AILA Review - Volume 36, Issue 1, 2023

Latinx who do not feel confident speaking Spanish are usually questioned. To fight these ideologies, Pascual and Cabo and Prada (2018) suggest new pedagogical approaches to incorporate in the curriculum the experiences of the heritage language learner (HLL). Latinx in higher education expect a culturally relevant curriculum to critically listen and speak to challenge the hierarchies that marginalize them. Why is social justice education key? To meet the needs of our minority students and to fight social inequities that affect their lives (Freire, 2021). This article offers a proposal to teach social justice in the HLL classroom through classroom strategies such as digital stories, autoethnographies, creative writing, or oral history to provide these students with the tools they need to give voice to their communities and incorporate them in the curriculum of an inclusive Spanish classroom whose backbone is US Spanish to fight raciolinguistic ideologies that marginalize them.

Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities among students, and teachers are often the very first to notice dyslexic students. It is therefore imperative that teachers be well-prepared to intervene appropriately and effectively once they encounter dyslexic students. The current study investigates teachers’ knowledge about the disorder in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context. Employing a questionnaire designed by Soriano et al. (2016), the study evaluates the awareness of dyslexia among 84 Iranian English teachers working in language institutes. The findings revealed that the majority of the teachers lacked adequate knowledge of the disorder but that they wished to learn more about this learning disability. Furthermore, the teachers’ awareness of the disorder was found to be independent of their demographic characteristics such as gender, previously completed programs, years of teaching experience, and experience with dyslexic students. The findings of this research can be informative for teacher educators, curriculum designers, and materials developers as there seems to be a need for revisions in teacher training curricula, instructional policies, and materials.

Migration, among the most important sociocultural phenomena of contemporary global societies, is complex, dynamic, and multifaceted. At the heart of migration is language, the indispensable agent of migration. Hence, in this article, a new sub-discipline of linguistics is presented, and that is ‘migration linguistics’. It is the interdisciplinary and multidimensional study of the various aspects of language within the dynamic process of human mobility. And a linguistic theory of migration postulates that: (1) Language is an essential element in the migration process; (2) an individual’s acquisition, learning, and use of language significantly changes as a result of migration; and (3) migrants must be understood in the languages they can use, taught the destination language, and provided basic and essential services understandable to them. The interdisciplinary nature of this new sub-discipline of linguistics is enriched by a variety of approaches and methodologies in solving issues relative to language in the context of migration.

The aim of this paper is to analyze a set of didactic materials developed to teach English as an Additional Language at a Brazilian public school in Rio de Janeiro. Such materials were designed to invite 7th grade students with diverse social, racial, and economic backgrounds to learn about the world and the English language from viewpoints that delineate a decolonial stance (Mignolo, 2010; Kumaravadivelu, 2016; Jansen, 2017). Grounded on the notions of Critical Race Literacy (Ferreira, 2014) and Critical Language Awareness (Alim, 2005), this paper looks into didactic activities built upon emancipatory (Freire, 1996) and transgressive (Pennycook, 2006; hooks, 2013) approaches to Applied Linguistics and Language Education, understanding English Language classrooms as privileged arenas for the construction of ideas on race. The methodological approach is based on the premises of a Dialogical Discourse Analysis (Brait, 2006/2018) to identify centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin, 1981) in the didactic materials produced. Results have indicated that the discourse genres selected (Bakhtin, 2003/1979 apud Tilio, 2017) and the set of activities developed are permeated by social voices (Bakhtin, 1981) that promote decolonial dialogues in the English language classroom.

In the fall semester of 2020, 269 Japanese university students were compared in a quasi-experimental study to determine whether extensive and intensive listening interventions yielded significant gains in L2 listening comprehension. At the beginning of the study, 269 students took a 100-item L2 listening exam, and were randomly placed into an extensive (n = 135) or intensive listening group (n = 134). After each group completed five assignments based on extensive or intensive listening principles, students took another 100-item L2 listening exam. Paired-sample t-tests of raw scores and Rasch person ability estimates indicated that the extensive listening group significantly improved in raw scores, t(134) = −7.44, p = .00, but not in Rasch person ability estimates t(134) = −1.86, p = .07, while the intensive listening group significantly improved in both raw scores, t(133) = −9.48, p = .00, and Rasch person ability estimates, t(133) = −3.58, p = .00.

This study investigated phase transitions in EFL students’ speech fluency development using a complex dynamic systems perspective. Two students with different proficiency levels were selected from an intact speaking class. These students learned and practiced specific strategies to improve their speech fluency. Phase transitions were analyzed based on three criteria: sudden jumps, anomalous variance, and qualitative change in the attractor. Number of syllables was used as the speech fluency measure. The results suggest that only the higher-proficiency student underwent one phase transition. These findings imply that a short explicit fluency strategy training intervention could improve the speech fluency development of high-proficiency students in EFL classrooms. The results have implications for theory and pedagogical practice relating to EFL students’ speech fluency development.