I have been invited, in this discussion piece, to offer my view on the opportunities and challenges that arise, for L2 education, from empirical studies on L2 acquisition. In this chapter, I therefore lay out what I see as central conditions for L2 education to move toward a more systematic concern with L2 learners' abilities to participate in…

Testing practices and the construct of English both serve separately and interactionally to promote activities of modernity and coloniality. Tests categorize and rank learning and knowledge in discrete, static ways. The construct of the English language through standardization and other processes upholds linguistic purism ideologies. Such concerns…

In this article, I offer my observations of the epistemological shifts that have taken place in the TESOL discipline as a result of the inexorable forces of globalisation. Specifically, the article highlights how the multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal nature of communication in the 21st century has disrupted various assumptions on how…

In this chapter I address what I see as the cornerstone for advancing our understanding of how results from empirical research into L2 interactional development can usefully be brought to bear on L2 education--be it curriculum design, teaching or testing--, namely an epistemologically coherent understanding of interactional competence and its…

The issue of representation has polarised public discourse and in recent years the decolonisation of research methodologies has entered the field of interculturality. However, universalistic discourses of dialogue and tolerance can be harnessed to silence certain voices by construing them as 'other'. With this paper I confront this conceptual knot…

There are millions of children attending English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) government schools for their basic education. The vast majority of these are in countries across the Global South. In these contexts, EMI policy decisions are rarely based on educational arguments while global learning discussions exist with limited engagement with…

"Testimonios" are used as a method to help understand and share the authors' lived experiences as "tocayos" with society and the human world, and to create interaction between both of them. The term "tocayo" is used to identify people who share the same name. The purpose of this paper is to share the lived experiences…

Multilingual identity is an area ripe for further exploration within the existing extensive body of identity research. In this paper we make a case for a conceptual framework that defines multilingual identity formation in terms of learners' active involvement, and proposes the classroom as the hitherto underused site for participative identity…

Most U.S. educational reforms have narrowly focused on how to improve the ways in which students use language, and most specifically English. But in the last two decades, it is something called "academic language" that has permeated all education discourse. Here we discuss the development of the construct of academic language and the…

Epistemological beliefs -- such as beliefs about the value attached to different forms of language teacher knowledge -- play a key role in knowledge interpretation and reconstruction in language teacher education. This article first presents a case for an explicit focus on epistemological beliefs in an ELT train-the-trainer program for state…

In this article, we delve into the characterisation of international students as "Confucian Heritage" learners. To appreciate the implications of such iterative interpellation, we develop a genealogy of Sinology, which is here approached as the discursive effect of a colonial epistemic division of the world into free and democratic West…

This commentary discusses the four papers that comprise the special issue on dialogic teaching and learning, while making general observations that apply across the field as a whole. Similarities and differences are identified over the concepts of "dialogue" and "dialogic pedagogy". The possibility is raised that some aspects…

The two opening sections of this Afterword show how the studies in this collection reflect wider trends in research related to language-in-education policy and practice in contemporary contexts of linguistic and cultural diversity: namely, the turn towards interpretive research and the diversification of research sites. The third section focuses…

In the ten years since the Modern Language Association published their report, "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" (2007) dissatisfaction with the "two-tiered configuration" of US foreign language departments has become increasingly vocal. While the target of the criticism is often the…

As a growing number of English language learners (ELLs) engage in digital and multimodal literacy practices in their daily lives, teachers are starting to incorporate multimodal approaches into their instruction. However, anecdotal and empirical evidence shows that teachers often feel unprepared for integrating such practices into their curricula…