Volume 3, Issue 2

Students who receive English Language Development (ELD) services for seven or more years are labeled as “Long Term English Learners” or LTELs. The Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA requires that states track and report on this group of students, which has shown that the number of students labeled as LTEL is growing across the United States. This label implies that this grouping of students is taking longer to learn the English language than other students, an implication that is damaging and carries along a stigma, as previous research has shown. This qualitative interview study examined the experiences of students who were formerly labeled LTELs under the English Language Proficiency Act (ELPA) in Colorado. The major findings included widespread uncertainty for students regarding different aspects of the ELPA, students being stuck in English Language Development services, and students developing deficit perceptions of their fluency. The long-term objective is to inform policymakers to revise the ELPA policy to better support this unique population of students. Keywords: LTEL, English Language Proficiency Act, Language Policy, Multilingual Students, Raciolinguistic ideologies.

Inspired by Hult’s (2010. Theme-based research in the transdisciplinary field of educational linguistics. In Francis M. Hult (ed.), Directions and prospects for educational linguistics , 19–32. Springer) discussion of theme-based research within educational linguistics that focuses, first and foremost, on solving problems rather than adhering to disciplinary boundaries and conventions, this article calls for transdisciplinary collaboration to resolve educational problems related to monolingualism, native-speakerism, and the hegemony of colonial ideologies. More specifically, we make a case for transdisciplinary dialogue between English as a lingua franca (ELF) and translingualism. We argue that these two research fields, with their increasingly converging interests and goals as well as distinct strengths, can make a greater impact in addressing persistent educational problems through targeted collaboration, research, and (language) pedagogy based on equitable multilingualism (e.g., Ortega, Lourdes. 2019. SLA and the study of equitable multilingualism. The Modern Language Journal 103. 23–38). In this conceptual paper, we first introduce translingualism and ELF as equally legitimate multilingual theories. Next, we identify shared key tenets and orientations as well as distinctive vantage points of each approach that researchers and educators can take advantage of for collaboratively addressing problems within classrooms and beyond. Finally, we lay out a vision for how this transdisciplinary, collaborative dialogue can help realize more equitable multilingualism.

This article analyzes American high school students hedging incorrect responses to teacher-initiated questions in IRE (Initiation-Response-Evaluation) format using conditional language and hypotheticals in ways that facilitate an affiliative stance between students and their teacher. Scholarship on hedging details its use to approximate responses as a shield against doubt and criticism or as collaborative communication, whereas stance is a grammatically encompassed expression of attitudes related to the content of a message. This study brings together theories of stance, hedging, and conditional language use to outline how errors can be a student-initiated pedagogical tool to deepen explanations and engagement. To broaden understanding of the form and function of both incorrect answers and hedging as a structure expanding traditional IRE turntaking for managing classroom discourse, this article outlines seven examples total where students hedge what they know to be incorrect answers drawn from recordings made in forty, fifty-minute high school level Latin lessons over the 2019–2020 academic year. This study presents a model and impacts of students creatively reconfiguring evaluative responses along with their teacher during instruction through hedging incorrect information in conditional, and sometimes hypothetical, formats.

The paper studies the possible role of change management, a well-known term and often used action in the public administration and corporate sector, in supporting the institutional shaping of positive language attitudes towards regional dialects. The theoretical study is based on the presupposition that the application of the sociolinguistic viewpoint in L1 education in Hungary can be understood as a process of change in organizational and corporate culture. The study aims to point out how the lessons of change management can help move the standard-based viewpoint and subtractive practice in mother tongue education more effectively towards a sociolinguistic and additive approach. Besides these viewpoints, the existing regulations and teaching practices regarding language variability in present-day Hungary are also summarized in the paper briefly. The second part presents the change management theory and its two famous models, and discusses what can be learned from them concerning the field of (educational) linguistics.

Universities, once regarded as places for producing organic intellectuals and critical thinkers, now are targets of neoliberalism, where managerialist discourses and lexis are dominant in various forms. Students and teachers are transformed into entrepreneurs, consumers and customers through such discourse and lexis. As a neoliberal variant used in education today, outcome-based education (OBE) – focus of the present study – can be viewed as one such discursive attempt on the part of the universities with an aim to perpetuate neoliberal market rationality. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with teachers at engineering universities in Pakistan, this study examines OBE-driven ELT pedagogy using Gramsci’s hegemony as a theoretical framework. We aimed to understand how OBE-based ELT tends to transform teachers’ subjectivities into neoliberal ‘selves’, the way it impacts pedagogy and learning of the English language, and how these subjectivities are resisted. It appears that OBE-based ELT circulates market logics in the ELT pedagogy and learning by viewing English language as a skill/commodity. Student learning and teachers’ pedagogical performance indicators are based on achievement of specific outcomes. Some teachers, however, argue that OBE-led ELT deprives them of their pedagogical experiences, freedom, and conceptualizations appropriate for their pedagogical approach. We therefore advocate de-centering and deconstructing neoliberal logics in pedagogy and suggest pedagogy of becoming , critical/dialogic language pedagogy and translanguaging as possible alternatives.

English Medium Instruction (EMI) is a content-focused approach in which language learning seems to have been sidelined. However, there appear to be some inconsistencies between EMI language objectives and actual practices that are reflected in the assessment phase. The literature has revealed that an implicit-explicit dichotomy is being used to explain the role of language in EMI; here explicit refers to the declared language outcomes as opposed to implicit , meaning implied but not stated. In this study, the description of a Linguistics course taught through the medium of English, the final assignment and its evaluative rubric are critically examined. The overall aim is to discuss discrepancies between language objectives and language assessment and identify a theoretical framework that could explain the implicit-explicit dichotomy in EMI. The present study raises the possibility that the discrepancies between language objectives and assessment criteria could be described in terms of teacher practices and beliefs that diverge from the declared language policy. Findings further indicate that the implicit-explicit dichotomy depends on academic literacies constructs, which have implications for the students’ development of linguistic tacit knowledge, which is learnt experientially but cannot be easily codified.

Drawing on Bernstein’s sociology of education, this article offers a critical discussion of the origins, assumptions and values of educational linguistics since its foundation in the 1970s. It argues that the sociohistorical context in which the field emerged led to its areas of focus and mission being based on a number of problematic assumptions originating in a primarily Anglophone, Chomskyan theory of language and learning; assumptions that have led to it promoting a strong ‘competence model’ (Bernstein’s term) of education ever since, thereby exacerbating the disconnect between applied linguist and language teacher communities. After identifying important changes in language learning contexts and characteristics worldwide since the 1970s, the article presents a framework for reimagining educational linguistics that looks beyond competence to also recognise the validity of both literacy and pluralist orientations to education and the need for systems, institutions, programs and teachers to move flexibly or choose eclectically along a continuum between these. It discusses the implications of this reimagined vision, including for understandings of relationships in the classroom, notions of authenticity in texts and communities, language modality, curricular outcomes, assessment and language repertoires. A reimagined research agenda is also offered that it is hoped will support attempts to make educational linguistics relevant to the widest possible range of practitioner communities worldwide.