How is EFL Writing Teacher Education Shaped by Teachers’ Unique Local Contexts?

This month we published EFL Writing Teacher Education and Professional Development edited by Estela Ene, Betsy Gilliland, Sarah Henderson Lee, Tanita Saenkhum and Lisya Seloni. In this post the editors explain the importance of studying local contexts and how they shape the pedagogical landscape of EFL writing teachers.

What do geopolitics and socioeconomics have to do with the English classroom and the skill of teaching English language writing? In our recently published book with Multilingual Matters, EFL Writing Teacher Education and Professional Development, we go beyond the traditional boundaries of English writing education to investigate how diverse regions that are mostly underrepresented in the research literature shape the pedagogical landscape of EFL writing teachers. 

Well over a billion individuals speak English as a foreign language around the world today. There are millions of English language teachers globally, working in schools, language institutes, universities, online platforms, and private tutoring settings. It is important, therefore, to document EFL experiences of learning and teacher education and allow them to inform theories and practices of second language writing that are still US-centric. It is to these less represented narratives, research, and stories that we need to listen to gain a deeper understanding of local practices and eventually work to develop a sustainable and ecologically responsible writing curriculum. 

This timely collection sheds light on often-overlooked areas of the globe, exposing how local settings from Rwanda to Japan, Kazakhstan, and Argentina present distinct challenges and opportunities for EFL teaching and the training of EFL writing teachers. We hope to foster a deeper, more inclusive narrative of EFL writing education by weaving together the stories of practitioners and researchers from all backgrounds – one that respects and represents the diversity of voices contributing to this subject. 

Our book offers teacher reflections, action research, and models of resources that can be adapted to other contexts. Chapters illustrate how educators modify their approaches to fit within the educational, cultural, and political contexts in which they work. In doing this, they also challenge the status quo and overcome the challenge of having to be the main drivers of their own professional development. For example, teachers of minority students in China show how they move away from exam-focused instruction, negotiating the advantages and disadvantages of this shift. Teachers in Japan, Chile, and Algeria reflect on their personal journeys toward student-centered, real-world writing pedagogies. A teacher educator in Turkiye describes activities that engage learners in exploring written genres through creativity. Iranian English teachers reveal that given the political and educational environments in two eras of Iranian history, primary and secondary school students have limited opportunities to learn how to write for communicative purposes. These and many other chapters illustrate the breadth of innovation and investment teachers and teacher educators have made in EFL writing across the globe.

Our book invites academics, policymakers, and educators to take a more comprehensive look at the global scene of EFL writing instruction. It is an appeal to acknowledge and honor the various ways that educators worldwide are advancing the subject of EFL writing, frequently under challenging situations and with limited resources. 

For individuals fascinated by the complicated dance of teaching writing in various global contexts, our book provides a glimpse into EFL educators’ innovative and resilient practices worldwide. We invite you to go through these pages, as each chapter demonstrates the ingenuity and passion of teachers who shape the next generation of English authors. 

If this topic speaks to you, or if you have your tales about the problems and triumphs of teaching EFL writing, we would love to hear from you. Let us continue to learn from one another, forming a worldwide community of educators united in our dedication to developing proficient, confident writers across boundaries. 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Second Language Writing Instruction in Global Contexts edited by Lisya Seloni and Sarah Henderson Lee.

10 Tips for Teaching and Using Multimodal Activities with Multilingual Writers

This month we are publishing Digital Multimodal Composing by Matt Kessler. In this post, the author gives us some advice for leveraging multimodal writing activities to teach multilingual students and learners of additional languages. 

With continued advancements in digital technologies, the practice of being a language teacher and a language learner has fundamentally changed. In particular, in both academic and professional settings, students are now expected to be able to produce digital genres such as social media posts, slideshow presentations, infographics, portfolios, digital posters, and more. Notably, such digital genres require the use of multiple modes beyond text, including the purposeful use of images, colors, graphs, and audio. To better prepare students to succeed in this digitized world, here are 10 tips teachers might consider for leveraging multimodal writing activities with both language learners and multilingual students:

1. Be aware that multimodality – which refers to the simultaneous use of multiple meaning-making resources such as text, images, sound, and gestures – is an important and common practice in today’s world.
2. Don’t avoid multimodal activities in your classroom by focusing only on traditional literacy skills such as reading and writing.
3. Recognize that pushing students to develop multiliteracy skills is not only crucial for their future success, but also for their current success.
4. View multimodal activities as a means of translanguaging, or the systematic use of two or more languages so that students can both understand and be understood.
5. Learn what your students’ needs are in terms of the digital genres that they will need to produce in the future.
6. Consider teaching those genres that many students will likely encounter such as slideshow presentations, infographics, and digital posters.
7. Take the time to train your students on how to use the tools or platforms they will need in order to successfully complete the activity.
8. Set clear expectations about the specific modes (e.g. text, images) that students need to use when creating their assignments.
9. Experiment with different activities, and consider implementing those activities in-class, out-of-class, or a combination of the two to meet your needs and the time you have available.
10. Help spur students’ motivation to invest in the activity and to perform well by making their final work publicly available (e.g. a blog available to the broader public).

Matt Kessler, University of South Florida

kesslerm@usf.edu

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Multimodal Literacies in Young Emergent Bilinguals edited by Sally Brown and Ling Hao.

“Spanish So White” Now Accessible as an Audiobook!

We recently brought out our very first audiobook of our 2023 title Spanish So White by Adam Schwartz. In this post Adam explains why it was so important for him that the book be available in audio format.

Upon the first anniversary of the publication of Spanish So White: Conversations on the Inconvenient Racism of a ‘Foreign’ Language Education, I’m so pleased to announce that my book is now available in audio format. I narrate my own text, which was recorded, mixed and edited at Don Ross Productions, in Eugene, Oregon. I send special thanks to Multilingual Matters and the Center for Humanities at Oregon State University, both of whom provided essential funding for this effort.

From the outset of its writing, I attempted to draft and design Spanish So White as a highly accessible text. I’ve thought a lot about its accessibility this past year, and how this has or has not been realized for its readers. Leading up to and following the book’s publication, I was tasked with helping Multilingual Matters to publicize Spanish So White widely. Implicit in this effort is a request to ensure that the book’s content is engaging, relatable, accessible.

Even before pitching a proposal to Multilingual Matters and other publishers, I imagined that an accessible book about language education, race and Whiteness could and should take many forms. For instance, I was thrilled that my work would not only be available in print, but through the flexible modality of an ebook. Additionally, of primary priority was a need to depart from academic discourse whenever possible. This was most challenging. As researchers, we have been trained to communicate in ways that (1) assume an audience of fellow scholars whose work falls within a shared academic community of practice; and (2) reproduce standardized language in order to communicate “rigor”. Throughout my writing process, I thought about wisdom of my students, my family, or an unknown individual encountering this book online, or perhaps at the recommendation of another. Would my words invite those wisdoms into the “conversations” this book urges are necessary? Would a reliance on academic language reproduce the very Whiteness I intended to challenge?

Questions of accessibility also extended to the length, organization, and layout of my book. This is not a long volume. I wanted the book’s physical size to communicate a lightness, to counter the necessary heft of topics taken up within. I was fortunate to have creative input in the design of the cover: Suggested in its artistry is a kaleidoscopic view of what a Spanish “So White” might entail. In addition, I knew that a shorter book would cost less for the buying public. I think often about how my students regularly go into debt when purchasing course textbooks in a given semester; I therefore hoped that a book addressing issues of social inequity would be affordable as possible. Multilingual Matters assured me that my book could be sold under $20 in paperback, and indeed, such is the case.

Finally, many of us have very little time to read, and this includes those for whom regular reading is essential: Students and teachers. This book is written expressly for this audience, of which I am a part. I personally enjoy flexible access to audiobooks for this very reason, and I know many others do as well. I commute to my campus by car, but I also walk, run and take care of life around the house – my daily soundtrack necessarily alternates music and spoken narration of all sorts. If a book is particularly engaging, I’ll be inclined to locate a hard copy as well, so I may pivot between versions, and not lose access to visuals or the personality of a book’s packaging.

As a text that invites conversation, Spanish So White is waiting to be “heard” in this new format. I’m excited about the possibilities of its impact, just as other texts in their audio format, in fact, impacted my own writing of Spanish So White (Amanda Montell’s Wordslut, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World and Me, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, among many others). I’ve also assigned portions of a few texts, also read by their authors, for my own students. To engage with one’s written language is a gift, but listening to one’s voice suggests a particularly personal, dialogic connection.

Listening indeed invites us to engage differently. In my book, I write about listening as method, one where we must be present and awake in multiple senses. As such, this recording is meant to be shared. Listen with your friends, your family, and your students – whomever joins you in the work of dismantling racism and White supremacy. Take a break and debrief not only at the pause points, but whenever something resonates and invites you to more deeply think, feel and act. This book is yours, as ever.

One limitation to an audiobook, as alluded to above, is that its affordances do not include illustrations and other referents that appear in the print edition. While an audiobook may activate our imaginations, it might be helpful to see images, read captions and interact with pause points that require a more visual scaffolding. Please visit the Multilingual Matters website for the full complement of resources to accompany you on your listening journey. Along the way, you’ll be prompted when a visit to this site is necessary for your participation.

Publishing this book in triplicate – physical copy, ebook and audio – was a significant ask for Multilingual Matters. This is the first audiobook for my publisher, and while I’m so grateful they took a risk on me, I hope it’s not their last. My hope is that the audiobook engages with an expanded audience of reader-listeners, and that it inspires future researchers and educators to write with the accessibility of this format in mind.

Please let me know what Spanish So White sounds like to you. Let’s converse! My email is adam.schwartz@oregonstate.edu.

Adam Schwartz

This audiobook is available on Audible UK here, Audible US here and from other audiobook retailers. You can learn more about the book from the author himself in a recent online author event here.

What Happens When We Undo and Reimagine Gender and Language Together?

This month we published Redoing Linguistic Worlds edited by Kris Aric Knisely and Eric Louis Russell. In this post the editors explain why the book is so necessary.

Has anyone ever told you that the way you language is “wrong”? That it “doesn’t exist”? That “you can’t” do or say or sign something in the way that you have? And, yet, here you are, speaking, writing, signing – doing language in those ways. As a languager – someone doing any form of linguistic activity – you are existing, shaping your world, and sharing that world with others (even if some of those people attempt to use claims to linguistic authority and power to suggest that you are not).

The kind of language pedantry that would suggest that anyone’s language is impossible or wrong is not new. Language is always a site of contestation, controversy, expansion, and tension. Language seems to always stir up these kinds of attitudes about what can and cannot (or what should and should not) be. We live with language attitudes and, often, we accept them as more palatable covers for racism, classism, sexism, cissexism, binarism, and other oppressive systems.

Why? What are these attitudes doing in our worlds and what’s behind them? Frequently, language attitudes are used as a tool to constrain and conserve, as a part of futile attempts to circumvent a core truth: Language is always changing, in large part because the linguistic doings, redoings, and undoings of languagers are very real ways of expressing how they understand their worlds. And like the individuals and collectives that inhabit them, these worlds are always shifting.

With Redoing Linguistic Worlds we – and our contributors – ask: What happens when we undo and reimagine gender and language together? What happens when we move beyond cislingualism (i.e. the intersection between normative ideas about language and about gender modality that center and value cisgender positionalities and ways of doing language)? In what ways is this about a movement past gender binarism (i.e. the idea that gender is a man/woman binary)? How does this open up possibilities for moving past other binarities (e.g. gender modality as a trans/cis dichotomy)? Where and in what ways is this about an expansion of gender? When is it about fluidizing – a blurring of the very concept that people can, might, or should be gendered in any way? How might it be about expanding, fluidizing, burning down, and reimagining all at once?

For those of us whose genders exist beyond normative frames, these questions are evidently bound up in the ways that we experience our worlds and the languaging through which they are constantly remade; these questions are the intellectual exploration of our lives and linguacultures. For others of us – those who sit more comfortably within dominant frames for doing language and gender – these questions may appear less salient, less obligatory; they are not about our own self-understandings, but a means of respecting and honoring those of others. Yet, it is a fallacy to think that we are not all involved in this change-in-progress: When someone engages singular they or xe or any form that expands their linguistic world, they ask others –directly or indirectly – to also expand their own.

If you’re reading this blog post, these are perhaps lackluster examples – you undoubtedly are familiar with such expansions in Anglophone settings – but what of other linguacultural spaces? What does this “redoing the world through redoing languaging habits” look like for others, especially in communities in which gender markings are done more extensively than in English, such as those deploying canonically-labelled masculine and feminine forms? How are languagers remaking the linguistic world through German, Spanish, French, or Italian?

We began this project with the observation that there is relatively little attention given to these linguacultural contexts and their inhabitants – and that what has been given is often rendered through an appropriating, approximating lens. Rather than simply calque understandings of Anglophone patterns onto those of other languaging ecosystems, or map cislingual frames onto communities that reject these, we wanted to understand these from within. And hence Redoing Linguistic Worlds was born.

This volume, the first of its kind to our knowledge, brings into conversation scholars working on how people do language and gender together in French, German, Italian and Spanish. Each of the chapters takes a different perspective – some focusing on classroom pedagogy and teaching practices, others on empirical data from various languagers, still more taking ethnographic approaches to the question of how redoing is accomplished, how it affects the lives of languagers and what any redoing means, individually and collectively. We’re thrilled to see these works be made available to the public – and to participate in the conversations that they engender, wrestle with the questions they ask, and attend to the perspectives they manifest.

We join with many of our colleagues (both those who are a part of this volume and those working beyond its purview) to assert – as the late John Henner so directly and perfectly stated: “How you language is beautiful. Don’t let anyone tell you your language is wrong. Your languaging is the story of your life.” With Redoing Linguistic Worlds we begin to sketch the contours of these beautiful linguistic worlds that are undone, reimagined, and remade when the infiniteness of language meets that of gender.

(Spoiler alert: These infinite galaxies cannot be contained in one volume – We are already formulating the next volume, in which we hope to continue to expand the conversation past well-trodden spaces. We invite any, but especially those working in “less commonly studied” linguacultures and among their languagers, to contact us for more information.)

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Reimagining Dialogue on Identity, Language and Power edited by Ching-Ching Lin and Clara Vaz Bauler.

Spanish So White: Conversations on the Inconvenient Racism of a ‘Foreign’ Language Education

We recently held an online event with Adam Schwartz, author of Spanish So White: Conversations on the Inconvenient Racism of a ‘Foreign’ Language Education. Our Editorial Director, Anna Roderick, spoke to Adam about the inspiration behind the book, his writing process and the book’s main takeaways. If you missed the event or want to rewatch it, you can do so on our YouTube channel:

For more information or to purchase this book, please see our website.

How do we Humanize Practices through Dialogue?

We will soon be publishing Reimagining Dialogue on Identity, Language and Power edited by Ching-Ching Lin and Clara Vaz Bauler. In this post the editors reveal three key takeaways from the book.

The genesis of this book traces back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic, a time when the world ground to a halt, in the wake of the erosion of our familiar ways of human connection. It had become apparent that we needed innovative approaches to stay connected. This period marked a revolution in dialogues, witnessing diverse ways of thinking and languaging due to increased engagement with synchronous and asynchronous digitally mediated platforms such as Zoom and WhatsApp as well as social media communities, especially on X (formerly known as Twitter). However, the dialogues in the book extended beyond mere conversation, delving deeper into critical societal issues surrounding identity, language, and power dynamics. We believed this edited book could serve as an instrument for constructing a junction of dialogue, storytelling, critical listening, creativity, and consequently, fostering love, peace, and social change.

Outlined below are three key takeaways from this book, along with suggested ways of utilizing it:

1. Dialogue as Knowledge Construction: Think of the conversations you had in the faculty lounge, hallways, or restrooms with your colleagues and how it often ignites creativity thereafter. This book guides us on repurposing our discussions for generating knowledge. While retaining the conversational tone, each chapter demonstrates how we can analyze live discussions for further actionable steps. We hope to inspire diverse and mindful ways of reflecting and analyzing daily dialogue, leveraging them for transformative change.
2. Dialogue as a Pedagogical Practice: Acknowledging that our identities and language practices influence classroom pedagogy, many chapters employ collaborative autoethnographic approaches to reflect on classroom practices. This book offers insights into diverse pedagogical ideologies and outcomes. Teachers can use these narratives as a “fishbowl” activity to model reflective practices or writing. Each chapter provides end-of-chapter questions for further exploration.
3. Dialogue as a Research Method and Writing: Dialogue serves as a driving force for inquiry, becoming not only data for subsequent reflection, but also the very methodology by which we can record discursive data via digital media. Just as Suresh Canagarajah suggests in the Foreword, our thoughts and languages engage in a constant dialogue with previous encounters—let’s recognize dialogue as a legitimate qualitative research methodology. This book serves as an excellent example and resource guide on how dialogue can humanize research as a meaningful social practice by unraveling complex voices and dimensions within research.

The book represents a few varied approaches to explore the cycle of dialogue, reflection, and action. We encourage you to advocate for your school district or university to acquire a copy, utilizing it in qualitative methodology educational research for faculty or as a collaborative model in Diversity and Inclusion professional development activities. Let’s sustain and further enrich the ongoing dialogue.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Shades of Decolonial Voices in Linguistics edited by Sinfree Makoni, Cristine Severo, Ashraf Abdelhay, Anna Kaiper-Marquez and Višnja Milojičić.

How Can We Meet the Language Learning Needs of Refugees?

We will soon be publishing Meeting the Needs of Reunited Refugee Families by Sarah Cox. In this post Sarah introduces her book.

This book explores the gap between policy, practice and academic literature within language learning for refugees. Both policy and academic literature recognise the benefits of multilingual approaches to language learning, however language classes are often based on monolingual pedagogies which centre on the need to use the target language as much as possible.

The book explores the language learning needs of a small group of refugee women and their children who had recently arrived in Scotland through family reunion. The book is based on a 5-month teaching study, using critical participatory action research to develop a multilingual approach, which combined translanguaging principles (where people use all their linguistic resources to learn) with decolonising methodology. The book is set within the context of arrival in the host community which is often a period of disorientation and profound change.

To draw the recommendations for multilingual approaches into teaching practice, rather than teaching and researching solely in English, I became a learner of the participants’ languages (Tigrinya, Tamil, Farsi and Arabic) to explore how teachers and researchers might use a multilingual approach even when they don’t speak the same languages as their learners/research participants. The translanguaging ‘stance’ we adopted meant embracing an openness to other languages and using them as much as possible in the research. In the book I talk about how this approach can be part of ‘linguistic hospitality’ which complements the principle of two-way, mutual integration laid out in Scotland’s New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy.

The book centres on three key findings:

1. The first is that decolonial, collaborative learner/teacher relationships bring particular benefits in terms of empowerment and confidence-building for refugee women during the initial stages of refugee arrival. These relationships were enhanced by the shift of power created by the teacher participating as a learner and by researching and teaching multilingually.
2. The second is the importance of the physical environment and the connections people have with their new physical surroundings as they develop a sense of belonging. In the book I draw on ecological approaches to language education and human geography to illustrate language learning as orientation to a new physical environment in a human and embodied way.
3. Thirdly I explore the ‘languaging’ within ‘translanguaging’ as a two-way dialogical process which valorises the full linguistic repertoire and encourages learners and teachers to draw on all their linguistic resources to learn. I consider ways that learners’ home languages can be harnessed in the classroom and detail our experiences of using translanguaging pedagogy. We found multilingual strategies brought particular benefits at the very beginning of learning English so soon after arrival.

The book illustrates how policy, practice and theory might be brought closer together as part of a decolonial approach to language teaching that shifts the balance of power in the classroom, repositions the roles of teacher / researcher and learner / participant and addresses inequality between languages by reducing the dominance of English. The themes of mutual integration and language learning as solidarity are at the heart of the book.

I hope the book will be relevant for anyone interested in ESOL, refugee integration, language teaching, language policy or researching multilingually.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Decolonising Multilingualism by Alison Phipps.

How to Organise Successful Online Intercultural Exchanges

This month we will be publishing Making Connections by John Corbett, Hugo Dart and Bruno Ferreira de Lima. In this post John summarises what the book can offer its readers.

Since the very first days of the rise of digital communications technology, many language educators have enthusiastically grasped the opportunity to connect their own language learners with others elsewhere in the world. Online exchanges, or telecollaborations, have been taking place since the early 1990s on a variety of platforms: email, Facebook and virtual learning environments such as ‘Moodle’ and ‘Canvas’. The focus of the exchanges can simply be the development of language competence, or, in ‘online intercultural exchanges’, there can be a dual focus on developing language and intercultural communicative competence.

While there have been many publications on the pedagogy and outcomes of online intercultural exchanges – describing online tasks that learners might undertake, and the capacities required of learners and instructors – little has been written explicitly to give guidance and reassurance to educators who are embarking on online intercultural exchanges for the first time. Most veterans of telecollaboration will say two things about online exchanges: they are certainly worth doing, but they can be frustrating. Novices who start organising an online exchange with the idealistic view that wonderfully rich interactions will occur, simply by putting learners in touch with each other, are probably in for a rude awakening. And yet, given the right conditions, wonderfully rich interactions can occur.

With this in mind, Making Connections: A Practical Guide to Online Intercultural Exchanges was written to give advice to the novice educator, and reassurance to the veteran. The slim, readable volume is informed by the experience of the three authors as much as by the research literature on the topic. In the book, readers will find sensible ideas on a range of crucial topics:

• Finding reliable partners
• Choosing a suitable platform
• Identifying common goals, both linguistic and intercultural
• Addressing questions of ethics and personal security
• Breaking the ice online
• Designing online tasks
• Developing rapport among participants
• Assessing learners’ participation
• Evaluating the online collaboration as a whole

There is also some advice for those educators who might wish to use their experience of running an online intercultural exchange, or participating in such an exchange, as the basis of a thesis or dissertation for a postgraduate degree. The three authors have, between them, decades of experience of participation in intercultural telecollaborations, and one of them used that experience as the basis for his PhD. The book draws on their long history of working on telecollaborations by giving actual examples of when exchanges go well – and when they go badly. The guidance will help organisers and teachers of online exchanges to avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls, and give them support when they hit the inevitable obstacles. All in all, Making Connections encourages language educators to open up the world for their learners – and supports those who are already doing so!

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Second Language Use Online and its Integration in Formal Language Learning by Andrew D. Moffat.

How Can Teachers Deepen the Connection Between Language Classrooms and the Outside World?

This month we published Intercultural Citizenship in Language Education edited by Kaishan Kong and Allison J. Spenader. In this post Allison discusses the importance of Intercultural Citizenship in the language classroom and how the book can inspire both inservice and aspiring teachers.

It’s back-to-school season where I live in the Midwest region of the United States of America. Heading back to the classroom inevitably means taking a closer look at resources for teaching and learning. Our new edited volume, Intercultural Citizenship in Language Education: Teaching and Learning Through Social Action, explores ways to deepen meaning and connection between language classrooms and the world. By engaging in Intercultural Citizenship work, teachers can bring enhanced relevance to their language classrooms and promote learner engagement.

As a faculty member who prepares teachers for World Language and Multilingual Learner classrooms, I work with undergraduate students who will soon be doing the important work of language teaching. What is important about our work as language teachers? How will we motivate our students to delve into their language studies, and to stay engaged with language learning for more than just a year or two?  Our new book gives both theoretical and concrete suggestions for aspiring language teachers who are preparing for their future classrooms. I plan to share with my students some of the insights from the first chapter in our volume. This chapter explains how the important work of Social Justice education is intrinsically connected to developing Intercultural Citizenship. My students will benefit from the specific examples of classroom activities for developing a deeper understanding of one’s identity, engaging students in critical analysis of resources, fostering dialogue, developing agency to act and providing opportunities for reflection. I also plan to share with my students the research findings regarding the role of study abroad in teacher education. My pre-service teachers have all engaged in international study and are curious to explore how those experiences will impact their work as language teachers.

Current teachers are busy envisioning how this school year is going to play out. Through which new lenses can they spark students’ interests in the content they will teach? One chapter describes how Professional Learning Communities can be used to support teachers’ pursuits of Intercultural Citizenship education. Another explores how virtual tandem learning allowed Chinese and American students to build Intercultural Citizenship through structured cultural discussions. The benefits of Contemplative Pedagogies are explored in yet another chapter in the volume, providing concrete suggestions for framing intercultural questions and experiences with students. Finally, our book also explores the opportunities for Intercultural Citizenship that naturally present themselves in elementary and middle level dual language immersion contexts.

The framework of Intercultural Citizenship in Language Education provides teachers with inspiration for curricular innovation that helps students use their language skills to enact social change both within and beyond their local communities. We hope that both inservice and aspiring teachers will find our new book to be a valuable resource!

Allison Spenader

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Intercultural Learning in Language Education and Beyond edited by Troy McConachy, Irina Golubeva and Manuela Wagner.

How do Students with Specific Learning Differences Learn Additional Languages?

We will soon be publishing the second edition of Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences by Judit Kormos and Anne Margaret Smith. In this post the authors explain what’s new in this edition.

When we published the first edition of our book, Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences, in 2012, there was limited awareness among language teachers, teacher educators, material designers, language testers and researchers regarding how students with specific learning differences (SpLDs) acquire additional languages and how to support their success as language learners. Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest and increased effort to design and implement inclusive language teaching programs that cater to the diverse needs of students. In a wide range of contexts, it is now mandated at the policy level that language learners with disabilities should be provided with equitable opportunities to acquire additional languages. There has also been a remarkable shift away from medicalizing and viewing disabilities from a deficiency perspective, instead recognizing them as part of the inherent diversity of human existence and experience, highlighting the importance of removing socially constructed barriers in all aspects of life.

The new edition of our book has been fully revised to reflect these changing conceptualizations of specific learning differences and places emphasis on barriers to participation, inclusive language teaching, and assessment practices in all its chapters. Accordingly, the first updated chapter includes a detailed discussion of discourses and conceptualizations of neurodiversity and draws attention to the fact that individual learners may have different types of intersecting disabilities and disadvantages simultaneously. The chapters on the general principles and specific techniques of inclusive language teaching have also been thoroughly revised to incorporate recent advances in research and practices related to accessibility and universal design.

Since the original publication of our book, a considerable amount of research has been conducted, not only on the potential challenges that students with SpLDs might face in language learning but also on how various instructional approaches and methods can support second language learners with diverse cognitive profiles. While many recommendations for teaching language learners with SpLDs were previously based on teachers’ intuition and prior experience, there is now substantial evidence from the field of second language acquisition research showing that these recommended approaches, such as multi-modal teaching techniques, benefit all language learners, not just those with SpLDs. The updated chapter on language teaching techniques has also been expanded to include detailed recommendations from first language literacy research that can assist in the development of reading and writing skills for second language learners with SpLDs. Not only has the number of studies investigating the language learning processes of students with SpLDs grown in the past decade, but there has also been an increased effort to make assessments fair and equitable for test-takers with SpLDs. The updated chapter on assessing students with SpLDs includes these latest developments and the studies supporting current inclusive assessment designs.

The field of inclusive language teaching and the study of disabilities in language learning are likely to continue expanding and branching into new directions in the future. Our book provides a current and comprehensive overview of how students with SpLDs learn additional languages, the barriers they might face, and how their language acquisition experiences can be enhanced. We hope that it will serve as a valuable resource for teachers, teacher educators, language testers, and academics, and that it will inspire future research and initiatives to make multilingual language education accessible to all.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like (M)othering Labeled Children by María Cioè-Peña.