Volume 15, Issue 4

Global North settings such as Australia are an attractive option for prospective students from the Global South to undertake tertiary studies. Using Linguistic Ethnography, we investigate the experiences that postgraduate students from the Global South have when studying in Australian university settings, to understand how translingual English discrimination affects them. We find that many students from the Global South encounter situations of translingual English discrimination, which affect their academic sense of belonging and the hiring order of things. Being penalised for their linguistic practises in their assignment work, or being provided with unclear and insufficient information during the early stages of their studies can both result in a loss of sense of academic belonging. These students may also be affected by the hiring order of things through additional barriers in gaining university employment due to perceptions that they have linguistic, work experience and qualification shortcomings, despite strong evidence to the contrary. We outline the implications of these forms of translingual English discrimination and recommend institutional changes to address these discriminatory actions.

The Commentary critically reflects on the papers published in the Special Issue (SI) of Applied Linguistics Review titled ‘Reflection and Reform of Applied Linguistics from the Global South: Power and Inequality in English users from the Global South’. While the papers in the SI add new insights to the recent innovations in the ontology and epistemology of Applied Linguistics based on research studies done in the contexts of Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Nepal, the Commentary shows that more research studies on the multi-modal meaning-making processes and the spatiality and temporality of semiotic resources will give a greater understanding of the meaning-making processes. The Commentary also indicates that the politics underlying the governance, policy packages of neoliberalism in education, and hidden linguistic governmentality observable in language policies and practices in both Global South and Global North require further attention. Decoloniality, moreover, requires delinking from the academic practices that give immense importance to northern theories. Minimizing intellectual dependency on northern theories may help gain the intellectual sovereignty of the South. Hence, the Commentary indicates that it is high time to explore what the epistemological South and geographical South have to say about the Global South.

In this paper, we consider the role of high-stakes testing in mediating access to English in two Central Asian contexts where English is increasingly important not just in terms of mobility, but in identity construction on an individual and national level. We argue that in these contexts, English is increasingly constructed not only as a global language but the global language, which also has important implications for determining what counts as an ‘internationalized space’ or ‘internationalized person’, and as part of national strategies intended to make Kazakhstan and Mongolia more international. High-stakes tests like IELTS and TOEFL act as a focal point due to the role of these tests in verifying and ‘converting’ English ability into a quantifiable, transportable figure. We draw on a survey about test-takers’ experiences and practices concerning IELTS and TOEFL as well as interview data about the role and significance of English. Since access to knowledge and preparation for these tests is not evenly distributed across the population, our work provides evidence that some people may be in a more advantageous position to succeed on and benefit from high-stakes testing than others. Previous research on IELTS/TOEFL has largely focused on washback effects on school curriculums, test reliability, and strategies for test preparation, while research on globalization needs to continue to engage with specific mechanisms of how scales and hierarchies are created and maintained. We bridge this gap by considering how success or failure on IELTS/TOEFL becomes internalized as a quality of the individual and a reflection of their abilities, dedication and cosmopolitanism, and how testing contributes to carving out particular ‘international’ spaces. This paper will focus on how English comes to be conflated at least in some cases with being international, and how individuals make sense of high-stakes testing as a way of accessing an ‘international’ scale which may or may not involve literal movement abroad.

Drawing on ethnographic interview analysis of Aboriginal participants in Australia, this study seeks to expand the critical discussions in Applied Linguistics by understanding the concept of translanguaging in relation to its “mundanity” (or ordinariness). Our data shows that rather than perceiving translanguaging as extraordinary, for Aboriginal speakers it is more likely to be considered normal, unremarkable, mundane, and as a long-existing phenomenon. The concept of the mundanity of translanguaging is thereby expanded through three main discussions in this article: 1) negotiating identity and resisting racism, where the Aboriginal speakers choose to translanguage using their full linguistic repertoires, but with appropriate communicative adjustments made for their interlocutor; 2) a display of respect towards their land, heritage and language; and 3) as an inherent and mundane everyday practice where they constantly negotiate between heritage languages, English, Kriol, and Aboriginal English varieties. The significance of this study lies in the normalisation of translanguaging as a mundane disinvention strategy, as this urges us to perceive linguistic separateness as a colonial ideological construct that is used to exhibit control over diverse peoples and to maintain uniformity and stability of nation-states.

Although the potential of translanguaging within ESL/EFL classroom contexts to promote students’ linguistic learning has been well-documented, most studies have focused on ESL/EFL teachers (whose L1 is not English) and their students’ ideologies and experiences, with little attention paid to the experiences and perspectives of native English teachers (NETs) working in the Global South and postcolonial areas. This study examined 11 native English teachers’ engagement with translanguaging in Hong Kong TESOL classrooms. Data were gathered through in-depth semi-structured individual interviews and video recordings of classroom interactions. A recursive qualitative analysis elicited a taxonomy of NET teachers’ engagement with translanguaging, comprising resistant, ambivalent, and reductionistic approaches. The findings also demonstrate that ambivalent engagement with translanguaging turned out to be adopted the most among the NET participants. The findings call for examining two new translanguaging forms through NET teachers who have worked under a linguistically policed discourse, i.e., the underground and disguised translanguaging, and multimodal translanguaging without involving students’ L1. The findings indicate that multimodality can be used as a bridge to create a translanguaging space, and that creating a translanguaging space through multimodality appears to be more politically neutral for NET teachers.

This article examines the construction of epistemic injustice in creating and implementing an EMI policy. Drawing on “epistemic injustice” (Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing . Oxford: Oxford University Press) and “misframing” (Fraser, Nancy. 2009. Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world . New York: Columbia University Press), we discuss how the EMI policy in Nepal’s school education has reinforced the epistemic nature of social injustice. Taking an ethnographic approach, we have analyzed how EMI policies are created, interpreted, and implemented in two public schools located in historically marginalized ethnic minority/Indigenous communities. Our analyses show that the schools misframe and misrecognize Indigenous/ethnic minority parents’ and children’s linguistic knowledge and awareness of language education policy. While reproducing neoliberal values, EMI policies construct a deficit identity of Indigenous/ethnic minority communities by erasing and stigmatizing their knowledge of mother tongues in school. Such policies not only promote an English-only monolingual ideology but also pose multiple challenges for epistemic access of Indigenous/minority students and affect parents’ “party of participation” (Fraser, Nancy. 2009. Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world . New York: Columbia University Press) in policymaking process.

This article draws on a transidiomatic interaction between South Africa and Brazil activists to investigate the emergence of “hybrids” (Latour 1993. We have never been modern . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press) of body, language, and politics, while simultaneously looking to the contextual objectification of communicative resources. The interaction took place during the 2013 Circulando, an annual event promoted by the NGO Raízes em Movimento in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro. As both Brazil and South Africa were on the route of mega sporting events and the neoliberal transformation of the city into business, activists from both peripheries produced comparable views of their struggle against forced removals ahead of the FIFA World Cup. In this ethnographic case, translanguaging as hybrid embodied practice occurs alongside other semiotic moves, such as circumscribing specific pragmatic functions. The empirical and epistemic findings may be of relevance for translanguaging research. Specifically, activists’ engagement with “non-modern” modes of hybridization (e.g., their contextual mingling of language resources, technologies and the body) and “modern” forms of objectification, such as the circumscription of specific “genres of listening” (Marsilli-Vargas 2022. Genres of listening: An ethnography of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires . Durham: Duke University Press) suggest that it is not fruitful seeing as separate in our data the dynamics of hybridization and objectification, or the dynamics of transglossia and uniformization.

This study explores how translanguaging has been enacted in a university-wide curriculum transformation project in an additional language programme in Aotearoa New Zealand. Its aim is to reveal students’ perspectives on integrating Indigenous epistemology into the curriculum of a beginner-level Chinese course. The survey data, collected from 155 students, show that most students react positively to the idea of embedding Indigenous epistemology into language teaching through a translanguaging assessment design. Moreover, students’ translingual practices in their digital multimodal compositions demonstrate that they can enact translanguaging to enable the coexistence of different bodies of knowledge while learning an additional language. Based on these findings, I suggest that language teaching should integrate place-based worldviews that are meaningful to all local students. It is also important to adopt translanguaging as a decolonising approach to facilitate a pluriversal epistemological stance that promotes plurilingualism in language education. The nexus between translanguaging and decoloniality needs to be explored further, as does the possibility for cross-civilisational learning through translanguaging.

While extensive studies have been devoted to English-medium-instruction programs as a major strategy of internationalization, there is a paucity of research on the content-and-language learning experiences of international students enrolled in non-English-medium-instruction programs in the Asia-Pacific region. Drawing on the notions of translanguaging and sociolinguistic infrastructuring, the present study investigates translanguaging among instructors and international students in Chinese-medium-instruction (CMI) postgraduate programs in the humanities and social sciences departments in a top university in China. Content analysis of student and instructor interviews reveals that despite the monolingual language policy that governs the medium of instruction for international degree programs at the institutional level, translanguaging serves as sociolinguistic infrastructuring to support some international students’ active participation in knowledge construction, as well as to negotiate tensions imposed by epistemic injustice inherent in disciplinary histories in Chinese academia and the enacted CMI curricula. It is argued that, as a defining feature of translanguaging, sociolinguistic infrastructuring highlights the agentive role of both teachers and international students, who coordinate and navigate distributed and diverse material-semiotic conditions, which can be used to foster a decolonial space for knowledge construction in CMI programs. Pedagogical and curriculum design implications are discussed at the end of the article.

This research offers a post-structuralist multilingual lens to examine translanguaging practice in Chinese as an Additional Language (CAL) teaching and learning. It investigates a cohort of bilingual Chinese teachers who had been trained in a teacher-researcher education programme in an Australian university. This research asks how the Chinese teachers utilised their own and their students’ bilingual repertoires to assist the learning of Chinese in Australian schools. The participant teachers’ theses were collected, and the evidentiary chapters reporting on their classroom teaching were analysed. Informed by the initial results, a follow-up stimulated recall interview was conducted. This research found that the teachers’ translanguaging practices were identified in the form of theirs and their students’ lingual and non-lingual capitals, and these practices showed a strong pedagogical purpose, particularly in motivating and engaging learners. The teachers’ translanguaging practices contributed to CAL pedagogy across three dimensions: teachers’ classroom instruction, teaching and learning resources, and learning activity design. These practices have demonstrated an impact on the students’ engagement, the enrichment of teaching content and improvement in dynamic teaching processes. This research is expected to provide insights into the future development of translanguaging curriculum and pedagogy in CAL education.

Asian scripts that are significantly different from Roman-derived alphabets usually impose difficulties in learning. Translanguaging has therefore been explored as a pedagogical tool for the language classroom, including Chinese. While learning Chinese characters is thought to be one of the main challenges for students learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL), there seems to be a paucity of up-to-date research into the strategies that adult students use to learn this logographic script. Situated in the translanguaging framework, this study employs the think-aloud method to investigate strategies utilised by a group of CFL beginner adult learners when learning characters. Drawing on the results of five think-aloud exercises with CFL learners over five weeks, as well as follow-up tests of their long-term memory of Chinese characters, this study shows that a variety of translanguaging strategies were utilised during the process of learning Chinese characters, and that overall three types of translanguaging strategies were observed: a) embodiment, b) translanguaging resemblance, and c) hybrid. The proposed typology of translanguaging strategies contributes to the further application of translanguaging as a methodology. It also sheds light on future learning strategy research across different linguistic systems.

This mixed-methods study explored the development of morphological awareness in learning Chinese as a third language, focusing on how the activation of a learner’s multilingual repertoire can influence morphological awareness. The study was conducted for a period of eight weeks with 62 Japanese students in a Chinese learning program at a university in China. The students are native Japanese speakers with English and Chinese as their second and third languages. The students were allocated into an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group received translanguaging instruction, while the control group completed learning through the monolingual approach for which the language of instruction was Chinese. The main aim of the translanguaging intervention was to help students utilize their multilinguistic repertoire across languages for their morphology learning. The results revealed that morphology learning scores were higher for the participants in the experimental group than the control group. The focus group interviews revealed that the students in the experimental group favorably perceived the use of translanguaging strategies for morphology learning. Moreover, the students in the experimental group reported cognitive, interactive, and affective benefits from translanguaging pedagogy. Finally, this paper presents relevant implications for the use of translanguaging pedagogy for teaching morphology.

Translanguaging practices in Chinese as a second language (CSL) classrooms have been a heated topic in recent years, despite the longstanding Chinese-monolingual ideology. Against this backdrop, we have explored the functions of translanguaging practices in CSL classroom and the interplay of translanguaging and learners’ participation, by comparing the language practices of a translanguaging-oriented classroom and a Chinese-monolingual classroom. We found the functions of classroom translanguaging include meaning-negotiation, peer-assisting, efficiency-increasing and communication encouraging. The findings also reveal that although multilingual practices can also be found in the Chinese-monolingual classroom, they are characterized by a norm-conforming pattern, in contrast to the norm-breaking pattern in the translanguaging-oriented classroom, and the latter can empower students and motivate them to become engaged in Chinese learning. Moreover, multilingual practices deliberately adopted by teachers can be regarded as pedagogical translanguaging and facilitate learner engagement only when there exists no discrepancy between their pedagogical ideology (i.e. advocating translanguaging) and practices. Based on our findings, we advocate a reflection and adjustments to the current monolingual policy in CSL classroom.

Previous research has recognised the value of translanguaging in Chinese language teaching but has focused primarily on using English as the medium of instruction. However, teachers and students may not share a common language with which to communicate in a multilingual class, which is a significant challenge in Chinese learning and teaching. This study incorporates translanguaging into the pedagogical design by implementing a translanguaging-based task, perceiving Chinese learners as creative agents orchestrating numerous semiotic resources in meaning-making. The participants were a cohort of beginner-level Chinese learners with diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds taking an online Chinese course at a Chinese university. Data sources included the participants’ video-recorded oral presentations and their reflective journals. Drawing on social semiotic theory, analysis of the video recordings shows that the learners moved creatively between modalities (written and spoken, visual and auditory, gesture and drawing) that worked together as an assemblage to make meaning beyond their linguistic capacity while ensuring audience comprehension. The reflective journals, however, reveal ambivalent attitudes: using multilingual resources eased concerns about the audience’s reception of the participants’ meaning-making, but also generated guilt among the participants. Based on these findings, this study argues for the transformative power of translanguaging-based pedagogy and highlights the communicative affordance of semiotic resources including cultural artefacts and knowledge. The pedagogical implications of designing translanguaging-based tasks in the teaching of Chinese and other Asian languages are discussed.

Secondary research is burgeoning in the field of Applied Linguistics, taking the form of both narrative literature review and especially more systematic research synthesis. Clearly purposed and methodologically sound secondary research contributes to the field because it provides useful and reliable summaries in a given domain, facilitates research dialogues between sub-fields, and reduces redundancies in the published literature. It is important to understand that secondary research is an umbrella term that includes numerous types of literature review. In this commentary, we present a typology of 13 types of well-established and emergent types of secondary research in Applied Linguistics. Employing a four-dimensional analytical framework, focus, review process, structure, and representation of text of the 13 types of secondary research are discussed, supported by examples. This article ends with recommendations for conducting secondary research and calls for further inquiry into field-specific methodology of secondary research.

In this study, we provide a scientometric analysis of 43,685 studies published in 51 quartile-1 journals in the field of applied linguistics (1970–2022). Scientometric analysis uses citation records to quantitatively compute networks of cited works and map out how published works have been cited. We adapted a multi-stage scientometric method consisting of database identification, dataset generation, document co-citation analysis, research cluster identification, and cluster characterization. A number of major research clusters were identified and a high degree of interconnectedness in terms of theoretical base was observed between the clusters. The pre-2000 publications had a conspicuous focus on theories derived from language use, which might be said had set the tone for the maturation of the field. By contrast, the clusters that emerged from the 2000s showed more specificity and granularity in focus and scope, suggesting the beginning of a research era with more specialized directions. Despite this trend, we identified influential publications which received several spikes in citations in different eras, indicating their continued temporal and thematic relevance in different clusters. In addition, we found evidence of inter-cluster cross-pollinations. We discuss how each cluster should be characterized in terms of its knowledge base and knowledge front. Highly cited works form the knowledge base of a cluster while novel works form the knowledge fronts of a cluster. Future directions are mentioned and highlighted.

This study provides a systematic review of the methodological features of meta-analyses in second language learning. The synthesis aims to inform how meta-analyses in L2 learning have been conducted, evaluate whether methodological decisions are aligned with norms and standards, identify issues, and suggest solutions based on expert advice, statistical guides, and best practices. A total of 120 meta-analyses were retrieved and coded for key features related to bibliographic and demographic characteristics, search and selection, publication bias, quality control, data coding, data analysis, and effect size interpretation. The synthesis showed that 98 meta-analyses examined the effectiveness of instructional treatments, 21 investigated correlations, and one explored the occurrence of events. These meta-analyses included an average of 37 primary studies (range = 9–302). Common selection criteria the meta-analyses applied included publication type, availability of data for effect size calculation, learner traits, learners’ target languages, publication dates, publication language, independent variables, and dependent variables. Major strategies used to detect publication bias included creating a funnel plot, using trim-and-fill analysis, and calculating a fail-safe N. Typical moderators examined in the meta-analyses related to research context, treatment features, sample characteristics, and outcome measures. The synthesis also identified a number of issues, including failure to report key features such as model selection (fixed- vs. random-effects model), effect size weighting, and so on; conducting moderator analysis based on very small cell sizes (e.g., only one study in a subgroup); lack of justification for certain methodological decisions such as using d instead of g, using confidence intervals rather than Q -tests to identify significant moderators; lack of quality control; and confounding study-based and synthesis-based moderators. We offer advice on identified issues and call for more transparency of reporting.

The International Database of Education Systematic Reviews (IDESR.org) contains summary records of published systematic reviews in education and protocols for unpublished reviews and reviews in preparation. During its pilot phase, IDESR is concentrating exclusively on curating systematic reviews in language education. IDESR makes ready access to extant evidence syntheses for researchers, who can use this information to assess the strength of the warrant for any proposed new primary research and/or additional evidence syntheses. By using IDESR to publish review protocols prospectively, review authors commit to high standards of transparency and rigour in producing their research. We have used the data held in IDESR to assess the topics, publication patterns, and reporting quality in the language education literature. We found (i) that language education has seen exponential growth in systematic reviews of research; (ii) that a variety of topics have been addressed, but those related to educational technology have dominated; (iii) that reviews are published in a wide range of outlets, going beyond language education journals; and (iv) that there is room for improvement in the quality of reporting evidence syntheses in language education.

Bilingual education has become increasingly popular in China, with a subsequent growth in research, particularly research with a qualitative component that examines learners’ and teachers’ experiences and perspectives. These studies have mostly been conducted in individual classroom settings where contexts and learners differ, making findings less transferrable to other educational settings. To address this need, we conducted a qualitative synthesis of research that aims to provide a holistic and rich description of bilingual education in China. Our focus is on the implementation of bilingual education in different educational contexts, learners’ and teachers’ perceptions of bilingual education, and the research instruments used for the evaluation of bilingual education. Following a discipline-specific methodological framework for conducting qualitative research synthesis (Chong, Sin Wang & Luke Plonsky. 2021. A primer on qualitative research synthesis in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 55(3). 1024–1034), we identified suitable studies using a pre-determined search string within various databases. Search results were screened based on a set of inclusion criteria and relevant information was extracted from the included studies using a piloted data extraction form. The extracted data were synthesised using grounded theory to identify new themes and sub-themes. Our findings point to the need for more fine-grained classifications of bilingual education models, despite the fact that Chinese learners generally show positive attitudes towards bilingual education. The study ends with an analysis of limitations, as well as recommendations for future research and practice.

In this paper, we present an approach for applied linguists to undertake research on speech acts in an interactionally anchored way. We first critically revisit studies on speech acts, with a special focus on L2 pragmatics, arguing that there is a clear need to further interconnect speech acts and interaction by relying on a finite, replicable and interactional typology of speech acts. We then suggest a methodological procedure through which such a typology can be employed in applied linguistic inquiries. Finally, we describe a case study featuring irritations faced by Chinese learners of English when it comes to extracting oneself from an interaction while the other keeps on talking. Such irritations are analysed through the lens of the approach proposed in this study.

Immigration from diverse countries of origin has brought to Australia a great linguistic diversity. Moving to Australia, many migrant communities tend to shift from their heritage languages (HLs) and shift to English. Korean migrant communities, however, buck this trend. Notable within the Korean communities are ethnic church congregations, which offer social networks to maintain Korean identity. Focusing on the Korean communities in Australia, this study extends the limited knowledge about the potential of migrant religious organisations to promote HL maintenance. Specifically, drawing on data from 300 surveys collected from parents and semi-structured interviews with eight parents and their children, this study compares experiences of HL maintenance among families who attend a Korean church with those who do not. A key finding is that families affiliated with a Korean church are more likely to prioritise HL learning, practise the language and be proficient in the language than those who are not. Additionally, participants in this study reported that Korean churches provide valuable opportunities for HL learning. This study contributes to an understanding of the intertwined dynamics of migration, religion and language.