Foregrounded in the work of Elizabeth Povinelli and drawing on semiotic theory, translanguaging and play-based learning pedagogies, this article presents findings from a critical participatory action research project conducted in an early years classroom in a remote Aboriginal community school in Western Australia. It describes how two educators, from both non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal backgrounds, collaborated to create spaces for the children in their classroom to engage deeply with their land, language and culture through intentional, purposeful and planned play, specifically Playworld Translanguaging. Findings are presented as a narrative account of one child's meaning-making practices in collaboration with their teachers and peers, focusing on how they co-created shared spaces for play, co-developed semiotic resources through their play and engaged in symbolic play through the transformation of the meaning of objects in the local environment. Following our analysis of the narrative account, we draw out and discuss the centrality of land to knowing, being and doing in Aboriginal contexts, and the connections to language and culture. We conclude by explaining how, through Playworld Translanguaging, educators can combat cultural, linguistic and geographical dispossession and reductive educative expectations caused by colonialism and enacted through education systems.
This study investigates the extent to which language teachers are aware of the motivational factors driving their students' learning experiences in the classroom and the influences received from their socio-cultural environment. It aims to compare teachers' perceptions and observations with students' self-reported motivations across four language programmes (French, German, Italian, and Spanish) at an Australian research-intensive university. This research adopts a three-level model of analysis (micro, meso, and macro) to categorise themes emerging from focus group narratives collected with 15 language teachers and longitudinal interviews with an initial number of 37 students over two semesters. Qualitative data analysis findings reveal that teachers demonstrated a high level of awareness regarding their students' motivations within and outside of the formal classroom environment, which spanned psychological, pedagogical and socio-cultural factors. Students' accounts contribute to understanding attitudes and perceptions towards French, German, Italian, and Spanish in the Australian society. This study highlights the importance of fostering teacher-student rapport, tailoring pedagogical approaches based on students' goals and expectations, and considering broader socio-cultural influences to sustain student motivation effectively.
Despite attracting the largest share of international students and being located in top migratory destinations, Anglophone universities frame internationalisation in economic and quantitative terms, with little attention to linguistic diversity beyond English. This paper explores 'internationalised' UK higher education, where institutional claims of global inclusivity coexist with a monolingual, native-speakerism English ideology. Drawing on a multimodal approach - language portraits and interviews - with four female students of diverse mobility backgrounds, it explores how they subjectively experience and navigate their plurilingual repertoires, vis-& agrave;-vis institutional hierarchies, and what this reveals about the depth of monolingual ideology. An internalised hierarchy with English at the top emerges regardless of students' background, yet analysis also reveals differences in how students navigate it: affective resistance through heritage languages; embodied tension between academic expectations and emotional belonging; aspirational plurilingualism oriented towards a professional future; and internalisation of monolingual norms despite family bilingualism. The study also demonstrates how language portraits serve as a powerful tool for uncovering these dynamics. By centring student self-representation across visual and narrative modes, the paper argues that plurilingualism should be recognised as a shared, embodied reality, and calls for curricular and pedagogical interventions that validate students' full linguistic repertoires.
This article examines language policing as experienced by Asian migrant youth in Australian schools and the discourse of English normativity underlying such policing practices. Drawing on a Foucauldian perspective and using interview data, it investigates how these young people's English competence and language manners were policed by the school system, their teachers and their peers. Findings suggest that the participants' certain levels of English proficiency and ways of speaking were believed to deviate from the normativity of 'qualified' English, of English-only, or of 'correct' and 'unaccented' English, and they were expected to 'fix' their language issues to be accepted into the school community or seen as a normal school member. These three ideas of normativity informed the institutional and individual language policing actors to perform their technologies of domination, where they claimed authority to intervene in the students' language learning and practices. The enactment of language policing as encountered by the participants was enabled under conditions of a broader architecture of linguistic assimilationist governmentality in which linguistic minorities have long been marginalised.
This study examines how Chinese language teachers in Latin America construct and negotiate their professional and personal identity in cross-cultural and resource-constrained contexts through everyday material practices. It employs the kit bag method as an embodied, object-based elicitation approach to examine how identity is materially carried, enacted, and negotiated across borders through everyday objects. Data were generated through participant-recorded videos and follow-up interviews conducted via social media (WeChat). The findings show that material objects actively mediate teachers' identity work. Professionally, handmade posters, puzzles, and logbooks enable teachers to enact authority and negotiate their role as 'cultural mediators' under resource scarcity. Personally, cosmetics for role transition, a thermos and tea for affective shelter, and a notebook or stuffed toy for self-continuity anchor their ontological identity across time and space. These findings show that objects mediate identity construction, enabling a coherent sense of self across contexts. By foregrounding how teacher identity is enacted, negotiated, and sustained through material engagement, this study contributes to sociomaterial approaches to teacher identity research and demonstrates the value of the kit bag method for capturing the lived, embodied dimensions of cross-cultural language teaching.
Although translanguaging has been widely theorised as a resource for meaning-making and pedagogical transformation, relatively little attention has been paid to how its engagements are shaped by, and shape, the intersectional dynamics of Asianization in the lives of language teacher candidates. This study examines how translanguaging is lived, inscribed, and (re)configured along intersectional lines in the case of Grace, a 1.5-generation im/migrant Asian American woman teacher candidate during language teacher preparation. Drawing on multimodal (counter-)narratives, the analysis traces her shift from stratified, conflicted translanguaging engagements toward more integrated and agentive orientations. Her multimodal inscriptions and counter-stories reveal how Asianization can discipline translanguaging practices through assimilationist demands for standardised English alongside familial and cultural imperatives to maintain linguistic and cultural heritage, while also illustrating how she reasserts translanguaging as a resource for wholeness and pedagogical reorientation. Methodologically, this study demonstrates how multimodal (counter-)narratives can surface embodied inscriptions, silences, and resistances as acts of translanguaged negotiation. The findings underscore the need for language teacher education to critically examine and address structural conditions that regulate whose translanguaging practices are legitimised, backgrounded, or silenced along intersectional lines.
Australian Aboriginal communities have endured significant cultural and linguistic disruption due to colonial language suppression, which has led to the erosion of ancestral languages across generations. While linguistic revitalization efforts have emerged in recent years, Australian Aboriginal languages are frequently excluded from both national and international Languages Other Than English (LOTE) agendas. This article draws on an early childhood playgroup-based study conducted within Aboriginal playgroup in Western Australia (WA), where young Aboriginal children engaged in learning their own traditional language, Noongar, as an additional language. The research findings show that the children are actively involved in both 'yarning' (Indigenous practice of storytelling) and 'translanguaging' (multimodal meaning making) during the playgroup, as both approaches centre the lived experiences, voices and knowledge systems of these Aboriginal young learners. The comparative analysis of these two approaches leads us to introduce a new decolonial framework - 'translingual yarning pedagogy', which advocates for a relational, ethical and community embedded classroom approach to LOTE education - one that strengthens Aboriginal linguistic identities. The article calls for greater recognition of Aboriginal languages within LOTE research and policy, offering a pathway toward more inclusive and culturally sustaining educational futures.
Doctoral education in the UK lacks guidance and institutional policies about how supervisors can effectively support doctoral students conducting research that involves more than one language, and there is little empirical research on supervisors' experiences. This paper reports on the qualitative component of a mixed-methods study on 'Researching Multilingually' awareness and practice amongst doctoral supervisors in a Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty of a research-intensive British university. Following training workshops for supervisors, focus groups explored ten supervisors' experiences of and attitudes towards supporting doctoral students working across languages in their research. Thematic analysis of the focus groups shows that supervisors' awareness of linguistic diversity in the doctoral research space is often implicit or emerging, with little consideration of multilingualism as a pedagogical or epistemological dimension of research practice. However, supervisors are willing to engage more fully when supported by a structured reflective framework for implementing a researching multilingually approach, accessible resources, and institutional recognition. Participants suggested that the promotion and content of materials relating to Researching Multilingually needed to be accessible, particularly to supervisors in non-language-related disciplines. Overall, our findings reframe 'Researching Multilingually' not just as a research practice, but also as a valuable pedagogical resource for supervision across disciplines.
This study examines how elite dimensions in English-medium instruction (EMI) programmes in Vietnamese higher education are discursively constructed in policy and reflected in key stakeholders' perspectives. A qualitative research design was adopted, combining analysis of national and institutional EMI policy documents with semi-structured interviews involving ten university administrators, fifteen EMI content lecturers, and five student focus groups. The findings demonstrate that EMI education in Vietnamese universities is discursively constructed as contributing to the production of elite human capital, sustaining a linguistic hierarchy that glorifies English and disadvantages Vietnamese, and enabling exclusive learning opportunities related to financial means. Beyond its pedagogical and internationalisation roles, EMI functions as a mechanism of distinction that reinforces social stratification and reproduces inequality within the higher education system. By providing empirical evidence from Vietnam, the study advances critical EMI scholarship and contributes to ongoing debates on the 'dark side' of EMI, offering insights to inform reflections on more equitable and socially just EMI implementation.
This article examines how cultural mapping supports intercultural learning among EFL teachers in South Korea and Taiwan during a 16-week virtual professional development (PD) program. Data included interviews, reflective journals, mapping artifacts, and video-recorded online meetings. Findings show that cultural mapping encouraged teachers to critically reflect on their understanding of culture and interculturality, transforming their teaching as they collaborated with colleagues across cultures in virtual communities of practice. The study highlights cultural mapping's potential to deepen intercultural understanding and support inclusive teaching practices. It also offers insights into how language teachers can reimagine and implement intercultural values in their classrooms.
This article examines the recent introduction of Chinese as a foreign language in Saudi Arabia. Drawing on the political economy of languages as an overarching framework, the study engages with the concepts of soft power, cultural diplomacy, and linguistic imperialism to analyze how Chinese was promoted and received in a context where Arabic remains the national language and English functions as the dominant neoliberal foreign language. In the absence of research on this policy, the article draws on media-reported perspectives of Saudi policymakers and higher education institutions, alongside Saudi citizens' responses to the policy expressed on Twitter.1 The analysis shows that the introduction of Chinese is primarily shaped by economic rationales and Saudi Arabia's strategic repositioning within changing geopolitical and global economic conditions. Saudi perceptions of Chinese were mixed, with more responses resisting the policy. While both soft power and cultural diplomacy have relevance, the political economy of languages provides a more productive lens for understanding the motivations behind and public responses to Saudia introduction of Chinese. Linguistic imperialism may not apply to Chinese in the Saudi context which serves as an important reference in the article.
Grounded in the scholarship of racial literacies and transnationalism, this study introduces the concept of 'transnational racial literacies' to investigate how Chinese immigrant teachers interpret and teach about race as they navigate racialisation and racism across borders and cultivate emerging critical racial consciousness through heritage language teaching. Drawing on interviews and curriculum design workshops with five teachers in a Chinese heritage language (CHL) school in Florida, United States, the study reveals that participants' understandings of race are shaped both by lived experiences of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. and by racial discourses and ideologies circulating through transnational Chinese media and social networks. While some participants internalised and reproduced dominant racial ideologies, such as race-evasiveness, anti-Blackness and model minority, others began to engage more critically with Asian American histories and racial injustices through teaching, demonstrating evolving racial literacy and critical racial consciousness development. By theorising transnational racial literacies as literacy and pedagogical practices mediated by global flows of people, ideas and power, this study extends understandings of racial literacy development beyond national boundaries and foregrounds CHL schools as key transnational communities for critical and anti-racist learning and development.
The rise of digital technologies and social media has transformed intercultural communication, necessitating innovative pedagogical approaches to develop EFL learners' abilities to craft culturally sensitive and multimodal narratives for diverse global audiences. This study examines the integration of design thinking (DT) and digital storytelling (DST) in a 12-week intercultural business communication course for Chinese EFL graduate students at a university focusing on finance and economics. By combining project-based learning with DT activities and DST tasks, the intervention aimed to cultivate creativity, multimodal literacy, and cultural empathy. Data sources included posters and video presentations created by students working in groups, along with written reflections and interviews, all of which were analyzed through multimodal and thematic methods. Findings reveal that the DT-driven DST pedagogy supported the collaborative generation of story ideas, enabling students to creatively reinterpret Chinese cultural symbols and professional identities for global audiences on platforms like TikTok. While students demonstrated increased intercultural awareness and effective use of multimodal resources, challenges related to ambiguity and time constraints emerged. This study proposes a process-oriented framework for language and intercultural communication education, offering practical insights for educators and future research on the long-term impact of DT-driven DST pedagogies.
Our study examines how in-service secondary content-area teachers draw on their intersectional identities to navigate language ideologies and enact equity-focused pedagogies in multilingual classrooms. Situated in a graduate-level professional development (PD) programme in South Texas, we explore how educators develop ideological clarity, redefining their roles through reflexivity and justice-centered practice. Guided by intersectionality and teacher identity, we analysed multimodal data, including digital language stories, identity wheels, and collaborative coaching cycles from 49 teachers. Through thematic analysis, three key findings emerged: (1) teachers engaged reflexively, transforming their intersectional understandings of emergent bilingual (EB) students' experiences; (2) they exercised agency by drawing on their own intersecting identities to enact resistance and advocacy; and (3) they constructed language-teacher identities informed by their positionalities within systems of power. Findings suggest that intersectional, geography-based identities in a region characterised by linguistic and racialized marginalisation enabled educators to challenge monoglossic norms, foster advocacy, and validate students' linguistic and cultural repertoires. By conceptualising language as a site of identity, power, and resistance, teachers resisted dominant ideologies and reimagined equitable instruction for EB students. This study contributes to research on teacher identity and intersectionality by highlighting how critical PD supports transformative praxis in linguistically diverse educational settings.
When examining interculturality through language use, there may be the risk of looking only at dominant language practices in urban areas. This study argues that interculturality in rural areas should be understood as a situated negotiation of meaning and relationality through local language practices and lived community practices. Against this backdrop, this study explores how local language practices in a rural school located in Sabah, Malaysia, require a reconfiguration of interculturality. Drawing from qualitative data gleaned through classroom observation, the research examines how students and teachers navigate teaching and learning processes through various language resources. Findings indicated that the local variety of Malay was the main language for instruction and social interaction, while Dusun was used fluidly among students and teachers, particularly during informal exchanges in the classroom and within the larger school setting. The findings of this study highlight how the environment was not separate from learning but a co-constitutive part of the educational experience, which demonstrates a learning experience that is deeply embedded in the ecology. This may be considered a key feature of rural interculturality, which may be shaped by everyday linguistic and relational practices.
This study examines the experiences of seven pre-service world language teachers who created multimodal identity texts as part of a year-long methods course designed to prepare them to teach diverse learners. We collected and analyzed qualitative data such as teacher-generated artifacts, written reflections, recordings of discussions, and fieldnotes. Our findings revealed that multimodal identity text creation enabled pre-service teachers to explore, unpack, and represent their intersectional language teacher identities by leveraging multilingual and multimodal resources. In these texts, they narrated the pivotal educational moments and figures that shaped their language teacher identities and revealed their visions and commitments as future language teachers, (re)imagining a form of language education in which children from diverse backgrounds can feel recognised, affirmed, and celebrated. Altogether, creating multimodal identity texts brought the teachers' intersectional identities and rich multilingual and multimodal assets to the surface and involved them in deeper critical reflection on the cultural, linguistic, educational, and ideological experiences that shaped who they are. This study underscores the importance of integrating identity work into teacher education programmes by creating opportunities for pre-service teachers to acknowledge their identities and resources through the creation of multimodal identity texts.
Recently, there has been an increase in scholarly research on local English language textbooks; a trend likely driven by language education policies in various countries that emphasise locally grounded approaches to English learning. However, no existing reviews have specifically surveyed this growing field. Addressing this gap, the present study systematically reviewed 114 SSCI and A&HCI journal articles that focused on local English textbooks, examining key research trends as well as how the notion of 'local' featured in these studies. The findings reveal an uneven global distribution of studies, a strong emphasis on secondary education, and a dominance of content analysis grounded in theories of language teaching and learning and sociolinguistic frameworks. Furthermore, five main perspectives reflecting meaningful engagement with local realities were identified. These findings illustrate the multiple tensions at play in and around local educational contexts. This review contributes to an understanding of what 'local' means in English textbook research and offers implications for future research and textbook development.
Social justice pedagogies play a critical role in teachers' work to address inequity and injustice in schools, which are increasingly characterised by socioeconomic and sociocultural complexity. This article examines the place of social justice pedagogies - including multilingual, multicultural, and translanguaging approaches - in a Norwegian language teacher education programme. Drawing on in-depth interviews with student teachers, the study explores how future educators experience their preparation for teaching in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms from a social justice perspective. Framed by theories of culturally sustaining pedagogy, translanguaging, and critical multicultural education, and analysed through reflexive thematic analysis, the findings reveal four key themes: (1) the absence of multilingual and translanguaging pedagogies, (2) insufficient integration of multicultural and social justice content, (3) a persistent gap between theory and practice, and (4) the emotional and pedagogical consequences of these curricular omissions. Student teachers reported learning about diversity-related issues through personal research, practicum experience, or intuition, rather than formal coursework. This configuration places the burden of equity work on student teachers and perpetuate a monolingual, monocultural normativity. The article calls for a more integrated and critically engaged curriculum that prepares teachers to affirm the full linguistic and cultural repertoires of their students.
Family Language Policy (FLP) research has often focused on children's agency, especially the language brokering (LB) process, while paying far less attention to the reciprocal role of immigrant parents, especially mothers who are themselves language learners. This nine-month qualitative case study examines how family dynamics and ESL classroom experiences interact to shape the language learning, heritage language (HL) maintenance, and the identity negotiation processes of six first-generation immigrant mothers in the UK. The findings indicate that although caregiving limited mothers' time and energy in ESL learning, maternal identities served as a motivator towards language learning. Three key findings emerged. First, the study identified mothers' reliance on their children for emotional, pedagogical and symbolic support for their language learning, and proposed the original concept of Reverse Linguistic Dependency (RLD) to capture this distinctive intergenerational dynamic. Second, while the classroom discourse encouraged HL maintenance, RLD that supported mothers' ESL learning could risk language shift in the long term. Third, the ESL classroom provided a mediational space where mothers reimagined themselves beyond caregiving roles to capable, autonomous learners. Pedagogically, the findings suggest that family-aware curricula that centralise learners' voices and heritage resources can meaningfully support immigrant mothers' identity development in adult ESL provision.
This collaborative autoethnography (CAE) aims to explore our lived experiences as four female language teacher educators (LTEs) in tertiary-level education across different contexts (U.S., China, and Indonesia). Drawing upon the concepts of intersectionality, we report on our constructed identities at the intersections of diverse backgrounds (e.g. cultural, linguistic, gendered) and the impact of the intersectional identities on our practices in language teaching and/or teacher education. Our CAE reveals that identities are not shaped by discrete categories but by multiple intersecting factors, such as cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, while also highlighting the contextual dynamics of LTE identity negotiation. Further, our lived experiences indicate that marginalisation and empowerment are not mutually exclusive but coexist within our LTE identity construction. Despite the challenges we experienced as LTEs, we turned those challenges into resources to empower ourselves and students, specifically by agentively utilising asset-based pedagogical approaches, advocating for ourselves and students, and engaging in scholarship on bilingualism, translanguaging, and marginalisation. Lastly, the study provides implications for LTE education and research.
