What does it mean to be a language teacher at a time when the roles of teachers and learners, and the technologies mediating their work together, are being rapidly reconsidered? This is not an entirely new question for TESOL, as teachers have always worked amid changing learner needs, institutional expectations, educational policies, and technologies (Uysal & Gao, 2026). Yet the growing presence of GenAI, alongside increasingly multilingual and multimodal learning environments, has brought renewed attention to teacher expertise, agency, identity, and professional judgement. Rather than being treated as individual attributes, these dimensions are increasingly understood as socially mediated and contextually situated (Tao & Gao, 2026). Technological change adds further complexity by reshaping the conditions in which agency, participation, identity, and pedagogical relationships are negotiated and enacted (De Costa, 2025; Tao & Gao, 2026). At the same time, it reinforces a longstanding recognition that TESOL is enacted through relationships: between teachers and learners, between educational aspirations and institutional realities, and between pedagogical possibilities and the contexts in which they are realised. Questions of how teachers develop and sustain their professional identities, how learners negotiate language, culture, belonging, and agency, and how practices developed in one context can, or cannot, travel meaningfully to another therefore remain central. Rather than displacing these concerns, current technological and social changes make context, judgement, participation, and responsiveness even more salient.
Although language teacher educators (LTEds) play an instrumental role in supporting pre-service teachers, existing studies provide limited insight into the psychological dimensions of their professional experience, particularly motives for becoming LTEds. This study investigates how the motives for becoming LTEds of Indonesian English of Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher educators are shaped by their sociocultural context over their life trajectories. To answer the research question, this study was designed as qualitative life-course research and employed the genetic method theory to guide its analysis of interview data involving 12 LTEds from six different teacher education providers in Indonesia. The construction of a combined life line based on the participants’ biographical narratives narrowed down the analysis to four critical life phases, namely growing up at home and in the surrounding community, attending schools, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in language education, and exploring career options post-graduation. By interpreting the participants’ accounts of ontogenetic critical moments within their cultural-historical boundaries, the study’s findings shed light on the temporal dimension of LTEds’ motives and stress the role of context in shaping them. Implications for theory and teacher education practice and institutions are discussed.
Learner autonomy is widely valued in higher education English as a foreign language (EFL), but it does not develop simply through expectations that students should learn independently. Less is known about how situated practice, a component of multiliteracies pedagogy that anchors learning in experience, social interaction, multimodal resources, and purposeful communication, supports autonomy in classroom activity. This study examined students’ perceptions of learner autonomy and how situated practice was experienced in an Indonesian university EFL course using an explanatory sequential mixed methods design. Questionnaire data from 39 students were followed by interviews and reflective journals from 10 students. Students viewed the learning environment positively and associated situated activities with meaningful engagement, responsibility, confidence in expression, communicative decision-making, and greater awareness of themselves as learners. However, autonomy was guided and task-dependent: students made meaningful choices within lecturer-designed activities but had limited control over the wider learning sequence. The study shows that situated practice may support autonomy when tasks require learners to connect materials with personal experience, negotiate meanings with peers, and produce texts for recognisable audiences and purposes.
This mixed-methods study investigates the experiences of English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) teachers in identifying and supporting students with learning disabilities. Data were collected through an online survey of 19 experienced EAL/D teachers in NSW, Australia, followed by 10 semi-structured interviews. EAL/D teachers reported considerable professional knowledge in distinguishing language acquisition from indicators of learning disability but reported significant systemic barriers when supporting these students. Fifteen of the nineteen participants reported teaching EAL/D students with diagnosed learning disabilities, indicating that contact with this group was common among the EAL/D teachers surveyed. Teachers identified several challenges affecting identification and support, including delayed diagnosis associated with cultural stigma, limited availability of multilingual assessment tools, insufficient enrolment information, and mainstream teachers’ limited understanding of second language development. In doing so, the study contributes to TESOL scholarship by providing empirical evidence from an Australian context of how EAL/D teachers’ specialist knowledge of second language development positions them to differentiate language acquisition from learning disability, an intersection that remains underexamined in applied linguistics research. The study highlights the need for improved professional learning, culturally responsive family engagement, and linguistically appropriate diagnostic tools to support equitable outcomes for EAL/D students.
This autoethnographic study investigates a TESOL teacher’s professional learning (PL) in a group setting, such as workshops, in Chinese English Language Centres (ELCs) from a sociocultural perspective. Drawing on a self-interview, entries from a twelve-month reflective diary, and institutional documents, including PL training documents and training notifications, the analysis highlights the tensions between PL activities—often fragmented, repetitive, and oriented toward test preparation—and the teacher’s broader professional aspiration. These tensions became productive sites of PL through the teacher’s ongoing efforts to navigate them, such as individual adaptation, reflective practice, and informal peer collaboration, shaped by personal, social, and technological factors. Specifically, contradictions related to institutional commercial goals, standardised teaching tools, and overwhelming workload not only constrained but also stimulated growth in the teacher’s learning. The findings suggest that teacher learning in marketised ELCs emerges through the negotiation of competing educational and commercial priorities across time. At the same time, the adaptive responses that supported learning also helped manage and absorb systemic tensions, contributing to the reproduction of existing organisational arrangements. The study contributes to understanding group-based PL in for-profit ELCs, a largely underexplored setting, and highlights the need for more collaborative, context-sensitive, and sustainable frameworks that involve both teachers and institutions in supporting teachers’ PL, which is essential for responding to the unique contradictions and competing demands shaping teachers’ PL in commercialised ELC contexts.
