Whilst teaching and learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) rightly focuses on meaningful and purposeful transactional language use, interpersonal language is often downplayed or given cursory treatment even though it is an equally essential and perhaps even more fulfilling dimension of target language interaction. Interpersonal language as…

In this paper we analyze the semantic and pragmatic properties of a colloquial interrogative construction attested in European Spanish, which we label invariable "qué" questions (IQQs). In doing so, we contribute to the better understanding of a relatively understudied phenomenon in Spanish, given that IQQs have been mainly approached…

In recent years, the number of Mexican youth moving (back) to Mexico from the US has been steadily growing (Sanchez Garcia & Hamann, 2016; Jensen & Jacobo-Suarez, 2019). The Pew Research Center for Hispanic Studies estimates that between 2009 and 2014, roughly 1 million Mexicans and their families moved from the US to Mexico…

This qualitative dissertation explored how Latina/o students at Frontera Community College (FCC) made sense of their identities and community college experiences while traversing the Tijuana-San Diego borderlands. FCC is an HSI and one of the closest community colleges to the U.S.-Mexico border in California making this an important site of…

Translanguaging in classrooms opens spaces for multilingual students to engage in learning across the full range of their linguistic repertoire. We argue that one result of translanguaging pedagogy is that it can transform the talk-for-learning in the classroom and create a corriente or flow of ideas that is more free and less constrained than…

Informed by the stories of transnational youth's participation in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in Mexico, this study explores the language/identity development and successful (re)integration of these youth in Mexican schools and communities. Drawing on students' voices, we utilize a multimodal systemic functional…

Second language classroom interaction has unique characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to describe the linguistic resources that teachers draw on to encourage social interaction in the EFL classroom. This examination includes a detailed analysis of the practical activities teachers engage in, focusing on their use of linguistic repertoires…

This article focuses on the relationships between social justice, environmental justice, and sustainability from the local to global levels. We envision social and environmental justice as involving not only human beings, but also the rights of all species to life and respect. We advocate an ecological justice approach based on the equality and…

Measures of teaching are used internationally to understand and improve quality in early education with little consideration for ecological validity. In this study, we analyze videos gathered in 58 K-1 classrooms in Central Mexico to evaluate the validity and reliability of scores from an observational tool developed in the U.S. and used…

Teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) has exponentially grown in the past decades as it has become part of the curricula from kindergarten to higher education. In many countries, governments have conducted initiatives that resulted in the implementation of English classes in public education settings. The use of narratives in language…

This edited volume brings together 10 cutting-edge empirical studies on the realities of English language learning, teaching and testing in a wide range of global contexts where English is an additional language. It covers three themes: learners' development of interactional competence, the organization of teaching and testing practices, and…

Currently, there is limited research examining the barriers that immigrant professionals experience when becoming a bilingual teacher in the United States. This study examines the trajectory of a Mexican national, trained as a teacher in his home country, who became a bilingual dual-language educator in a Central Texas school district. Drawing on…

Despite a growing amount of research on collaborative dialogue during task performance, little attention has been given to the occurrence of collaborative dialogue across task modality and its impact on language development. To expand our current understanding of task modality effects on learning opportunities, we examined the process of engaging…

I examine whether teaching formulaic language raises English as a foreign language learners' awareness of pragmatic resources when expressing requests. To carry out this research I adopt a qualitative self-reflective approach which encourages students to use formulaic language when making requests. By responding to discourse completion tasks,…

The linked concepts of "scaffolding" and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) were originally applied to the context of asymmetrical teaching and learning with a teacher or adult explicitly supporting a learner, usually a child, to achieve tasks beyond their ability when working alone. In this paper we investigate how these concepts…