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This paper draws from a collaborative project in which we piloted a Critical Multilingual Language Awareness approach (CMLA) in a preparatory class for recently arrived secondary school students in Sweden. We adapted material on Language Awareness from We Are Multilingual (https://www.wamcam.org). This adapted approach followed the five principles of educational design for multilingual learners, which also relate to cognitive, performative, affective, social and power domains of Language Awareness. Data consist of audio- and video-recorded interactions from classroom observations, student/teacher interviews, and teaching/student-produced material. With a process-oriented focus, we discuss student participation in this co-learning design as contingent upon practices of curiosity. A focus is also on the co-learning process through reflection on activity, and how cultivating new ways of listening, involving multilingual study mentoring, may spur linguistic participation.

Critical applied linguistics remains deeply relevant today, arguably more than ever, but it needs constant renewal. This paper returns to these concerns to assess where this project has got to and where it may be headed. I review first both long-term and short-term political trends, from the rise of neoliberalism to the COVID pandemic. Next, I discuss responses to these conditions – questions of pessimism or hope – and their relevance for applied linguistics. This is followed by a discussion of epistemological changes (or turns) in applied linguistics, and an argument that we need to be both responsive to and skeptical of such shifts. Above all, we need to be adept at looking at them in relation to each other – material and discursive, translingual and raciolinguistic, queer and practice, multilingual and decolonial, for example, – to disrupt their apparent novelty and ensure there is always a critical dimension. Finally I conclude by looking again at a critical applied linguistic agenda for the future, suggesting ten key principles we need to keep in mind.

Gestures have been shown to reflect speakers’ embodied thinking about mathematical concepts and play a role in conveying understandings in teaching/learning interactions. However little research has been done to consider the similarities and differences in the functions that a particular gesture might have in mathematics classrooms in different parts of the world. In this paper, the occurrence of a metaphorical gesture to do with addition in a bilingual mathematics classroom in the UK and two Spanish-speaking classrooms in Chile is investigated. To do this, we elaborate on Systemic Functional Linguistics to consider how the gesture is integrated with other modes of communication to reflect the immediate context of situation as well as a wider mathematics education context of culture. An analysis of the interactions in three classrooms illustrates how the gesture seemed to convey extra meanings, sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory, to what was expressed through other modes. Besides adding meaning to the mathematical ideas conveyed verbally, the gesture could potentially convey meanings to participants in the interactions about interpersonal relationships which were not as evident in the verbal communication.

A tribute to Keith Davidson, who died in April 2021. Keith combined a deep and passionate knowledge of linguistics with an equally deep and passionate understanding of the teaching and assessment of English. His insight and engagement with key issues of linguistics and English education is an invaluable legacy to students and teachers of language across the English-speaking world – and beyond.

Many scholars use the complexity of colour categorisation as a key example in arguments about cognitive linguistics. This paper focuses on two of the main modern arguments of colour perception in r...

The book under review aims to help readers who do not have solid statistical knowledge to apply basic and key statistical principles and methods in corpus studies. It serves both as an overview of ...

This book is thought-provoking for the field of applied linguistics (AL). Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South seeks to map the areas in which AL has been overwhe...

A number of studies have reported the cultural representations in English textbooks in many contexts, especially those in Asia. However, these studies relied on a small data set and the findings su...

Applied linguistics was originally brought to Japan primarily through English language teaching (ELT) professionals, and its potential has been explored exclusively in connection with ELT. As a res...

Multimodal News Analysis across Cultures co-authored by Helen Caple, Changpeng Huan and Monika Bednarek, demonstrates the analysis of news values by combining three dimensions, namely cross-linguis...

This special issue explores the affordances and limitations of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as a critical social praxis, specifically within the context of teacher education. We define Cri...

The articles in this issue of Language and Education highlight three important areas of research that have evolved in the education of multilingual learners: (1) culturally sustaining pedagogies (C...

Historically, academic language (AL) has been a highly contentious and debated construct, criticized because of its framing as a set of objective linguistic forms requisite in academic settings, as...

This article responds to recent calls to investigate the role of agents and the connections between layers of agency in the development and implementation of language policy and planning (LPP). Usi...

‘Law is an overwhelmingly linguistic institution’1 and forensic linguistics helps with overcoming language-based discrimination, injustice, and poor practices in the law. As a speech pathologist, I...

This paper reports on an interdisciplinary pedagogical research project involving academic literacy experts and lecturers at a School of Nursing. Specifically, the paper focusses on the development...

This paper explores a potential avenue of dialogue between Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), namely genre. SFL's approach to modeling genre is br...

(2020). New Frontiers in Forensic Linguistics: Themes and Perspectives in Language and the Law in Africa and beyond. South African Journal of African Languages: Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 238-241.

The aim of this study is to analyse the emergence and development of Saussurean linguistic thought and structural linguistics in Turkey after the 1920s. Although Saussurean and structural linguisti...

Since its inception in the 1950s and early 1960s, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has resulted in a large body of scholarship and been widely applied to language teaching/learning and discour...