Julian Chen

Higher education is often framed as a pathway to opportunity and professional advancement, with employability and so-called ‘workplace readiness’ positioned as key outcomes of course completion. In...

The widely held and pervasive ideology that English as the global dominant language is “the key” to successful “integration” of nondominant communities has far-reaching implications on various social, cultural, and educational dimensions. This ideology often perpetuates the notion that proficiency in English is essential for social mobility, access to economic opportunities, and participation in global markets, reinforcing the hegemonic legacies of English over Indigenous and minoritized languages and practices. This study critically examines the intersecting experiences of language, race, and ethnicity of six multilingual (refugee) learners in Australia. Having fled from a small ethnic group in northern Iraq (Assyrians), these adult learners face significant challenges in adapting to a predominantly monolingual, English-speaking environment with perceived limited English language resources for effective inclusion into the mainstream community. Framed through the lenses of colonialingualism and transraciolinguistics, the study critically unpacks the lived linguistic and racial(ized) experiences of multilingual learners and the fluid ways in which they challenge and resist dominative and assimilative forces associated with the colonial legacies of English as the dominant language. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, learners were asked questions that addressed two key dimensions: (1) personal experiences, challenges, and opportunities in Australia and (2) future personal, educational, and professional aspirations in Australia. Findings from the analysis of interview data revealed that while learners feel disadvantaged, racialized, and disconnected from the wider English-dominant community, their persistent desire to advance their English language and semiotic resources is linked to their aspirations for their children and future generations. Specifically, they expressed a strong desire for their children not to experience the same feelings of marginalization and racialization that they have encountered. Instead, they envision a future where their children are valued citizens in society, capable of navigating and succeeding within the dominant English-speaking context while also maintaining and valuing their own cultural and linguistic identities.

Inspired by feminist queering and affect theories to disrupt research norms, we drew on our felt experiences to explore the affective atmosphere of language teacher education. In this experimental work, we harnessed affect and queer theories to contest the gendered, classed, and heteronormative atmosphere of language teacher education using a form of post-qualitative inquiry that we named “dialogic queering”. Given our marginalized backgrounds (queer; academic of colour; working-class female academic), dialogic queering creates spaces to explore difficult but genuine thoughts and feelings while challenging norms entrenched in language teacher education. Underpinned by critical empathy, dialogic queering allowed us to decenter prescriptive methodologies to explore the entanglements of gender diversity, inclusion, and queer theory. This queering embodiment demonstrates how norm-resistant approaches can empower language educators and researchers to disrupt the cis-heteronormative and neoliberal ways of thinking, learning, researching, and writing. We hope that our work can convey to readers the potentiality and power of dialogic queering as a form of post-qualitative inquiry to engender insights about language teacher education and research that surprise, resonate, and transform.

There is significant pressure on translingual communities, who draw upon and blend all the linguistic and semiotic resources with which they have come into contact (i.e., language, material objects, the built environment) to navigate linguistically inaccessible infrastructures in their new setting. We examined the role language plays within one Local Government Area (LGA) in Western Australia via a larger Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) project; re‐visiting the politics of resourcefulness and focusing on examples of linguistic privileging and linguistic invisibility.The overall study included an initial needs analysis survey which enabled critical conversations around identified problems. These were further unpacked through data collected via interviews/focus groups; shadowing community leaders and LGA/not‐for‐profit employees in their contexts. This offered opportunities to document how stakeholders navigated or resolved known problems. The data was analysed iteratively and thematically to inform and expand conversations around potential collaborative efforts.This article focuses on the analysis of interview and focus group data in one LGA which highlighted systematised linguistic privileging of individuals who speak certain forms of English, and the rendering of community languages as invisible by the system. In response communities created resourceful spaces where collaborative semiosis licensed collective meaning making through the community's full spatial and translingual resources, enabling access to resources, utilisation of community‐generated skills, sharing of local knowledge and fostering of recognition for individuals as agents in civic life, countering the linguistic invisibility they experienced.For institutions, such as LGAs, to catch up with communities, they need to recognise and sustain community translingualism as an essential resource. Our article outlines a viable framework for dismantling linguistic privileging and invisibility in favour of sharing language responsibility with translingual communities.

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Technological advancement has enabled language learners to employ verbal and nonverbal cues in computer-mediated communication (CMC). These cues can support language use for learners wishing to communicate more effectively in English. Interactive alignment is one phenomenon that shows how humans tend to collaborate in their language use by adapting, priming, and reusing verbal and nonverbal cues to achieve mutual understanding. Informed by a sociocognitive framework, this study explored and documented English language learners’ multimodal interactive alignment during their CMC task engagement through Instagram. We collected data from 30 first-year Indonesian business school learners who participated in seven online CMC tasks using Instagram chat features: text chat, voice chat, and video chat. To examine various interactive alignments (e.g., how interlocutors adapt, prime, and reuse verbal and nonverbal cues to achieve mutual understanding) that occurred during multimodal task communication, we employed multimodal (inter)action analysis. Findings revealed that learners adapted and reused various nonverbal features (e.g., emojis, GIFs, facial expressions, gestures) and verbal cues (e.g., expression, lexical) to convey and comprehend meaning during CMC task completion. Caveats about using various nonverbal alignment patterns for supporting better English online communication were also noted. The study highlights how language learners use the full repertoire of semiotic resources in CMC to maximize their online language learning.