Hot Topics: Recommended Reading from Our Language Education Faculty
Social and emotional learning (SEL), ChatGPT, transnational identities, plurilingualism and translanguaging are topics that are top of mind topics for our experts.

Netta Avineri
Itās heartening to see how applied linguists, language educators, and language teacher educators are highlighting the roles of reflexivity, positionality, solidarity, and praxis (theory + action for transformation) in critical language pedagogies. The world is shifting in consequential ways, and these approaches center our roles as language educators in building toward a more just world. among academics, practitioners, and community members in a recent special issue that my colleague Danny C. Martinez and I co-edited.

Kathi Bailey
An issue thatās gotten quite a bit of attention lately, spurred by the after-effects of the pandemic, is social and emotional learning (SEL). This has been written for a general audience of teachers, parents, and school administrators. And hereās that can be downloaded for free.

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I’ve been particularly interested in, and inspired by, the discussions about plurilingualism and translanguaging in the classroom. Itās such a welcome shift in our perspective on our learnersāāwho they are and the valuable resources and experiences that they bring to the classroom. Weāre making great strides escaping from what Ortega (2019) referred to as a āmonolingual biasā in SLA research. Watch this panel on āā held at McGill University in December 2021.

Heekyeong Lee
As many of you are aware and are concerned about, the world is currently witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record. I was alarmed by a report from that, as of 2020, there were 90 million displaced people, which has not yet considered the trauma of the ongoing war in Ukraine. My father was a North Korean refugee during the Korean War. So, naturally, Iāve become interested in better equipping myself to understand language education for students from refugee backgrounds by delving deeply into the academic, social, cultural, psychological well-being of displaced people who must become language learners in their hosting countries. Among what I have learned so far, I found the framework of transnationalism and transnational identities (e.g., Duff, 2019; Warriner, 2017) particularly intriguing and appropriate, as it helps us replace the conventional dichotomies of nation-state boundaries with a more fluid and nuanced account of migrantsā learning processes and identities and the ways they maintain connections to their homeland as well as their new context. If you want to know more about it, you can read (Park & Lee, 2022) published in TESOL Quarterly.

Jason Martel
High-leverage teaching practices (also known as core practices) play a key role in my Principles & Practices of Language Teaching courses. I was therefore excited to see the recent publication of by Peercy et al. The following elements of their framework caught my eye:
- Adapting instruction based on awareness of the complexity of language and studentsā language development needs
- Engaging in advocacy with colleagues, administrators, policymakers, and community to support student learning and social-emotional needs
- Practicing self-care for well-being

Thor Sawin
Like most of us, I have been fascinated playing with ChatGPT. Iāve been trying to discover which mundane tasks we can outsource to Artificial Intelligence to free our time and energy for more engaging kinds of feedback, and on how to train the learners to work with ChatGPTās outputs as a starting place for discovery activities about style, natural and unnatural language use, and argumentation. Since AI struggles with producing level-appropriate language, it helps raise awareness with teachers and learners about language patterns at different proficiency levels. See ideas on leveraging Chat GPT education and . Iāve also been working on an Open Educational Resource on Grammar Teaching, and have been trying to collect the range of practices and methods for discovery-based learning. Iāve been aware of the for years, but continue to uncover new elements of great design within it.
Recent Publications
Read more insights from our faculty in their recent publications:
- , by Hayo Reinders and Kathi Bailey
- , by Baburhan Uzum, Netta Avineri, and Bedrettin Yazan
- , by Kathi Bailey
- , by Kathi Bailey
- , by Anne Glazer and Kathi Bailey
- , by Thor Sawin
- , by Netta Avineri and Jesse Harasta