In this brief forum article, I draw from the disciplinary orientation of linguistic anthropology to discuss how a collection of linguistic and semiotic resources gets "enregistered" as the "language" for specific communicative activities. Enregisterment is an ongoing social and ideological process whereby a semiotic corpus gets…

In this study, the aim is to explore what genres can be found in applications used in preschool as a way to facilitate preschool teachers' informed choices and raise awareness concerning the importance of choosing digital content carefully. In particular, applications that facilitate communication beyond a verbal majority language are in focus in…

Pointed polysynchronous interactions (PPIs) were initiated by the participants of this study to promote more adequate interactions between learner-learner, learners-teachers, and learners-learning materials in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) science hybrid learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This photovoice study spotlighted…

Moving from one educational setting to another is often accompanied by various psychological and emotional stressors. In the case of English education in Japan this is exacerbated further by an enduring ideological division in the field between English for test-taking and the use of English as a communicative tool. In order to explore potential…

Over the years, we have been witnessing the burgeoning of interdisciplinary interest in the use of ideological discourses and enactment of representations through linguistic and semiotic choices in positioning, (re)constructing and expressing identities. In this picture, there is an evident paucity of research investigating the kinds of…

The current study examines how Japanese and international care workers at a geriatric healthcare facility in Japan manage one of the most fundamental elements of handover interactions -- person reference and recognition to identify a particular care receiver and discuss their specific conditions and needs. By using Conversation analysis (CA) as a…

A key insight of a transdisciplinary perspective on second language acquisition (SLA) as articulated by the Douglas Fir Group (2016) is its usage-based understanding of language. Evidence on the fundamental role that usage plays in shaping individual language knowledge is no doubt compelling. However, while the force of social interaction in…

The texts students encounter are becoming increasingly complex and multimodal. There remains a need to understand the semiotic resources students draw upon to make meaning with these multimodal texts. This study draws on social semiotics as a frame to explore the ways in which eight first graders with a wide range of literacy proficiency levels…

The present study investigates the adoption of Japanese by users from a popular Chinese video-sharing website, bilibili.com. Over a two-month period, 5,808 instances of language use that involve Japanese language features were sampled from 28,579 video comments. It was found that features of Japanese were often utilized -- either entirely in…

Teachers are vital internal pioneers who can make changes in their own classroom by developing an enhanced sense of agency. In multilingual classrooms, teacher agency is the capacity of language teachers to perform constructively for supporting students' linguistic diversity equitably. This study uncovers the potential strategy of teacher agency…

This article takes the inquiry into semiotic repertoires beyond their classifications and inventories to analyse their interactions with each other and the way they gain indexicality in situated communication. As previous theorisation suggests that semiotic repertoires are deployed by agentive individuals, this article draws from New Materialism…

This action research examined the process of integrating students' out-of-school digital literacy into a second language composition class and the role of social mediation in developing learner agency. It involved EFL students with pre-basic and basic proficiency (pre-A1 to A1-A2 on the CEFR level) in a Saudi Arabian university. Using socially…

This qualitative study investigated the impact of online education on the learning and peer interaction experiences of students from eight universities in Hong Kong over the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It employed an expansive and spatial notion of translanguaging to explore the process by which students drew on the affordance of virtual…

Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants' (ITAs') proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative…

This paper is concerned with multimodal literacy involving the different kinds of knowledge required to fully access texts with multiple semiotic resources used in reading comprehension test tasks. Such literacy requirements have not drawn researchers' attention to date, mainly because the foreign language teaching and testing project has…