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The present study examines translingual practices among students enrolled in international English‐medium instruction (EMI) Master's degree programmes in a top‐rated comprehensive university in Shanghai, China. Ethnographic observations across urban/institutional spaces and social media as well as in‐depth student interviews converge to reveal that while English has been used as a lingua franca for disciplinary teaching, learning, and navigation of everyday life, students have been engaged in translingual practices (1) to understand and create meaning out of intercultural experiences in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, and (2) to negotiate epistemic frameworks as contextualized in both the institutional student management setting and the global politics of discipline‐specific knowledge production. This article is hence aimed at expanding the scope of translingual research to include critical inquiry into the role of English as a lingua franca in students' transcultural/trans‐epistemic experiences in EMI programmes in the context of internationalization of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital literacies abound in playing a foundational role in the rhythm and pattern of our lives, yet debates continue about how to harness them to teach and learn literacy. In an effort to humanize digital literacies, this department column offers a vast array of topics, from participatory work that pushes educators and researchers to communicate in local and global spaces to ways of redefining core reading and literacy skills through a screen-based, multimodal logic. This column also provides a venue for research and practical applications that depict technology use as a part of the fabric of being human. The column helps educators reconceptualize the ways that children learn with technology, media, and new communication systems; honors educator success stories and burning questions and issues; and reimagines literacy futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical thinking is believed to be an essential skill for 21st century survival and therefore has been widely promoted in education. In Hong Kong, critical thinking is one of nine generic skills to be developed across all subjects, including English. How students do critical thinking in ESL, which is seldom used outside school and yet holds high social value, has, however, been underresearched. This article is concerned with how some low-English-proficiency senior secondary students in Hong Kong conducted critical talk in English. The study specifically investigates how the students used English to express ideas that were first developed in Cantonese (the students' first language). Based on a discourse analysis of the criticality and elaborateness of the Cantonese and English utterances of one group of students, the authors discuss findings that reveal a significant contrast between the students' more elaborated discourse in Cantonese and a restricted discourse in English characterised by reduced content and limited lexicogrammatical structures. The findings call for more attention to the impacts of linguistic proficiencies on critical thinking performance of ESL learners and to how the communicative gaps in critical literate talk revealed in ESL learners' first and second languages can be gradually reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors argue that at the center of every English language learning moment lies desire: desire for the language; for the identities that English represents; for capital, power, and images that are associated with English; for what is believed to lie beyond the doors that English unlocks. However, despite its centrality within TESOL practice, the construct of desire has been largely undertheorized by English language educators. The authors propose (1) that educators in the TESOL field would benefit from a greater recognition of desire as situated and co-constructed, acknowledging that our desires are not solely our own but are intersubjectively constituted and shaped by our social, historical, political, institutional, and economic contexts; (2) that the difference between conscious and unconscious desire is significant in language learning; and (3) that whereas desire can be manipulated in exploitative or unethical ways, it can also, given the right circumstances, serve as a tool for compassionate and liberatory pedagogy. This article explores the interconnectedness of desire with motivation and investment, the commodification of English, akogare desire, racial identities, globalizing forces, colonialism, and communicative language teaching. The authors propose a revisioning of TESOL that recognizes the centrality of desire in the acquisition of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary TESOL methodologies have been characterized by compartmentalization of languages in the classroom. However, recent years have seen the beginning signs of paradigmatic change in TESOL methodologies that indicate a move toward plurilingualism. In this article, the author draws on the case of Hong Kong to illustrate how, in the past four decades, deep-rooted ideologies of linguistic purism combined with dominant TESOL knowledge claims have made it difficult to develop locally appropriate methodologies. She outlines the innovative work of some teachers who build up plurilingual pedagogies in content classrooms despite these difficulties, and on this basis proposes suggestions for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) brings people from various racialized backgrounds together in teaching, learning, and research. The idea of race, racialization, and racism are inescapable topics that arise in the contact zones created by teaching English worldwide and thus are valid topics to explore in the field. Nonetheless, unlike our peer fields such as anthropology, education, and sociology, the field of TESOL has not sufficiently addressed the idea of race and related concepts. This special topic issue is one of the first attempts in our field to fill the gap. This introductory article will survey key concepts and theories defined and debated in various fields, including race, ethnicity, culture, racialization, racism, critical race theory, and critical White studies, to provide a foundation for future explorations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the views of the authors on the marginalization and discrimination of women faculty of color teaching English as a second language. Labor-intensive administrative and teaching duties are offered to women faculty of color. If women faculty of color protest against being ill-treated, they are alleged to be unreasonable and emotional. There is a need for educational and administrative leadership to monitor the work environment of women faculty of color. Minority women educators should be given equal pay as given to their male and White colleagues.

The article discusses the result of a study citing the diversity of discursive practices in a similarly constrained classrooms during English lessons in schools that are located in different socioeconomic areas in Hong Kong, China. It is observed that majority of the students in one classroom speak mostly Cantonese at home but sometimes also speak English with their Filipino domestic helpers. For students in another schoolroom, they speak only Cantonese at home and watched the news on television. The author noticed that the English fluency of students in Classroom C were limited. For Classroom D students, their socioeconomic backgrounds and their sociolinguistic and extracurricular literacy habits are the same of those in Classroom B and C.