Pseudo-compliance or convergence?

This paper reports on a professional learning (PL) project conducted over one year at a senior secondary school in New Zealand. Subject teachers volunteered to work with one another and a facilitator to identify the linguistic demands of their subjects, adapt teaching materials, and try out teaching approaches congruent with research evidence about teaching emergent bilingual (EB) learners. This paper explores cases of subject-specific partnerships and how participants’ responses to the PL appeared to impact their existing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The PL sessions were facilitated through audio-recorded Zoom meetings. A thematic analysis was conducted, and the findings were analysed using an adaptation of Davison’s (2006) framework to map how participants engaged with the PL and collaborated with one another on new pedagogies. The study suggests that these teachers accommodated linguistic teaching approaches, but their adaptation to language PCK may have remained at a compliant level.

International students’ language socialization in an English-medium university

This article investigates second language socialization of three international students in a tertiary institute in New Zealand. To understand the experiences of international students, the article draws on the theoretical framework of the production of space to examine how the students experienced their new social space. The article uses multiple sources of data including video/audio recordings of the classroom interaction, field notes, interviews with the focal students/teachers/tutors/lecturers, diaries, and institutional documents to provide a thick description of students’ participation, language socialization, and identities. It does a within and across case analysis of the students’ experience to situate the learning experiences but at the same time to highlight the role of space as a participating social being in the socialization process. The concepts of language socialization and identities are reconceptualized as ever-evolving and ever-changing phenomena, whose production depends on the social conditions and relationships in the social space.

Understanding textual meaning-making in Chinese high school EFL learners’ writing

The present study examines the ways Chinese high school EFL learners organize information in their writing. A class of 50 students at grade 9 from a local high school in Guangzhou, China, were recruited as participants. The students’ writing at grade 9 was collected as a corpus, comprising ten writing tasks from different text types. In order to gain a holistic understanding of the organization of information in student writing, the analytical framework of Theme at three levels – that is, clause, paragraph, and text – from Derewianka and Jones (2010) was adopted. Findings show that the students have varying degrees of control over information organization at different levels. In particular, the students are not proficient in organizing information at the paragraph level. Findings also show that registerial differences affect the organization of information. The study provides relevant pedagogical implications and recommendations for this group of learners.

Should Munanga learn Kriol?

Kriol, an English-lexifier contact language, has approximately 20,000 speakers across northern Australia. It is the primary language of the remote Aboriginal community of Ngukurr. Kriol is a contact language, incorporating features of English and traditional Indigenous languages. The language has been perceived both positively and negatively, although recent literature suggests a shift towards more favorable views. This paper investigates how community members in Ngukurr responded to the question of non-Indigenous residents (known locally as Munanga) learning Kriol. Interviews with local Indigenous residents showed positive attitudes to Kriol, with respondents providing a number of perceived benefits for outsiders learning the language. Our interviews provide empirical evidence for pride in the language, affirming a shift to more positive attitudes.

Understanding the translingual practices among international students in multilingual cities

The impact of global mobility and technology innovations on urban linguistic diversity poses a key challenge to understand how and to what extent international students are immersed in the target language. Such diversity of languages and modes of communication has pointed to a fundamental transformation in the way that international students interact with both online and offline resources. The translingual practices of Chinese international students presented in this study suggest that, instead of being a language learner in an English-dominant country, these students make use of but go beyond their full repertoires to conduct various online and offline activities when living in a translanguaging space. An evaluation of both online and offline practices demonstrates how their online translingual practices were merged into offline contexts, to create opportunities for learning and social engagement. Understanding international students’ experience with both online and offline resources provides useful insights into the translingual practices and processes adopted by them when living and studying in a multilingual city.

Second language learners’ engagement with written feedback

Studies on feedback given to second language (L2) learners have focused primarily on learners’ response to feedback on language. This study explores how L2 learners in one university EAP class respond to teacher written feedback on all aspects of writing and the factors that may affect their response. Using data from student initial and revised texts, the study first looks at nine learners’ uptake of feedback. Then, adopting a case study approach and using data from retrospective interviews, the study examines how three learners engage with feedback on different dimensions of their writing. Findings show that learners took up almost all feedback suggestions regardless of form or focus. Yet, learners’ engagement with the feedback differed. Using activity theory (AT), we explain the learners’ engagement with the feedback received by reference to the interaction of context and individual-related factors. Our findings highlight the complexity of learner behavior in response to feedback.

Discursive ripple effects in language policy and practice

The advancement of English as an instrument for the internationalization of higher education has foregrounded English as an academic lingua franca (EALF), and the case of China is no exception. This study focuses on the process by which EALF has been interpreted and negotiated across university policies and local practices in China’s internationalized higher education. Drawing upon nexus analysis and multisource data, the study traced the discursive (re)location of EALF across different scales of social activity related to multilingualism at an English-medium transnational university in China. Our analysis illustrates the tension between English and other co-existing languages, as presented in educational language policies and as perceived and practiced by multilingual students in the local communicative context. The findings also show an interactive policymaking process through which students and university administrators opened ideological and implementational spaces that linguistically and semiotically pluralized communicative scenarios at the internationalized university in focus.