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Peer review is now a commonplace practice in process-oriented writing instruction. A crucial aspect of peer review is assessing another classmate's work, which encompasses the act of disagreement. Given its prevalence in the classroom, it is necessary to analyze how L2 learners mitigate disagreement in the context of peer review with other L2 learners and native speakers. The present paper presents a qualitative analysis of action research from an introductory English writing class at the university level including native speakers of English and international students from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The conversation-based peer review sessions were analyzed for various mitigation strategies including token agreement, hedging, prefacing positive remarks and requests for clarification. The analysis shows that L2 learners and native speakers of English use similar mitigation strategies, and it demonstrates the co-construction of meaning in peer review interactions.

In the U.S./Mexico borderlands, local language varieties face frequent discrimination and delegitimization or "linguistic terrorism." The present study uses the three-level positioning framework to analyze how young adults in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) in south Texas construct borderland identities by positioning themselves with respect to "linguistic terrorism" in sociolinguistic interviews. In their narratives, young adults enact, ascribe, and accept but also reject, subvert, and reconstitute language ideologies, including national identities, raciolinguistic ideologies, and standard language ideologies. An understanding of these multiple and contradictory borderland positionalities holds important implications for critical language awareness as a way for language educators to counter "linguistic terrorism" in both physical and metaphorical borderlands.