RELC Journal

This qualitative case study examines the influence of religious identity on English as a second language (ESL) teachers’ identity in Malaysia. Coupled with the concept of transidentitying as a conceptual framework, this study applies the notion of ethical self-formation in language teacher identity (LTI) research to analyse how religious identity shapes professional ethics in ESL teachers’ professional identity. This study employed semi-structured interviews, observation data and document analysis to explore how ESL teachers navigate their professional ethics using their religious identity. The findings reveal that religious identity is a formative force in ESL teachers’ professional ethics in promoting fairness and inclusivity in ESL teaching, maintaining professional integrity, and building positive collegial relationships in workplace. Thus, this study offers insights for both researchers and educators regarding the complexities of ESL teacher identity in a multireligious setting such as Malaysia, and the need for culturally responsive training for ESL teachers to help them acknowledge and engage with these connections between religious and professional selves.

This study explores how Indonesian non-specialist primary English as a foreign language teachers negotiate perception of legitimacy and professional identity within constrained institutional contexts. Framed by Lave and Wenger's concept of legitimate peripheral participation and Wenger's 1 community of practice (CoP) framework, the study analyses interviews, classroom observations and document data from four teachers in public and private schools. Thematic analysis identified six mechanisms that shaped teachers’ legitimacy: internal and external validation; institutional recognition; subject-matter gaps; self-directed learning; societal attitudes; and multiple teaching roles. Legitimacy was locally enacted through practice and moral commitment rather than formal accreditation, mediated by access to institutional resources and sustained through individual agency. The findings extend current understandings of teacher identity by showing how legitimacy is negotiated within partial or isolated CoP. Context-specific implications highlight the importance of micro-level professional development, recognition structures and inclusive policy measures to support non-specialist teachers’ participation and identity growth.

This study examined notetaking by university-level English as a medium of instruction (EMI) students at different proficiency levels over a course of ten weeks. Ten Chinese graduate students participated in the study. The results showed that advanced students took higher quality notes and performed better academically than intermediate students. As for the use of language in taking notes, the intermediate students utilized more Chinese than English, while the reverse was true for the advanced students. With respect to generative and verbatim notetaking, the advanced students engaged more in the former and less in the latter compared to the intermediate students. Further, the advanced students and the intermediate students favored the pen and paper method and computerized notetaking, respectively. In contrast, the students all reviewed their notes after class. They also reported receiving no instruction on taking and reviewing/reorganizing notes. Based on these findings, implications are discussed.

This study investigated how university English-as-an-additional-language teachers’ professional identity mediated their receptivity to Global Englishes Language Teaching-inspired feedback. Drawing on Dialogical Self Theory as an analytical framework, semi-structured interviews incorporating purposefully designed vignettes were conducted with 13 participants from both English major and non-English major programs at universities in China. Findings showed that participants’ multiple-identity positions create both barriers and pathways for Global Englishes Language Teaching innovation. Although institutional constraints and accuracy-focused traditions may have impeded change, cultural sovereignty emerged as a powerful catalyst enabling teachers to transcend native speakerism. Implications for Global Englishes Language Teaching-oriented teacher professional programs are discussed.

Responding to current interest in how pragmatic competence can be taught and assessed in Global English contexts, this study examines whether Global Englishes (GE)-informed classroom pedagogy can support the development of early pragmatic awareness in the absence of explicit pragmatics instruction. The study reports a re-analysis of classroom data from a GE-oriented module implemented in an Italian secondary school, in which learners engaged with Asian Englishes and other English varieties through presentations and reflective journals. Although the original module was designed to raise awareness of linguistic diversity rather than to teach pragmatics, the dataset provides insight into how learners attend to meaning, interaction and sociocultural norms across English-using contexts. The analysis is framed through the Adaptive Control of Thought–Rational (ACT-R) model, focusing on the emergence of declarative pragmatic knowledge as a precursor to later procedural development. Findings indicate that learners developed conceptual awareness of context-dependent lexical meanings, sociocultural expectations shaping interpersonal communication and discourse practices associated with different Englishes. These reflections were particularly pronounced when learners engaged with Asian Englishes, which appeared to prompt noticing of pragmatic variability and reasoning about communicative appropriateness across contexts. While no evidence of procedural pragmatic competence was observed, learners’ reflections align with ACT-R's account of early pragmatic development as the accumulation of declarative knowledge through exposure, noticing and reflection. The study contributes empirical evidence to the underexplored relationship between GE pedagogy and pragmatics by showing how GE-informed classroom activities can foster foundational pragmatic awareness in school contexts where explicit pragmatics instruction is constrained.

Research has shown that teachers’ decisions about feedback on second language (L2) writing are mediated by their beliefs about teaching and learning and the contexts in which they work. Teaching and learning contexts vary widely in student profiles, curricula, program policies and institutional culture, and each of these has a significant impact on teacher practices and how these practices are mediated by teachers’ beliefs. This study adopted a case study approach to investigate the beliefs and practices of 15 teachers teaching in one of three program contexts in Canada: an English for academic preparation program for international students; an undergraduate English language studies program; and an English as a L2 settlement program for immigrants. Data was collected through in-depth teacher interviews; analyses of teacher feedback on students’ writing; and stimulated recalls by teachers about students’ papers with teacher feedback. We examined teachers’ educational and professional background and experiences and their beliefs about writing feedback, and documented features of the contexts in which they worked to understand how factors that characterize their individual teaching contexts interact with their beliefs to shape their feedback practices. Findings confirmed that the context in which teachers work has a significant impact on teacher feedback practice. How individual teachers perceived specific features of the context emerged as a strong mediator of the relationship between their beliefs and practice. The study calls for researchers to rethink the mediating role of context in the research agenda; program developers and policy makers need to design curricula that integrate teacher input and support investment; and language teacher educators are called on to consider how best to prepare teachers to analyze and understand their own engagement with the features of the contexts in which they work.

Given the challenging nature of effective teacher questioning, teachers often need support in asking more learning-conducive questions. However, little research has explored how professional development initiatives could contribute to language teachers’ effective questioning practices and the cognitions behind them. To address this gap, the present study explored the contributions of a classroom-based mentoring initiative to three Hong Kong English-language teachers’ development of questioning skills, drawing on a microgenetic analysis perspective. Data included rounds of teacher–mentor conversations and semi-structured interviews conducted with the teachers at the end of the program. Data analyses showed that as the teachers became better at identifying question types and provided increasingly sophisticated reasoning for their questioning practices, they gradually increased their talk in mentoring sessions, whereas the mentor's talk decreased. Furthermore, the teachers reported heightened awareness of questioning's contributions to student learning and a shift toward dialogic questioning, which they associated with increased student engagement and enjoyment. We discuss the implications of these findings for language teachers and teacher educators regarding how questioning can be integrated into mentoring initiatives to improve teachers’ questioning skills.

Feedback on multilingual writing is a central yet contested feature of English language education, historically guided by narrow, prescriptive norms. Drawing on our experience as researchers and editors in the fields of global Englishes and academic writing, this viewpoint article critiques conventional feedback practices that privilege prescriptive native-speaker standards and marginalise multilingual writers. We argue for a reconceptualisation of feedback as an inclusive, dialogic process that aims to improve rhetorical effectiveness and mirrors the linguistically diverse contexts within which the written language is used. The paper explores how teacher-, peer- and artificial intelligence-generated feedback can reinforce or resist normative bias, and examines the structural challenges that inhibit change, including high-stakes expectations and institutional pressures. We propose that feedback, when guided by global Englishes and translingual principles, and supported by emerging forms of critical digital literacy, can empower writers to participate confidently and equitably in global and academic discourses.

Global Englishes is an emerging line of research that has recently garnered interest from language teaching scholars. Previous studies have extensively investigated the implementation of Global Englishes in the university context but have largely ignored its implementation at other classroom contexts (e.g. elementary, secondary and teacher education). Guided by a collaborative autoethnography, we explored our professional experiences implementing Global Englishes language teaching across classroom contexts. Through introspective, reflective and collaborative exploration, we uncovered different Global Englishes language teaching pedagogical approaches, which could be characterized as content-focused, integrated, and critical and transformative. Each approach differs in its overarching objective for Global Englishes language teaching implementation, specifically for each learner group. Our findings highlight the prospects and possibilities of the Global Englishes language teaching framework for being specifically tailored to different classroom contexts.

With the growing use of large language models (LLMs) in English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching, balancing teacher control over instructional focus with students’ autonomy in using artificial intelligence chatbots while ensuring more dynamic interaction have become key pedagogical concerns. This article reports on an innovative teaching practice implemented in a foundation undergraduate English for Academic Purposes course, which featured interactive feedback, including chatbot-mediated dynamic assessment, delivered through two custom-built LLM-powered chatbots. The intervention aimed to support students’ argumentative writing with specific reference to argumentation quality and linguistic accuracy, through an iterative multi-draft process. Drawing on observation and critical reflection on this practicum, the article argues that customized LLM-powered chatbots can provide dynamic, instruction-aligned feedback at scale to scaffold EFL learners’ writing process, while instructors remain essential in the loop to address the limitations of automated feedback. The article concludes with suggestions for refining this approach in future practice.

As large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered tools such as ChatGPT enter language classrooms, teachers face new opportunities and challenges in adapting their pedagogical practices. This study adopts a duoethnographic approach to examine how two university English as a foreign language teachers in China made sense of, negotiated and integrated LLM-powered tools over time. Guided by the cognitive-socio-technical framework, the analysis traces their experiences across cognitive, workflow and organisational levels through tandem writing and dialogic conversations. Findings reveal a four-stage trajectory, from initial excitement and early experimentation to critical reflection and balanced integration, showing how enthusiasm gradually gave way to reflective, teacher-led engagement. While LLM-powered tools enhanced efficiency and creativity, they also generated tensions related to academic integrity, teacher identity and institutional support. The study highlights the situated and developmental nature of teachers’ engagement with LLM-powered tools and underscores the importance of teacher agency, ethical awareness and institutional dialogue in supporting context-sensitive integration in English language education.

While the field of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has been growing, there is currently no assessment that fairly captures the nature of ELF communication. The necessity for such an assessment has been emphasized by some scholars, but concrete efforts to develop one have been slow. To stimulate discussion and evidence gathering, this thematic review examines ELF within the framework of communities of practice, highlighting key components of the theory to underscore the importance of learning in and through practice within these communities. The discussion then turns to indigenous criteria − that is what members of communities of practice actually value when evaluating or assessing their peers − which is highly relevant in English for specific purposes assessment. In fact, many ELF studies can be classified as contexts for English for specific purposes. By reviewing studies that explore indigenous criteria, we can gain a better understanding of how domain or non-language specialists determine what is important for performance or communication within their respective communities, as well as how these criteria differ from those perceived by language specialists or applied linguists. A strong approach (i.e., focusing on task performance in real-world contexts) is then suggested, as a weak approach (i.e., focusing on language-related aspects) is inadequate for assessing ELF interactions, based on characteristics described in both ELF studies and research on indigenous criteria in various English for specific purposes contexts. The discussion concludes with a call for evidence gathering on what experienced ELF users perceive as important for communication in ELF settings.

Literacy has gained significant attention in applied linguistics and language education, with various types of literacy (e.g., multimodal literacy, assessment literacy, feedback literacy, digital literacy and artificial intelligence literacy) being proposed and researched. In this Viewpoint article, we offer a critical examination of this ‘literacy craze,’ which may lead to excessive specification and conceptual boundaries, thereby weakening the pedagogical value and applicability of research outcomes. We propose a tentative framework comprising four dimensions – that is, scope, uniqueness, utility and generativity – to evaluate and determine whether a specific type of ‘literacy’ is conceptually justified, theoretically coherent and pedagogically meaningful. We conclude by calling for future research on ‘literacies’ to be conducted in an academically responsible and pedagogically impactful way.