Research on digital multimodal composing (DMC) in second language (L2) classrooms has proliferated considerably in recent years, to a large extent in response to the changing digital and multimodal communication landscape. This article offers a research agenda on DMC in L2 classrooms. We begin with a theoretically oriented overview of DMC scholarship. We then examine seven research themes for future research inquiry, from which we draw seven research tasks. The seven themes are: (1) the effectiveness of DMC for L2 writing development; (2) DMC task design; (3) L2 teacher education/training for implementing DMC; (4) feedback practice for DMC; (5) DMC assessment; (6) collaborative DMC as a translanguaging space; and (7) the deployment of DMC for critical digital literacies. Throughout the article, we refer to interdisciplinary scholarship and methods from multimodality, L2 writing, composition studies, new literacy studies, language teacher education, and computer-assisted language learning. The seven research tasks represent what we see as the essential next steps for understanding DMC, which is a young domain that has great potential to advance L2 language and literacy education in the digital age.

Expertise exists among all communities of educational practitioners at all levels and in all national contexts. By identifying expert practitioners, learning from them and valuing their professional competence, researchers can support, promote and build upon sustainable, embodied, holistic models of quality in ways that have direct relevance for the classroom, the curriculum and wider educational goals. Yet, despite its potential as a field of research, there have been relatively few studies involving expert language teachers to date. After a brief historical background, this article makes the case for language teacher expertise research, noting its high ecological validity, its great practical utility, its ability to bridge the research–practice divide and its potentially positive impact on teaching communities. Key methodological considerations are also discussed, including defining expertise, identifying expert teachers and looking beyond the limits of subject-specific pedagogy to understand the whole practitioner in their sociocultural context. The article then proposes a framework for future teacher expertise research that spans diverse methodologies. Six example research tasks from within this framework are proposed, each justified and exemplified, incorporating suggestions for research design that are intended to encourage both experienced and novice researchers to engage with teacher expertise as a promising domain for future investigation.

The massive increase in the use of English Medium Instruction (EMI) in universities around the world has been accompanied by an ever-growing body of publications. The majority focus on EMI policies, teacher identities, and teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards EMI, whilst there seems to be little research into pedagogical approaches to language and literacy support for students as well as into practices in EMI teacher education, areas that are fundamental to the successful delivery of EMI. Recommendations come predominantly from conceptual papers (e.g. Dafouz, 2018, 2021; Galloway & Rose, 2021; Lasagabaster, 2018), and it is noticeable that some of these papers, in line with other EMI publications, rarely draw on English for Academic Purposes (EAP), a field that offers a rich set of theories and practices relating to student support and teacher education that are based on a decades-old research history.

In this position paper, we argue that second language (L2) pragmatic research needs to explore new avenues for integrating speech acts and interaction, by proposing a radically minimal, finite and interactional typology of speech acts. While we will introduce what we mean by integrating speech acts and interaction in detail below, the following argument helps us to summarise the issue we consider in this study:

Numerous studies have analyzed various aspects of English language teaching to uncover discriminatory employment practices within the field. However, there is a gap in the research regarding the discourses present in school-managed teacher recruitment websites (TRWs), particularly in the field of private online language education (POLE). This study aims to address this gap by investigating how the preferred online English teacher is characterized and what benefits they are promised when visiting these webpages. Using critical discourse analysis, the author analyzed the textual elements of 32 TRWs of online English schools operating in six major markets in Asia. The findings reveal that although a few schools show signs of relatively fair policies and emphasize professional qualifications, most of them appear to exploit native-speakerism through their application requirements and compensation policies that often favor only some groups. The implications emphasize the benefits of creating equitable employment opportunities and professionalizing POLE by leveraging the qualifications and experience of teachers from diverse backgrounds, while ensuring fair compensation. Finally, this study provides practical strategies for present and prospective online teachers on how to take advantage of the opportunities of digital language work while contributing to the attainment of equity in the industry.

Ema Ushioda is a professor and Head of the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick. She has been interested in motivation and autonomy in language learning for over 30 years, particularly from pedagogical and qualitative research perspectives. Recent books include Teaching and researching motivation (3rd ed.), co-authored with Zoltán Dörnyei (Routledge, 2021), and Language learning motivation: An ethical agenda for research (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Pauline Foster was Professor of Applied Linguistics at St. Mary's University until her retirement in 2020, and is currently a Senior Research Associate at University College, London. Pauline has published her research widely, including papers on task-based language performance, classroom interaction, idiomaticity, and the development of instruments for oral language analysis. Pauline's i-10-index is 29, with more than 10,500 citations.

The primary objective of this paper is to contribute to the advancement of second language (L2) fluency research by outlining a specific proposal for future replication studies. The overarching goal is to assess the generalisability of the original findings of the two influential studies in the area of perceived fluency: Kormos and Dénes (2004) and Rossiter (2009). This objective will be achieved by first introducing the concept of L2 fluency that often conflates two categories: (1) overall language proficiency; (2) temporal features of speech production. The paper then highlights limitations in the current fluency research paradigm emphasising the variability in the methods employed for speech analysis and rating data collection. This diversity makes it somewhat challenging to compare results across various studies. In response to these challenges, the second part of the paper proposes several close and approximate replications of the two studies.

Over the past two decades in the applied linguistics subfield of second language (L2) writing, there has been considerable interest in the topic of collaborative writing (CW). Studies in this domain have investigated different phenomena such as the nature of learner-to-learner interactions, the learning outcomes of CW, and students' perceptions of these activities when implemented in the classroom. Despite the large number of studies that have been published to date, replication research has been scarce. As such, the current article opens by making a case for replication work in the area of L2 CW, arguing why such research is both important and necessary. Following this, the article turns to a discussion of two key CW studies that have been highly influential in the L2 writing sphere. These studies are described in detail, and suggestions are provided as to how and why these studies might be replicated in the future.

We closely replicated Nurmukhamedov and Sharakhimov (2021), which was the first study to examine the lexical profile of general-audience English podcasts. Nurmukhamedov and Sharakhimov (2021) found that podcast listeners should have a knowledge of the most frequent 3,000 word families and 5,000 word families, respectively, plus proper nouns, marginal words, transparent compounds, and acronyms in order to achieve good and high-level listening comprehension. We followed the methods and procedures of the initial study with a much larger corpus. Specifically, a total of 8,862 podcast transcripts sampled from 12 general-audience podcast programs were used to compile the 14-million-word corpus. Results of the study confirmed Nurmukhamedov and Sharakhimov's (2021) findings in the vocabulary size required to understand general-audience English podcasts. However, some minor differences pertaining to individual podcast programs were revealed, indicating that the sampling of data had an effect on the lexical demand. These findings provide solid evidence to support the validity and generalizability of the initial study's findings. Implications for second language teaching and learning are also discussed.

The steady expansion in qualitative research in the area of language education over the last two decades indicates the growing recognition of its importance to investigating issues of language teaching and learning. Along with this recognition, understanding and assessing the quality of qualitative studies in this area has gained increasing significance. Addressing this concern, in this research synthesis, we qualitatively explore how 236 qualitative language education studies published in seven leading journals explicitly foreground the issue of ‘research quality’. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of how authors of these studies addressed the main quality concepts proposed by well-known frameworks of qualitative research quality. Our findings, presented as ten major themes, show that qualitative researchers' overt treatment of research quality is realised based on three distinct orientations: no explicit quality criteria, positivist views of quality, and interpretive quality conceptions. We discuss aspects of these orientations and their implications for qualitative research in language education.

This study explores the impact of power dynamics – represented by linguistic privilege, learning environment, and identity formation – on translingual practices in Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) writing education. It focuses on a specific case involving Chinese language learners at a Sino-US joint-venture university in China to elucidate these dynamics in a real-life context. The findings revealed how societal expectations, internalized power dynamics, and prevailing language ideologies nurtured perceptions of a diminished Chinese identity and influenced students' language preferences and engagement in CSL writing. The article argues that the decolonization of writing education necessitates critical awareness of power dynamics and the challenges they pose to monolingual ideologies. It also proposes pedagogical strategies to incorporate power dynamics into translingual practices by emphasizing the need to embrace language diversity and fluidity, facilitate translingual identity formation, and employ reflective practices. By raising awareness of power dynamics in translingual practices, educators can empower students to confront the linguistic status quo, promote linguistic justice, and cultivate a more equitable CSL writing education.

As Kathleen Graves argues in her 2023 article, the belief that students learn best when teachers deliver a curriculum exactly as written is a common fallacy, based on an underlying assumption that ‘the institutional curriculum is the most important determinant of what happens in the classroom’ (p. 200). Graves stresses that, in reality, the institutional curriculum itself does not guarantee effective learning and that, instead, it is up to teachers to modify, adapt, or ‘enact’ the curriculum for it to make sense and work effectively in each unique context (p. 200). In our roles as academic writing instructors at a university in Japan, we are simultaneously teachers and curriculum developers. As such, we were drawn to this article and have examined how Graves’ ideas relate to our teaching beliefs and experiences. In this response article, we first discuss issues caused by an overemphasis on the institutional as well as on the enacted curricula. We then highlight the importance of building a program culture that invites open dialogue about how teachers creatively adapt a given curriculum in order to involve teachers meaningfully in course development.

It is, perhaps, with some surprise that I find the native/non-native divide again attracting attention. The first I remember of this being an issue was when we were informed that the native speaker was dead (Paikeday, 1985). Needless to say, to those of us who did not feel at all deceased, this came as a surprise, but the announcement certainly attracted attention. The next contribution to the debate that I remember was Peter Medgyes's (1992) question regarding whether native or non-native was worth more. And so the dispute has continued spasmodically until the present, when we find two pieces on the subject within two recent issues of Language Teaching (Llurda & Calvet-Terré, 2024; Selvi et al., 2024).

In their “Webinar on the subject of English and applied linguistics”, Widdowson and Yazdi-Amirkhiz (2023) argues for the need to “rethink orthodox ideas about the relationship between applied linguistics and English language teaching that have been promoted in the past and still prevail” (p. 393). In the following commentary, I describe examples from my experiences as a language teacher and teacher trainer that address two of Widdowson's critiques: the supposed idealization of native-speaker competence in applied linguistics, and the impracticality of applied linguistics research.