Hot Topics: Recommended Reading from Our Language Education Faculty

Netta Avineri

It’s heartening to see how applied linguists, language educators, and language teacher educators are highlighting the roles of reflexivity, positionality, solidarity, and praxis (theory + action for transformation) in critical language pedagogies. The world is shifting in consequential ways, and these approaches center our roles as language educators in building toward a more just world. See compelling case studies of cultivating relationships for justice (CRJ) among academics, practitioners, and community members in a recent special issue that my colleague Danny C. Martinez and I co-edited.

Kathi Bailey

An issue that’s gotten quite a bit of attention lately, spurred by the after-effects of the pandemic, is social and emotional learning (SEL). This brief, reader-friendly report based on research about SEL has been written for a general audience of teachers, parents, and school administrators. And here’s an SEL reference list that can be downloaded for free.

Renée Jourdenais

I’ve been particularly interested in, and inspired by, the discussions about plurilingualism and translanguaging in the classroom. It’s such a welcome shift in our perspective on our learners––who they are and the valuable resources and experiences that they bring to the classroom. We’re making great strides escaping from what Ortega (2019) referred to as a “monolingual bias” in SLA research. Watch this panel on “Plurilingualism and Translanguaging: Pedagogical Approaches for Empowerment and Validation” held at McGill University in December 2021. 

Heekyeong Lee

As many of you are aware and are concerned about, the world is currently witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record. I was alarmed by a report from the United Nations that, as of 2020, there were 90 million displaced people, which has not yet considered the trauma of the ongoing war in Ukraine. My father was a North Korean refugee during the Korean War. So, naturally, I’ve become interested in better equipping myself to understand language education for students from refugee backgrounds by delving deeply into the academic, social, cultural, psychological well-being of displaced people who must become language learners in their hosting countries. Among what I have learned so far, I found the framework of transnationalism and transnational identities (e.g., Duff, 2019; Warriner, 2017) particularly intriguing and appropriate, as it helps us replace the conventional dichotomies of nation-state boundaries with a more fluid and nuanced account of migrants’ learning processes and identities and the ways they maintain connections to their homeland as well as their new context. If you want to know more about it, you can read my co-authored article “I want to keep my North Korean accent”: Agency and identity in a North Korean defector’s transnational experience of learning English  (Park & Lee, 2022) published in TESOL Quarterly.

Jason Martel

High-leverage teaching practices (also known as core practices) play a key role in my Principles & Practices of Language Teaching courses. I was therefore excited to see the recent publication of Core Practices for Teaching Multilingual Students: Humanizing Pedagogies for Equity by Peercy et al. The following elements of their framework caught my eye:

• Adapting instruction based on awareness of the complexity of language and students’ language development needs
• Engaging in advocacy with colleagues, administrators, policymakers, and community to support student learning and social-emotional needs
• Practicing self-care for well-being

Thor Sawin

Like most of us, I have been fascinated playing with ChatGPT. I’ve been trying to discover which mundane tasks we can outsource to Artificial Intelligence to free our time and energy for more engaging kinds of feedback, and on how to train the learners to work with ChatGPT’s outputs as a starting place for discovery activities about style, natural and unnatural language use, and argumentation. Since AI struggles with producing level-appropriate language, it helps raise awareness with teachers and learners about language patterns at different proficiency levels. See ideas on leveraging Chat GPT education here and here. I’ve also been working on an Open Educational Resource on Grammar Teaching, and have been trying to collect the range of practices and methods for discovery-based learning. I’ve been aware of the Growing Participation method for years, but continue to uncover new elements of great design within it. 

Recent Publications

Read more insights from our faculty in their recent publications:

• Assessing and Evaluating Language Learning Beyond the Classroom, by Hayo Reinders and Kathi Bailey
• Becoming Teachers of Emergent Bilinguals: How Content Area Teacher Candidates Navigate Ideological Tensions of Context, Language, and Pedagogy, by Baburhan Uzum, Netta Avineri, and Bedrettin Yazan
• Language Learning Diary Studies in Learning Beyond the Classroom Contexts, by Kathi Bailey
• Learning to Let Go: Ruminating on Delegating, by Kathi Bailey
• Reflecting and Connecting: Creating Opportunities to Connect Theory and Practice, by Anne Glazer and Kathi Bailey
• Technology and the Development of Pragmatic and Intercultural Competence, by Thor Sawin
• Writing Metalinguistic Communities: Democratizing Academic Publishing through Process and Reflection, by Netta Avineri and Jesse Harasta