Abstract Conversations involving potentially sensitive topics across cultures pose challenges not only for L2 speakers engaged in intercultural communication but also for researchers seeking to understand the mechanisms of such interactions. Digital spaces have long offered rich affordances to address these challenges — primarily by facilitating easier cross-cultural access and creating pedagogically and interculturally meaningful interactive environments. This article explores one such setting: video-mediated interactions among pre-service language teachers within the scope of a virtual exchange project between Türkiye and Poland. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the study examines how participants manage cross-culturally sensitive topics (e.g., religion and history/war) on a turn-by-turn basis during video-mediated interactions. I argue that virtual exchange contexts can serve as ‘safe’ spaces for ‘brave’ conversations and for engaging with sensitive issues, where topic initiations do not typically lead to tension or conflict — even when the legitimacy of the topic may be negotiable. The findings reveal that sensitive topics are managed through a variety of interactional resources, including laughter, topic continuers or shifters, extended elaborations, or brief and counter-argumentative responses, depending on the topic initiated. The findings offer new insights into the challenges and affordances of digital spaces for applied linguistics, intercultural communication, and language teacher education research.
Abstract In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in the use of technology to assist in the delivery of second language oral communication (OC) assessments. In particular, video mediation, virtual reality, and spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) have been employed for this purpose. These emerging technologies have helped in assessing aspects of the OC construct that have been previously neglected, such as interactional competence. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to showcase how these technologies have been incorporated into OC assessments, what aspects of the construct they can help to assess, areas where they are inadequate, and what new challenges they introduce. The paper concludes with directions for future research.
Abstract This article draws attention to the centrality of translation in multilingual pedagogies that include translanguaging and transknowledging with higher education (HE) students in English Medium Instruction (EMI) institutions. At a perplexing time when AI technologies advance, this article provides a background to earlier (southern) research on multilingualisms in education, including the use of human language translation technologies to increase epistemic access to academic texts predominantly written in English. We specifically draw a distinction between more northern perspectives of translanguaging and more southern perspectives that emphasise the central and explicit role of translation in ‘vertical’ translanguaging and ‘transknowledging’. We follow this with a close discussion of a micro-study, the purpose of which is to offer insight into how Chinese-speaking multilingual students engage with academic texts in English through their own human capacity for translation and in interaction with machine translation (MT) and post-editing (PE) of MT to enhance their academic writing ( Chang, 2024 ). In so doing we connect this study to earlier research, pedagogical interventions and theorisation of vertical translanguaging and transknowledging ( Heugh, Li & Song, 2017 ; Heugh et al., 2022 ).
Abstract In this commentary, I consider contributions to the special issue on Challenges and Affordances in Digital Spaces. The contributions both build on well-established areas of interest in language learning and technology (like digital multimodal composing, for example) and attend to relatively new frontiers in the digital domain (like AI and platformization). I comment on three inter-related themes that are raised in the special issue: (1) process and distributed agency, (2) criticality and creativity, (3) power, platforms and legitimacy. I close with a call for more research to better understand how language and literacy educators can rise to meet increasing challenges in ways that promote active and critical learning, meaningful activity, and individual agency.
