Volume 16, Issue 1

Much applied linguistic research has investigated how experts from different disciplines – different “disciplinary tribes” – present knowledge claims, drawing on taken-for-granted disciplinary ideologies and epistemologies. However, this research has mainly focused on specialist to specialist communication rather than specialist to non-specialist communication. This article aims to fill this gap by examining a corpus of mainstream media “expert opinion articles”, written by experts for members of the public, on the topic of the COVID-19 crisis and published in The Guardian and The New York Times. The corpus included articles by experts in Medical Science, Medical Practice, Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, Law, and Economics. Using corpus-based discourse analysis, we consider the effect of discipline on the way that experts present and evidence knowledge claims. We compare the kinds of experts, their content focus, and forms of evidentiality seen in verbal evidentials used in the articles. The analysis identifies four discourse strategies: (1) deriving knowledge from experience; (2) invoking the knowledge of the expert community; (3) invoking vernacular knowledge; and (4) raising claims in argument or critique. Differences in disciplinary epistemologies lead to systematic differences in presenting and evidencing knowledge claims, even in texts primarily intended for a wide public audience.

The naming of the novel coronavirus was notably one of the most politically sensitive aspects of the pandemic. After former US President Donald Trump began using the term “Chinese Virus” in March 2020, partisans with different tribal affiliations in various countries and regions rushed to formulate arguments for and against using geographically marked and racially charged labels when referring to the virus. Informed by the principles of critical discourse analysis, this article analyses the naming of the virus in the US and Hong Kong, where similar practices of naming served the interests of very different political tribes and ideological agendas. It focuses on different aspects of meaning, i.e. analytic and synthetic, and the argumentation strategies various interpretive communities used to legitimize particular naming practices. It argues that it is not just certain practices of naming, but also certain practices of reasoning about names that comes to index different tribal loyalties.

This study demonstrates how tribalism and nationalism, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have given rise to the enregisterment of a cultural discursive practice – dui (怼) – on Chinese social media. Based on a sample of social media posts collected through a combination of ‘noticing’ and systematic data scanning and archiving over a month, our analysis shows that dui shifted from a discursive practice of friendly teasing, a specific function that underpinned its rise of popularity prior to the onset of the pandemic, to an oppositional discursive practice characterised by wrangling, words of violence and a conversationalised journalistic discourse of refuting. We argue that COVID-19 has heightened Chinese netizens’ sensitivities towards China’s perceived friends and enemies. This politicisation, together with the associated traditional discourses of national pride and humiliation, contributed to the emergence of dui as a tribalising discourse, which in turn has further destabilised and polarised the user community on Chinese social media and beyond. The study illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of the enregisterment of discursive practices and social relationships and the importance of bringing together discourse analytical and socio-cultural perspectives in analytical terms.

While the effectiveness of facemasks against COVID-19 has now become largely uncontroversial, at the beginning of the global pandemic, wearers of facemasks were often the target of sometimes racially tinged attacks. Wearing facemasks (or not) became not just a question of science, but evolved into a more complex issue of social identity, morality and global citizenship embedded within the “tribal thinking” of mask-wearers and non-mask-wearers. This paper explores to what extent two bilingual YouTube influencers participated in either accentuating or softening of boundaries of the two “tribes” by embedding facemasks in their videos. Based on multimodal transcriptions of the two videos (Wang, Yilei, Dezheng Feng & Wing Y. J. Ho. 2021. Identity, lifestyle, and face-mask branding: A social semiotic multimodal discourse analysis. Multimodality & Society 1(2). 216–237), three moments were identified where facemasks were employed by the social actors to perform everyday activities, such as grocery shopping and family brunch. I then examine the interactional stances (Dubois, John W. 2007. The stance triangle. In Robert Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction , 139–182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) taken by the actors towards facemasks through language and other semiotic resources. By exploring their multimodal stance-taking, it is argued that the two YouTubers’ intercultural trajectories, their performances of authenticity, and their established influence on social media provided them unique means for participating in tribalizing discourses around facemasks by making perceived differences between different groups materials for cultural consumption. The paper concludes by discussing the opportunities and challenges of vernacular health communication through social media influencers.

This paper explores the relationship between epistemologies, tribalism and affect in the experiences of Chinese international students studying in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on data from student diaries, interviews, and focus groups, it explores how boundaries between in-groups and out-groups were erected and dismantled through processes of socio-temporal scaling, whereby social actors configured affective geographies by linking local spatial relationships to higher level (national and international) scales. The analysis reveals how negative emotions like fear of infection led to practices of spatial distancing and the drawing of cultural boundaries between groups, while feelings of worry about family members in China shaped communication patterns and information flows across geographic spaces. At times, however, positive emotions like affection and sympathy helped participants transcend boundaries, leading them to readjust their emotional mappings of the world and reevaluate their beliefs about COVID. The study highlights the central role affect and emotional labor play both in the formulation of epistemologies around health and in the drawing of boundaries between groups.

The recent surge in acknowledging and critically engaging with identity, advocacy, social justice, criticality, anti-racism, and decolonization in applied linguistics has initiated a process aimed at destabilizing, disrupting, and eventually transforming the geopolitics of knowledge, epistemological orientations, ideological commitments, and methodological practices in research. The current study investigates the evolutionary trajectory of decoloniality in applied linguistics, specifically focusing on citation practices as a point of entry in knowledge building, theorization, and dissemination in major journals over the past 5 years. The findings uncover the consistent invisibility of scholars from the Global South as authors (who use their voices [in]form the knowledge building and dissemination), cited authors (whose voices are used to [in]form the knowledge building and dissemination), and editors/editorial board members (whose vision and practices that ultimately [in]form disciplinary norms, expectations, and directions about knowledge building and dissemination). These (in)advertent (self-) exclusionary trends relegate Southern voices, subjectivities, and epistemological perspectives, perpetuating the dominance of the Anglosphere and obscuring ongoing epistemic appropriation. It concludes that resisting epistemic injustices (erasure, silence, and theft) must be regarded as an ethical, ideological, and professional imperative and demand the deployment of rhetorical strategies, equitable citation practices, collaborative initiatives, and a sustained commitment to decolonial skepticism.

Postcolonial critiques of contrastive rhetoric (CR) have called our attention to epistemological theft and appropriation in the field of second language (L2) writing. Published in Anglophone venues in the Global North, these critiques reveal that early contrastive rhetoricians dispossessed non-Western people from their ownership over certain knowledges, methodologies, and practices by normalizing their language, fixing their culture, and speaking for them. These critiques have contributed to a decolonial reckoning in L2 writing. To understand how the reckoning has impacted L2 writing in the Global South, this paper examines CR scholarship published in Chinese-language venues. The study reveals that while Chinese scholars are not unfamiliar with the decolonial reckoning, they have continued to embrace the traditional CR framework. By doing so, they took part in the epistemological theft and appropriation by reenacting the appropriation of students’ writings and narratives and interpreting them in ways that fit Western knowledges and perspectives. Their acts of epistemological theft and appropriation include racializing Chinese students as inferior to White native speakers, portraying Chinese language and culture as static and inferior, and celebrating CR as a means to solving students’ problems in English writing. Chinese scholars’ acts were motivated by their national identity being defined in opposition to the West and the complicity of capitalism and nationalist discourse in China, a reality that poses challenges in decolonizing L2 writing.

In recent years, there have been multiple endeavours at unsettling the dominance of western voices in knowledge production, consumption and dissemination in language and intercultural communication education and research. Including, mediating and creating ‘new’ knowledges about interculturality are epistemic acts that may sustain and exercise decoloniality and decentering through (potential) dialogues with e.g., the Global South. However, these acts might unknowingly precipitate epistemological appropriation through their complicity or due to the pressures to comply with the skewed geopolitics of knowledge production, consumption and dissemination. This paper unpacks the complex deployment of languaging and knowledging in contesting, blurring and problematising both the dominant epistemological tenets and/or decentring attempts. For example, it presents the notion of ‘epistemological chameleon’ which captures how our knowledgings and languagings are (in)deliberately revamped and reshaped to fit ‘trendy’ narratives without destabilizing one’s assumptions and perspectives; an act that may often be driven by the necessity to survive within the skewed geopolitics of knowledge. The concepts and methods of devenir-langue and transknowledging as proposed by the authors, are used to examine how six recently published research papers in English by prominent Northern and Southern scholars may exhibit potential lingua-epistemological inaccuracies to include and showcase the voice of the Global South(s) while claiming in-/directly to push for decoloniality and epistemological diversity in language and intercultural communication education and research. These articles were selected as example cases based on their indicated rationales and intentions for decoloniality, criticality and inter-epistemological collaborations and are not meant to generalise the current state of this complex field. Implications from these analyses are the development of six ideal-types of inclusion, mediation and creations versus epistemological appropriation based on the papers. Further insights are made into the factors precipitating appropriation that may often be implicit, unheeded and unintentional.

Within the current turn of decolonization in the field of applied linguistics, the dominant discourses may have little to say about exposing and disrupting the act of epistemological theft and appropriation in qualitative research methodologies, even implicitly. Epistemological theft and appropriation refer to the (in)deliberate intricate acts of dispossessing the original knowers of their epistemological ownership over certain knowledges in their research practices. This paper introduces and operationalizes Halaqa as an alternative way of theorizing and doing qualitative research that is not only anchored in non-western epistemologies but can also be employed as a means for disrupting theft and appropriation in literature review and drawing on participants’ narratives within qualitative inquiry. Through a four-month journey of dialogue with three in-service Saudi western-trained language teachers-educators-researchers in our Halaqa, we co-explored possible mechanisms that foster legitimate ownership of epistemologies and emphasize appreciating other ways of knowing that may not be necessarily aligned with our perspectives about ELT in applied linguistics research. This paper concludes with a call for a nuanced and continuous process of self-critique and reappraisal that centers ethical, moral and epistemic imperatives while doing a literature review and drawing on participants’ narratives.

In this rather unorthodox dialogic autoethnography, our discussions revolve mainly around two main questions: Does autoethnography offer qualitative researchers (us) any affordances to respond to epistemic violence in the field of applied linguistics? If so, what are possible ways to generate de/colonizing knowledge through autoethnography without falling into the trap of epistemic violence ourselves? Throughout the manuscript, we take the liberty to express our beliefs/thoughts/emotions in the most personal ways possible. Talking to each other as well as our readers/listeners/companions, we problematize the global north/south, East/West, center/periphery, conformist/critical knowledging binaries and corresponding hierarchies precipitating theft and appropriation. To us, retro/intro/pro-spective reflection and dialogic communication are two possible ways to address epistemic violence with a particular focus on theft and appropriation. Later, drawing on our lived experiences, we discuss the ramifications of making pragmatic choices to further de/colonize research practices through autoethnography.

Writing the literature review is not a neutral act. In fact, the key central aim of consolidating work in a particular research area is to demonstrate one’s knowledge of this area; that is, one must know the ‘conversations’ concerning the research topic. Literature review becomes violent in the Bourdieusian sense because it imposes particular configurations of privileged knowledge on researchers. Thus, in this paper, we argue that literature review is an enactment of symbolic violence and, in the process, epistemic theft, and central to this practice is the construction of research questions. Literature review, as a site of scholarly conversations, dictates the kinds of questions we ask, thus unwittingly framing our research according to the epistemic demands of past and recent studies. By asking a different set of questions, ‘new’ or different understandings about certain social phenomena may emerge.

Material belongings have a significant impact on shaping one’s identity, and they play a crucial role as identity markers and valuable instruments for negotiating distinctions among diverse communities, especially for those who experience migration. This research focuses on a specific group of Iraqi Kurdish migrants living in the UK, exploring how they navigate and mould their cultural identity through their cherished possessions. Utilizing a multimodal approach, data collection involved narrative interviews and visual ethnography methods, such as photo voice. The dataset underwent a systematic thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s methodology, leading to an objective and cohesive thematic presentation. The findings underscore the significance of material culture for Iraqi-Kurdish participants in this study. These respondents held deep emotional connections to material objects, linking the landscapes of their past lives to their present experiences in the UK. By cherishing and preserving these possessions, they established a discursive “third space” to express emotions and negotiate their complex “in-between” identities. This term describes a state of dilemma wherein individuals grapple with conflicting senses of identity due to exposure to and affiliation with two distinct cultures. Specifically, it applies to participants who simultaneously value and embrace both their Kurdish culture and identity, as well as their British culture and identity.

The focus of this paper is the hidden world of women’s imprisonment as revealed in their writing produced in creative writing workshops. Proceeding from the perspective of narrative inquiry as a methodology to study lived experience, this study explores the juxtaposed spaces of the closed, exclusionary carceral world and the open, creative space of the writing workshop. Here we come to find the personal, situated within the wider carceral institution, in the marginalised voices of women in prison, writing their stories in their own words. The prison environment is seldom envisaged as a space that promotes literacy, education, the arts or creativity. This paper takes a relational perspective of creative writing workshops as a space which enables and facilitates prison writing, becoming a bridge between the enclosed prison space and the world outside. Following Foucault (1986. Of other spaces. Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacrities 16(1). 22-27) the creative writing workshop and the textual space of writing may be seen as heterotopic spaces of play, empathy and inclusion that reflect the prison in the language of marginalisation. It gives the opportunity to women in prison to write about their inner lifeworld as a process to bear witness to their experience and work through the trauma of imprisonment. This writing in the textual space becomes a reflection of the repressive heterotopic space of prison and serves as a counter-narrative to the master narrative of punishment and prison. Therefore, whilst the writers in prison reach out to poetic and creative techniques to capture colours, metaphors and genres such as the fairy tale, the reader is constantly confronted by the harsh reality of their lived experience of confinement and their lives pre-imprisonment.

Disruptions, and indeed spectacular disruptions, are understood and experienced by people in many different ways. They serve to both highlight and embed deep-rooted inequalities, changing experiences of the everyday and even challenging the very right to have an everyday. In this joint article we critically engage with conceptualisations of the mundane, exploring how people negotiate everyday life in contexts of unprecedented change. We take up Georges Perec’s call to take account of the everyday, focusing on examples from two ethnographically informed projects, both of which engage with creative practice. The first is long-term research in forced migration settings in North-Western Finland, which explores how people negotiate and re-negotiate linguistic citizenship and everyday life, in a policy context which restricts and limits. The second is a community arts and wellbeing project in the North of England, which investigated creative approaches to re-emergence from the Covid19 pandemic among people who had been particularly affected by isolation, including new mothers. In both projects, our data are drawn from fieldnotes from observations, reflections from our own participation, interviews and creative artefacts made by participants. In our analysis and discussion, we foreground ephemeral everyday moments and how individuals aim to hold up the mundane in the middle of major, internal and international crises. We consider how the ‘right to an everyday’ is central to understandings of being human, and draw on these experiences to show how ethnographic research, with particular emphasis on language(s) and creative practice, can shed light on lived experiences of the mundane and unequal experiences of and rights to the everyday.

Using the concept of translanguaging art that combines language(s) with other means of artistic expression, I discuss an artist’s book published in 2015 by Monika Szydłowska, who is a Polish-born visual artist living in the UK. Szydłowska’s book Do you miss your country? is a visual diary in which, using media traditionally associated with a travel journal (pencil and watercolours), the artist captures her experience of migration. The book depicts the everyday life of a young migrant woman from Poland, in the first years of her life in Scotland. The visual and textual narrative pinpoints the intricacies of the process of othering and identity building. I consider what the translanguaging art reveals about the process of identity creation in linguistically and culturally diverse communities and show how, through her choice of multi(trans)lingualism as a mode of writing and the form of a pocket-size sketchbook filled with watercolour drawings and speech bubbles, Szydłowska problematises the popular image of the migrant. I also discuss her engagement with the tradition of migrant writing and travel writing and her subtle subverting of these genres. I demonstrate how, by combining languages with visual means of expression choosing the form of a comic and the watercolour – a gendered and nationally loaded medium – she negotiates her identity and destabilises power relations historically operating within the migratory discourse. My conclusion suggests that her use of translanguaging enabled the artist to indicate the transformative and emancipatory potential of migration seen as the empowering rather than disempowering process for migrants and locals alike.

Cupchik (2013. ‘I am, therefore I think, act, and express both in life and in art’) claims that being is associated with artistic expressions of various kinds. In line with this notion, the present paper reports on a socially engaged art project that involved the clients at a day centre for people experiencing homelessness. For nearly four months, the participants met once a week for a few hours under the direction of a facilitator and a film-maker who video-recorded the group activities. The experimental ethnographic project aimed to establish whether engagement in creative art can provide these usually ‘invisible’ individuals with an opportunity to reflect on their self and find a voice. The paper describes the group’s activities and the individuals’ responses. The focus is on the minimal narratives the clients produced from surrealistic scenarios to personal memories and political reprieves. The study shows how intrinsically participatory art, centred on the encounter of the participants’ different subjectivities, can encourage self-reflection among individuals with problematic lives.

Analysis of German-based studies reveals a common interpretation of Chinese students’ adaptation to German academia, depicting them as learners with limited participation and critical thinking capacities. This perception stems from the perceived contrast between Confucian values, which emphasize social power distance and collectivism, and German academic expectations that prioritize values such as critical thinking and direct communication of personal perspectives. To challenge these assumptions, this study employs a transcultural analysis that explores quantitatively and qualitatively the oral discourse socialization of Chinese students in German universities. By applying Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, the research reinforces the presence of cross-cultural disparities in Oral Academic Presentation (OAP)-related expectations between China and Germany. Furthermore, by centering the voices of this student cohort and their transcultural perspective, the study presents a novel insight into their silent participatory approach and critical thinking mode, thereby challenging the prevailing generalized assumptions within German academia. This study underscores the necessity of moving beyond binary dichotomies that may inadvertently overlook the diversity of interpretations. Furthermore, the research underscores the importance of academic staff recognizing and legitimizing the diversity of students from the same culture and adjusting their teaching practices to address their evolving needs and interests in multicultural classroom settings.

Drawing on recent theorizing of feedback in educational assessment and psychology, the current study aimed to examine the links between perceived teacher feedback practices, student feedback motivation and engagement in English learning. Seven hundred and sixty-four Chinese university students attending a tertiary-level English enhancement course ( N = 764; age: M = 19.45, SD = 0.88; 57.3 % female) participated in this study. The students completed surveys measuring their perceived teacher feedback practices, feedback motivation and engagement. Scaffolding feedback, verification feedback, and criticism were found to significantly predict student feedback motivation. Feedback enjoyment significantly predicted student feedback engagement, but there was no positive significant relationship between perceived feedback usefulness and feedback engagement. Indirect effects testing provided empirical evidence that student feedback motivation mediated the impact of teacher feedback on student feedback engagement in a university English enhancement course context.

The present study, given increasing attention to incidental vocabulary learning, explores how different input modes (i.e., listening, reading, and viewing captioned videos) affect such learning while considering frequency and prior vocabulary knowledge. One hundred twenty Chinese university students learning English as a foreign language were allocated to three treatment groups and one (test-only) control group. Target words included 48 terms appearing at various frequencies (1–6 occurrences) in a documentary video. Incidental vocabulary learning outcomes were measured through form and meaning recognition. Mixed effects models showed that the caption viewing condition led to the most pronounced incidental vocabulary learning and retention outcomes, followed by the reading and listening conditions. A significant interaction effect was identified between time, group, and prior vocabulary knowledge. A significant interaction effect was also observed between time, group, and frequency. Meanwhile, frequency was less important for incidental vocabulary learning than prior vocabulary knowledge. Pedagogical implications are discussed based on these findings.

The absence of language admission thresholds in many English medium instruction (EMI) university programmes has led to marked heterogeneity in students’ English proficiency upon entry. These students may face diverse challenges when listening to academic lectures, adopt different strategies to cope, and undergo varying trajectories in listening over time. To unpack such complexities, this study adopts a longitudinal mixed-methods design, comprising questionnaire responses from 412 freshmen and semi-structured interviews with 34 students at the beginning, halfway, and end of their first semester studying at an EMI university in China. Students were divided into high, medium, and low proficiency cohorts based on their listening placement test scores. Multilevel modelling analyses highlight that students entering with lower proficiency reported sharper reductions in listening challenges over time. Interview findings also reveal that these students engaged in more industrious self-regulated listening practice outside of the classroom than their highly proficient peers. Regardless of disparities in students’ proficiency, all students developed a higher tolerance towards ‘non-native’ teacher accents and shifted attitudes towards handling disciplinary terminology. The findings offer pedagogical implications for supporting different groups of students’ needs for successful transitions into English-medium tertiary education.

Although there has been a great deal of research on L2 writing in higher education over the past few decades, limited attention has been given to secondary students’ writing motivation and engagement in L2 writing contexts. The present study aims to examine the association between writing instructional approaches and student writing motivation and engagement in the Chinese EFL context, and investigate the mediating role of writing feedback in this relationship. 2,169 students from 35 secondary schools in mainland China participated in this study. Results showed that product-oriented teaching approach related positively to the three indicators of maladaptive motivation (i.e., anxiety, failure avoidance, and uncertain control) and process-oriented teaching approach related positively to the two indicators of adaptive engagement (i.e., task management, persistence). While genre-oriented teaching approach related positively to adaptive motivation and engagement, and related negatively to maladaptive motivation and engagement, cooperative multimedia writing teaching approach related negatively to adaptive motivation and one factor of adaptive engagement (i.e., task management), and related positively to two factors of maladaptive motivation (i.e., anxiety, failure avoidance) and maladaptive engagement. This study also identified the mediating role of four feedback practices (i.e., learning-oriented feedback, expressive feedback, computer-mediated feedback, and peer and self feedback) in the associations between writing instructional approaches and student writing motivation and engagement. This study provides insights into our understanding of the complex relationship among teachers’ instruction, classroom feedback practices, and student writing motivation and engagement in L2 school contexts.

Identities fundamental to the self, such as race and gender, can operate through visual markers on the body. Identities related to a person’s heritage, or nationality, can also become visible. However, when physical appearance means that a person can pass as a member of a dominant group, being identified or ‘marked’ as other takes place through language use. In migration contexts, situations where a person’s heritage or nationality is revealed can lead to experiences of vulnerability. This study investigated the experiences of five Russian-speaking women living in Sweden whose migrant backgrounds were not visibly noticeable, up until the point that interaction was initiated. Interviews were carried out in the summer of 2022 during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Data was analysed using a double hermeneutic approach. Findings revealed how, following the outbreak of the war, the fear of becoming visible increased. Fears of exposure triggered vigilant behaviours, and an experience of needing to regulate visibility. Results show how the experience of having situational control over visibility could buffer against emotional pain caused by perceptions of negative positionings, and the risk of prejudicial treatment.