Recently, we have been witnessing the emergence of scholarly interest and professional advocacy efforts centering on systemic, intersectional, fluid, and contextualized inequalities and dynamic hierarchies constructed by essentialized and idealized (non)native speakerhood (speakerism/speakering) and its personal and professional implications for English language teaching (ELT) profession(als). This critical literature review aims to portray, examine, and guide the existing scholarship focusing on a myriad of issues related to ELT professionals traditionally conceptualized as “native” and “non-native” English-speaking teachers. We come to a working conclusion that (non)native speaker/teacherhood is an epistemologically hegemonic, historically colonial, contextually enacted (perceived and/or ascribed), and dynamically experienced socio-professional phenomenon intersecting with other categories of identity (e.g., race, ethnicity, country of origin, gender, religion, sexuality/sexual orientation, social class, schooling, passport/visa status, and physical appearance, among others) in making a priori connections and assertions about individuals as language users and teachers and thereby forming discourses and practices of (in)equity, privilege, marginalization, and discrimination in ELT.

Self-assessment (SA), as an activity for reflecting on one's own performance and abilities (Black & Wiliam, 1998), has been a topic of interest to educators over the years. Among second language (L2) educators, SA began growing in popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, when L2 educators’ focus shifted from analyzing linguistic systems to examining how learners learn a language. Many can-do statements and SA descriptors have been developed for L2 language learning, including SA grids aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR, Council of Europe, 2022) and can-do statements prepared by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL) in collaboration with the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages (NCSSFL) (ACTFL, n.d.). Textbooks and other L2 learning materials, including online apps, often contain SA items. SA can be used in conjunction with other assessments, such as traditional objective assessments, peer assessments, and portfolios. Teachers are often encouraged to incorporate SA into their curricula as part of the promotion of constructivist approaches to education, which have been particularly popular since the late 1980s (e.g., Nunan, 1988; Tarone & Yule, 1989); SA resonates well with modern learning theories such as learner-centered education, self-regulated learning, and autonomous learning (Butler, in press).

Learning pragmatics involves learning linguistic forms and their communicative functions as well as the context where the form-function relationships are realized. Given its socially grounded, context-sensitive nature, pragmatics may be best learned in a technology-enhanced environment that provides direct access to contextualized communicative practice. Technology can help produce rich multimodal input, opportunities for interaction with consequences, and experience-based learning, which are all important elements of pragmatics learning. This lecture highlights these benefits of technology-enhanced pragmatics learning using a digital game as a sample platform. We created a digital game to teach request-making in English by having participants experience interpersonal consequences of their request as feedback (observing their interlocutor's reactions to their choice of request-making forms). Using the digital game with Chinese learners of English, a series of studies were conducted to investigate a variety of topics, such as the effects of different feedback conditions on learning outcomes, role of metapragmatic knowledge in learning, and transfer of request-making knowledge to a novel speech act. This lecture presents findings from these studies and concludes with future research directions on technology-enhanced pragmatics learning.

This paper puts forward a research agenda in the area of explicit and implicit knowledge and learning of second or additional languages. Based on a brief overview of reliable findings as well as open questions in the field, three agenda items are highlighted. First, valid and reliable measures of explicit and, in particular, implicit knowledge and learning need to be identified and their suitability for participants of different ages established. Second, and closely related to the previous point, explicit and implicit knowledge and learning should be investigated across the human lifespan. Therefore, studies need to include to a greater extent hitherto under-represented groups such as children and older adults in order to pinpoint the benefits or otherwise of implicit and, in particular, explicit knowledge and learning in these age ranges. Third, researchers should aim to capture with their designs the complex and dynamic interplay of the multiple cognitive, affective, biographical and contextual factors that influence the development of explicit and implicit knowledge over time. Concrete tasks for future research are proposed under these three agenda items, with a view to assisting interested investigators in formulating research questions and specifying research designs.

We are living in an era characterized by multilingualism, global mobility, superdiversity (Blommaert, 2010), and digital communications. Mobility and multilingualism, however, have long characterized most geolinguistic contexts, including those where monolingual ideologies have influenced the formation of contemporary nation states (Cenoz, 2013). As language is a pillar of both curriculum and instruction, in many academic spaces around the world efforts are on the rise to acknowledge the colonial origins of English, decenter the dominance of Standard English(es), and decolonize knowledge production (e.g., Bhambra et al., 2018; de Sousa Santos, 2017). Additionally, many ‘inner circle’ (Kachru, 2001) Anglophone contexts have long witnessed the centrifugal forces of multilingualism. Yet what prevails in institutional academic contexts is a centripetal pull toward what has been captured in phrases such as ‘linguistic mononormativity’ (Blommaert & Horner, 2017) or ‘Anglonormativity’ (McKinney, 2017). Nowhere is this pull more evident than in the sphere of writing for publication, relentlessly construed as an ‘English Only’ space, as exemplified in Elnathan's (2021) claim in the journal Nature: ‘English is the international language of science, for better or for worse.’

This reflective piece tells the story of how I started out doing Conversation Analysis (CA) and have been transitioning into doing mixed methods for some years now. My basic argument is that language learning talk is too complex a phenomenon to analyse using a single methodology. Specifically, it is extremely difficult to isolate from the interaction concrete evidence of the learning of specific individual items in terms of change of cognitive state. This is owing to the singular complexity of language learning, which adds an extra level of complexity to language learning talk, hence supercomplexity. Of course, the counter-argument to this would be that CA as a methodology is designed to reveal the complexity and fluidity of spoken interaction. The complex organisation of ordinary conversation (Sacks et al., 1974) and of varieties of institutional interaction (Drew & Heritage, 1992) have been very well established for a very long time. CA has been extremely successful and popular as a methodology for the analysis of spoken interaction in a huge range of settings. There have been many CA studies of language learning talk over the last few decades, including my own. So why do I now feel that it cannot portray the full complexity of language learning talk on its own? There is an idiosyncratic problem with language learning talk, namely that it has an additional level of complexity superimposed on top of the regular problems of analysing spoken interaction. This is because language is the object as well as the vehicle of language learning talk.

There has been a great deal of interest in second language vocabulary studies regarding the potential of reading as a source of incidental vocabulary learning. More recently, several studies have also focused on comparing reading with other input modes, such as listening, or reading-while-listening. Among these studies there are two – Brown et al. (2008) and Vidal (2011) – that have been extensively cited because of the evidence they provided regarding the differential effects of reading versus listening in promoting incidental vocabulary gains. The present study presents different arguments for replication of these two original studies as well as specific ideas on how such replications could be conducted.

This article puts forward several proposals for replicating two well-known First Exposure studies dealing with the earliest stages of adult second language acquisition. Both of them enquire into the word-level knowledge that complete beginners are able to extract from minimal input when exposed to a new language for the first time. They also focus on several input variables that may enhance learning from minimal input. However, the first, by Gullberg et al. (2012), uses audiovisual input in Dutch learners of Chinese to assess word recognition and word meaning after watching a short video; while the second, by Shoemaker and Rast (2013), uses oral input with French learners of Polish to measure word recognition before and after 6.5 hours of intensive classroom exposure. Close and approximate replications of these studies can help to re-evaluate and generalise the findings, as well as contributing additional relevant data to the field.