Letter From the Editors
Andy Jiahao Liu, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Raj Khatri, George Brown College, Toronto, ON, Canada
An Issue of Innovation and Reflection
Welcome to the 2024 Summer/Fall Issue of TESOL Applied Linguistics Forum. While the summer has faded away, this Letter brings a leadership update and a collection of manuscripts that have been with us through the summer. Miriam Moore, our social media coordinator since 2023, was elected as the incoming Chair of ALIS (Applied Linguistics Interest Section) this April. In her leadership letter, Miriam shares her positive experiences running multiple ALIS social media platforms, reflects on sociocultural changes in our profession, and invites us to attend the ALIS academic session and interest section meeting at the TESOL 2025 Convention in California next March. We invite you to join us in welcoming Miriam to embark on this important leadership role and follow us on ALIS social media platforms—@TesolALIS—to stay connected!
We are also excited to report that this issue includes four feature articles, two book reviews, and one response from book authors. The fascinating set of articles covers a broad range of topics, varying from methodological innovation in applied linguistics and TESOL to practical strategies to cope with challenges in EMI settings; we hope you enjoy reading these authors’ thought-provoking pieces as much as we did. In the following paragraphs, we briefly introduce the articles to help you preview them.
Echoing the recent trend of methodological innovations in applied linguistics, Yu Tang and Andy Curtis welcome and introduce Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as a helpful complement to traditional analytical techniques in applied linguistics and TESOL. With reader-friendly languages, Yu and Andy also share seven key steps in employing QCA for research in our field. Readers interested in learning more about QCA can visit their extended manuscript (Tang & Curtis, 2024) published in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.
Centering on technology’s role in mediating human experience and its importance in language teacher education, Anna Bartosik shares how to incorporate posthumanism into sociocultural theory. Anna presents the dialogic mediation through technology with her teaching story, highlights teachers’ agency in incorporating technology meaningfully in online learning environments and students’ reluctance to engage digitally, and concludes with possible practices for readers to adopt the posthuman lens in teaching.
Against the backdrop of World Englishes, John Paul Obillos Dela Rosa examines and uncovers the “unequal Englishes” phenomenon in English language teaching. He shares his personal engagement with the “unequal Englishes” phenomenon, showcases how the Unequal Englishes Facebook page has furthered his understanding of linguistic inequalities through available resources and professional development opportunities, and comes up with multiple strategies to promote linguistic justice in English writing classrooms.
In the last feature article, Bingjun Zhang investigates how Chinese English learners adopt communication strategies while communicating with different interlocutors. Drawing on a mixed-methods study that used questionnaires and classroom observations, Bingjun uncovers the frequency and preferences of communication strategies used by Chinese English learners and provides insights into the differences in learners’ strategies in interactions with Chinese and non-Chinese interlocutors.
In line with our publishing philosophy of viewing book reviews as a type of scholarship in its own rights and highlighting reviewers’ connections with the referred books, Fang Wang and Jiayan Zhang bring engaging reflections and critical perspectives to their reviews, respectively. Fang, in her review of Innovations in Learning-Oriented Language Assessment, underscores the benefits of implementing LOLA in classroom settings, applauds for the replicable examples and practices in this edited volume, and invites language practitioners and/or researchers to consult this practical guide. Reflecting on her experience working as a language instructor in an EMI law program, Jiayan, in her review of Internationalising Learning in Higher Education: The Challenges of English as a Medium of Instruction, suggests pragmatic strategies for EMI instructors to support students and presents possible collaborations between content instructors and language instructors.
An innovative practice of attention is that we have launched an Author Response initiative to invite authors of the reviewed book to continue the conversation with the reviewer. We are grateful to the author team of Local Language Testing: Design, Implementation, and Development—Slobodanka Dimova, Xun Yan, and April Ginther—for accepting our invitation and generously contributing a response to Monteiro’s (2024) review published in our Winter/Spring issue; otherwise, this initiative will be a pie in the sky. We now would like to reframe this Author Response initiative to an Author/Reader Response initiative and invite you, our AL Forum readers, to have a scholarly conversation with our contributors. Your response, if selected, will be published in the next issue around February 2025.
We close by taking this opportunity to wish you a happy, productive, and fulfilling academic year ahead. We hope you will enjoy reading this issue, as well as the Winter/Spring issue published in February. We also look forward to meeting you in person or virtually at the upcoming TESOL 2025 (Virtual) Convention. As always, please feel welcome to get in touch with us if you have any questions or something interesting to contribute.
With appreciation for your continued readership and support,
Andy and Raj
References
Monteiro, N. P. (2024). Book review of “Local language testing: design, implementation, and development”. TESOL International Association Applied Linguistics Forum. https://my.tesol.org/news/825226
Tang, Y., & Curtis, A. (2024). Necessary and sufficient conditions for social science undergraduates’ academic success in English medium instruction settings: a crisp set qualitative comparative analysis. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2024.2380100
Andy Jiahao Liu is a Global Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where he delivers Foundations Writing courses to multilingual students in the International Foundations Writing Program. As a multilingual writer, Andy centers his research on second language writing, English for research publication purposes, and language testing and assessment.
EAP-SoTL Professor at George Brown College’s School of ESL and Immigrant Education in Canada, Raj Khatri has facilitated EAP classes and mentored EL teachers for over two decades in Canada and abroad. His research interests include L2 reading strategy use, reading comprehension, universal design for learning (UDL), and SoTL.