSL) curriculum has engaged and challenged hierarchies among different Tamil-speaking groups amid the demographic, political, and institutional shifts of the civil war and post-civil war periods. I combine the analysis of three TSL textbooks/curricula, participant observation of TSL courses, and interviews with TSL teachers, public servants, and Tamil language experts regarding the curriculum and which spoken varieties should be incorporated in it. I argue that this project has prompted language planners and educators to reevaluate Tamil sociolinguistic differences and hierarchies from different scalar perspectives and, by doing so, reimagine Sri Lankan Tamil linguistic identity.
This study investigates how teachers' linguistic choices discursively position ethnic minority students and mediate their access to learning opportunities. Drawing on systematic discourse analysis of 730 min of classroom observations and interviews in a Chinese ethnic minority preparatory program, we examine mechanisms through which language constitutes-rather than merely reflects-participation access. Analysis of 310 pronoun instances and 46 teacher questions reveals four discourse mechanisms-pronoun selection, meta-pragmatic framing, temporal deixis, and question design-that systematically constitute students' participation access. Boundary-marking (sic)(sic) appeared 66 times, with 82% co-occurring with deficit-oriented content, demonstrating how automatized linguistic choices constrain learning opportunities beneath teachers' conscious awareness. Longitudinal retrospective data from one student, corroborated by cross-sectional comparison, suggests that identical discourse strategies yield differential positioning effects depending on students' cultural-linguistic distance and proficiency development-for instance, explicit heritage validation may support high-distance students at early stages while being experienced as othering by low-distance students. Students evaluate teacher authenticity not through inferred emotional states but through observable discourse features: longitudinal consistency in cultural knowledge retention, complexity calibration matched to developmental stage, and paralinguistic-semantic alignment. These findings operationalize "cultural responsiveness" as concrete, teachable discourse competencies-pronoun sensitivity, meta-pragmatic awareness, question design, and complexity calibration-amenable to systematic measurement and pedagogical training, providing an empirically grounded framework for teacher preparation in multilingual educational contexts.
Integrating the Douglas Fir Group's (2016) multilayered complexity and Green et al.'s (2020) positioning continuum, this study builds upon Darvin and Norton's (2015) model of investment to develop a multilayered positioning framework of investment. Foregrounding positioning as a fine-grained analytical concept, the framework enables us to holistically examine the multilayered discursive processes of identity construction by investigating how positionings co-occur, interact, and mutually constitute one another across micro, meso, and macro levels, in ways that may align, compete, or contradict. It further allows for the examination of positioning along an agentive-structural continuum in diverse social contexts, while highlighting the context-dependent and fluid boundaries between layers that dynamically shape learners' identities and investment. Applying the proposed framework to two South Korean students' narratives of childhood migration to China and Chinese learning in local primary schools, the study traces how positions interact and shift across contexts, revealing the multilayered interplay and temporal unfolding of identity construction. The analysis further demonstrates how both learners drew on different forms of accessible capital, including athletic skills, L1 peer support, multilingual competence, and academic achievement, to secure empowering micro- and meso-level positions. These positions enabled them to counteract the disadvantages imposed by macro-level positions, facilitating their investment in Chinese language learning and fostering a more equitable environment for identity construction.
Learners’ civic engagement has increasingly been acknowledged as an important component of language curricula, especially in second/foreign language learning contexts. While digital multimodal composing (DMC) has been shown to provide opportunities for learners to engage with issues of public concern, relatively little research has examined how civic engagement is semiotically enacted and made communicable to audiences in multimodal texts. To address this gap, this study examines how six Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) undergraduates enacted civic engagement through English-language video projects on indigenous language preservation. Systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SFMDA) was applied to investigate the multimodal realisation of civic engagement across three meta-functions. Data included six student-authored videos and video-stimulated recall interviews, allowing triangulation between multimodal design practices and learners’ design rationales. Findings show that in their videos, students framed indigenous language preservation as a public issue with global significance, evoked the audience’s empathy, proposed solutions, and delivered knowledge about indigenous languages to a broader audience, via an intentional and creative orchestration of multimodal resources. This study further reports learners’ orchestration practices of multiple semiotic resources for communicating their civic engagement within the meta-functional construct. SFMDA is argued to be a useful approach for understanding students’ civic engagement in multimodal texts. Pedagogical implications are provided for integrating DMC into second- or foreign-language learning classrooms to enhance the civic engagement of multilingual learners.
This study investigates how English medium instruction (EMI) is conceptualised, organised, and implemented at national, institutional, and classroom levels. Drawing on a multi-level, multi-dimensional policy framework, we examine Bangladesh as the macro-level context and focus on one university and its classrooms as meso- and micro-level cases. The study utilised multiple data sources, including policy documents, interviews, classroom observations, and stimulated recall. Across the levels of policy implementation, the findings point to three common ideological drivers: employability, internationalisation, and English proficiency as capital. In terms of language management, bilingualism is encouraged in national policy documents and by macro-level actors, although it remains largely symbolic. At the meso level, institutional actors translate national goals into English-dominant policies through their recruitment preferences, English-only requirements, and admissions thresholds. At the micro level, however, teachers intentionally employ translanguaging to support student learning, thereby counterbalancing the top-down emphasis on English. These discrepancies highlight EMI as an ongoing, negotiated process. By foregrounding teachers’ translanguaging as a principled form of policy enactment rather than a deviation from policy, the study offers practical guidance for national authorities and universities seeking to develop EMI models that are both pedagogically sound and equitable.
This article examines the emergent complexities of understanding in bilingual workshops, and focuses on procedural instructions. The study participants were children from Finnish- and Swedish-speaking primary school classes, and their workshop facilitators. Our data comprised video-recordings of workshops in which the facilitators instructed various types of embodied activities in both Finnish and Swedish. Using conversation analysis, we demonstrate how the bilingual delivery of instructions complicates understanding, and analyze how the emergent trajectories of trouble are managed in the unfolding interaction. Our findings reveal that when instructions were delivered bilingually by two facilitators who translated each other’s instructive turns, the division of labor between them required seamless collaboration and was prone to sequential disruptions and complicated recipient design. In cases of emergent displays of trouble, the facilitators aimed to resume their collaborative project of bilingual instruction. When one facilitator alternated between both languages while delivering their instructions, the emergent display of trouble was solved by focusing on the embodied instructed activity. Our results suggest that although the aim of the bilingual instruction was to address issues of understanding, it also functioned as a source of trouble. Overall, the findings illustrate that in multilingual, multiparty educational contexts, monitoring the projects and receptivity of other participants is a complex task.
This article examines how Cypriot Greek is positioned at the interface of curriculum policy, classroom practice, and language ideologies in UK Greek complementary schools (GCSs). Drawing on ethnographic data collected over six months in 2018 in two North London GCSs, we analyse (a) curriculum documents produced for Greek complementary schools, (b) classroom interactions, and (c) pupil perspectives from one case-study school. The curricula formally acknowledge Cypriot Greek but frame it in limited and bounded ways. Standard Greek is constructed as the legitimate target for literacy, while Cypriot Greek is treated as permissible mainly in oral communication and often linked to cultural tradition. Classroom data show how these policy framings are recontextualised in teaching and learning, particularly in moments where exam-related expectations are made salient. The teacher's practices reproduce a literacy-oracy binary and discourage the use of Cypriot Greek in writing, while pupils display uncertainty about what is allowed and orient to assessment as a key rationale for avoiding Cypriot forms. We argue that, although flexible multilingual practices also occur in everyday interaction, exam-thematised episodes make visible how assessment regimes can intensify standardising pressures that are rooted in broader hellenocentric hierarchies and in limited institutional support for repertoire-based pedagogies. We conclude by calling for more systematic curricular guidance, materials, and teacher education that legitimise pupils' full repertoires and support metalinguistic work across varieties in home, heritage and community language education.
Class-time is marked by planned schedules designed and managed by schools and their teachers to promote student learning and development. Clear and managed structure throughout the school day is implemented to create a positive learning environment. Transitional spaces within this structure can be less predictable than lesson-time. For children with disabilities, these spaces can be stressful or anxiety inducing. Order in the classroom is achieved through the dynamic intersections between student and teacher agency in social actions or interactional moves. Registering is a pervasive action in conversation, and has particular relevance in the classroom. This umbrella term describes an initiating action characterised by drawing mutual attention to a publicly perceptible referent. In studies of classroom transitional spaces, registering is frequently evident but not specifically explored. This study explores 89 instances of registering in the classroom, within 4.6 hours of video recordings in a special education primary school. Instances were analysed with a conversation analysis approach focussing on the co-construction of transitional spaces. Students displayed agency in registering during lesson-time and transitional spaces with peers and staff. Teachers promoted lesson related registering, restricted non-related registering and relaxed restrictions in transitional spaces. Teacher and student registering of expected behaviours contributed to the shaping of classroom conduct through student self-regulation. Registering actions in transitional spaces are resources for managing participation, and are used by both students and teachers. Transitional spaces provide insight into the continuous interactional achievement and negotiation of classroom schedules.
