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…

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…

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 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…

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…

Meaning-making in a new era increasingly defined by digital communication is a complicated ensemble of both verbal and non-verbal modes. Following this trend of conveying information multimodally, digital memes have become a new and viral way to communicate and make meaning. Memeing, as a multimodal and social practice, may hold potential for…

Previous research on classroom interaction in international university contexts tended to focus on individual speakers' language (in)competence. This paper adopts a translanguaging and spatial orientation to intercultural classroom interaction and highlights the role of situated assemblages of linguistic, semiotic and multimodal resources embedded…

This article explores the underlying processes involved as two experienced Portuguese as a foreign language instructors, who are novices to 3D technologies, became immersed in the epistemology of teaching in a 3D context. The two instructors undertook a challenging initiative to develop and deliver two sections of oral Portuguese in a 3D…

The trend in the Reading class in KSA has been what is called "Standards Based Proficiency" as opposed to the more desirable "Real World Reading Requirements". This is also where the greatest gap occurs. Whereas white collar jobs may require more reading, blue collar jobs may invariably involve reading of technical manuals and…

Access to digital technology in the classroom enables the composition and organization of ideas on screen with a variety of semiotic systems of different modes and media. This study explores patterns of communication and preference of design in digital meaning-making of twelve 7-8 years old students. Meanings were shaped in complex uses and…

To explore the multimodality of two representative EFL textbook series for Chinese college students, their visual and verbal semiotic modes were compared. The target textbooks are "Experiencing English" and "New Century College English". Through multimodal discourse analysis, the study aims to shed some light on how to develop…

This study addresses academic literacy in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) secondary education. More precisely, this paper focuses on attempts to meet modern standards for language competences set in areas like Europe, where the notion involves multilingual academic competence. The study centres on new proposals for language…

English learners of French whose first language (L1) does not mark the perfective/imperfective distinction have shown verb semantic influence and an overall preference for perfective over imperfective in their use of second language (L2) tense-aspect markers. This study investigated whether learners whose L1 marks the perfective/imperfective…