Fostering critical multilingual language awareness with teacher candidates in Türkiye through linguistic landscape projects

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed scientific writing practices in higher education by providing innovative support for literature exploration, content generation, paraphrasing, grammar correction, and manuscript refinement. Despite the increasing adoption of AI-powered writing platforms, comprehensive comparative studies examining their strengths, limitations, and educational implications remain limited. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the roles, capabilities, and challenges of six widely used AI tools Perplexity.ai, Braintext, QuillBot, Claude, Gemini AI, and Grammarly in supporting scientific writing. This study employed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach following the PRISMA 2020 framework. Relevant studies published between 2019 and 2025 were retrieved from Google Scholar, Scopus, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, and Taylor & Francis Online. The initial search identified 126 records. After removing duplicate records, 108 studies were screened based on titles and abstracts. Subsequently, 78 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility, and 35 peer-reviewed studies met all inclusion criteria and were included in the final synthesis. The findings revealed four major themes: (1) efficiency and productivity enhancement, (2) improvement of writing quality and linguistic accuracy, (3) ethical and academic integrity concerns, and (4) pedagogical implications for higher education and English education. The review demonstrated that each AI platform offers distinct advantages in supporting scientific writing; however, no single tool comprehensively addresses all writing requirements. Furthermore, challenges related to hallucination, factual accuracy, transparency, and overreliance remain significant concerns. The study concludes that AI should function as a cognitive support tool rather than a substitute for human intellectual engagement.

Assessment in teacher education has become increasingly learner-centred, and it is now dedicated to reflection and autonomy of preservice teachers. This study investigated the process of self-assessment among preservice teachers of English education in South Korea in the framework of requirements of academic courses and preparations to take the national teacher certification exam. The study employed qualitative thematic analysis based on reflection notes and semi-structured interviews with nine participants. The findings revealed that self-assessment functions in three mutually dependent dimensions in a way that: 1) facilitates professional competence in exam preparation, 2) facilitates metacognitive monitoring of learning, and 3) contributes to the construction of teacher identity. These dimensions identify self-assessment as one of the tools of academic preparedness and a professional development and identity construction process. This study suggests that teacher education programmes should integrate structured self-assessment activities into coursework and teacher certification preparation programmes to promote preservice teachers’ metacognitive awareness, reflective practice, and professional identity formation. The findings also imply that teacher education curricula in South Korea should balance examination-oriented preparation with reflective and identity-based pedagogical training so that preservice teachers can develop academic competence and sustainable professional self-awareness.

ABSTRACT Teacher educators play a crucial role in the educational research-teaching nexus, making it important to understand how they view research that bridges a subject discipline with school teaching, as well as how they use this research in initial teacher education (ITE). The present study contributes to this understanding by spotlighting the views of a cadre of teacher educators specialising in a subject discipline. Based on in-depth interviews with 21 teacher educators drawn from English literary studies in Sweden, this qualitative study examines how English literary scholars view literature education research and its usefulness in ITE. It shows that participants regarded their educational research literacy as limited, predominantly held a negative view of literature education research and were often disinclined to include this research in their courses. The study points to challenges of realising the close relation between educational research and teaching, offering important implications for ITE stakeholders.

ABSTRACT This paper critically examines how national policies promoting generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) are enacted within English Further Education (FE) colleges between 2023 and 2025, with a focus on vocational and technical education. Drawing on documentary analysis of national policy, regulatory texts and institutional materials, the study is informed by policy enactment theory and a social justice lens. The study identifies a persistent gap between ambitious national discourse (emphasising personalised learning, workload reduction and workforce preparation) and uneven institutional practices. Documentary sources on a small number of early-adopting FE colleges indicate benefits such as administrative time savings and enhanced feedback processes, but significant barriers remain, including limited access to professional development, concerns regarding assessment malpractice and unequal institutional capacity. Critical scholarship suggests that failure to enact technology with substantive policy, institutional and practitioner guidance can accentuate existing inequities, particularly in rural or under-resourced contexts. The paper supports arguments that GenAI, frequently framed as a democratising innovation in vocational education, may instead intensify structural divides without equity-oriented policy support, and concludes by proposing clearer regulatory guidance, capacity-building measures and differentiated funding as conditions for more just and sustainable GenAI integration in the FE sector.

ABSTRACT Social-emotional learning (SEL) has been widely discussed as a framework for supporting learners’ well-being, relationships, and academic development, yet its relevance to language education in underrepresented contexts remains insufficiently explored. This study examines how teachers and learners in Vietnamese secondary English classrooms perceived SEL-informed teaching, understood here as socially and emotionally responsive classroom practices and teacher orientations guided by SEL principles rather than as a formal SEL programme. Guided by SEL theory, sociocultural theory, and humanistic language pedagogy, we employed a qualitative interview design. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Vietnamese with ten English language teachers and ten secondary school learners from two public schools in an urban area of Vietnam. The interviews were transcribed, translated into English, and analysed thematically. Four interrelated themes emerged from the data. Participants associated SEL-informed teaching with emotionally safer and more supportive classrooms, greater learner confidence and participation, and stronger empathy and collaboration among peers. At the same time, both teachers and learners described tensions between relational pedagogy and the exam-oriented expectations of Vietnamese schooling. Most notably, several teachers reported a shift in how they understood their professional role, moving from a narrow focus on content delivery toward a more relational and developmental view of teaching. The study contributes context-sensitive evidence from Vietnam and suggests that SEL in language education is best understood not as a fixed imported framework, but as a pedagogical orientation interpreted and negotiated within local educational realities.

ABSTRACT Within the current global reimagining of English language education through a decolonial lens, China represents a unique example of a top-down reform agenda. Unlike grassroots decolonial initiatives in many Global South contexts, China’s approach is embedded in state policy that reframes English to promote national culture and enhance international discourse power – captured in the ideological call to ‘tell China’s story well’. Adopting an ecological perspective, this study examines how secondary school English teachers in China perceive and negotiate this ideological repositioning in their classrooms. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 12 teachers from diverse school contexts and one teacher educator, the analysis reveals a complex interplay between ideological alignment and practical constraint. Many participants viewed the policy as a meaningful reform to strengthen students’ cultural identity, reduce cultural barriers in language learning, and enhance China’s global voice. However, implementation was hindered by challenges including difficulties integrating cultural content into exam-driven curricula and teachers’ perceived gaps in cultural knowledge and pedagogical resources. These findings illuminate how decolonial goals can be simultaneously supported and constrained by intersecting ideologies – native-speakerism, neoliberalism, and neo-nationalism – within China’s educational ecology. While top-down policy creates enabling conditions, decolonisation ultimately remains pedagogical work requiring reflective, adaptive, and context-responsive practice.

This study examines the psychological well-being of community-recruited Latino immigrants in Georgia's Atlanta-Dalton corridor, focusing on cultural, structural, and belief-based determinants of thriving in a nontraditional immigrant destination. Drawing on a secondary survey and focus group data collected by the Atlanta-based Latin American Association, we investigate how multicultural comfort, immigration status, religious worldview, and socioeconomic factors jointly predict psychological well-being. The sample included 479 Latino immigrants, with measures including demographic characteristics, income, education, employment, English proficiency, multicultural comfort, religious influence, and well-being (assessed via the Brief Inventory of Thriving). Hierarchical regression models evaluated the unique contributions of these variables. Findings reveal that multicultural comfort emerged as the strongest predictor of well-being in the present sample, followed by income and religious worldview. In the complete-case analysis, immigration status showed a suggestive pattern: undocumented immigrants and permanent residents reported higher well-being than U.S.-born Latinos. However, multiple imputation sensitivity analysis indicated that these immigration status effects were not robust to the inclusion of cases lost to listwise deletion, whereas multicultural comfort, income, and religious worldview remained significant predictors across both analytic approaches; employment was significant under classical but not heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors. English proficiency and education were not significant in either analysis. These results highlight the importance of emotional inclusion, stable resources, and meaning-making systems in promoting well-being, while suggesting that observed differences by immigration status may partly reflect differential survey completion patterns rather than population-level effects. Policy implications include promoting multicultural belonging, expanding economic opportunities, supporting legal integration, and leveraging faith-based networks as resilience resources.

ABSTRACT This study examines how teachers and students in multilingual Thai secondary classrooms design, enact, and experience translanguaging during English language lessons. Drawing on classroom observations, video recordings, field notes, and stimulated-recall interviews, the study investigates how teachers deploy translanguaging to support comprehension, participation, and classroom management and how students use translanguaging as they learn. Findings show that teachers engaged in both planned translanguaging, such as bilingual task sequences and intentional L1 scaffolds, and spontaneous switching for interactional purposes. Students, however, used Thai and Isan fluidly and instinctively to negotiate meaning, collaborate with peers, and manage affective demands, often without perceiving their practices as strategic. The study affirms Cenoz and Gorter’s (2021). Pedagogical Translanguaging. Cambridge University Press) pedagogical translanguaging framework while revealing a gap between teacher-designed scaffolds and students’ emergent multilingual practices. These insights highlight the pedagogical value of integrating students’ lived linguistic repertoires and challenge monolingual norms in English language education. Implications for translanguaging-informed pedagogy, theory, and research in multilingual and multicultural settings are discussed.

English language learning through mobile devices has significantly transformed educational practices over the past decade. With the increasing prevalence of smartphones and tablets, learners can access a wealth of resources that enhance their language acquisition process. This study investigates the impact of mobile-assisted English language education, focusing on seamless learning and the integration of multilingualism. Using a quantitative methodology, data were collected through questionnaires from 134 teachers and 190 students and analyzed using SPSS software. The findings reveal several important insights. Purposeful and strategic use of code-switching emerges as an effective pedagogical tool for enhancing second language learning in English classrooms. Additionally, integrating information and communication technologies into English language instruction positively impacts students' multilingualism and language acquisition. Furthermore, learners engaging with various forms of English demonstrate distinct language preferences and proficiencies, often shaped by regional sociocultural factors. The study's novelty lies in its exploration of multilingualism and code-switching in the learning process, emphasizing the importance of embracing linguistic diversity in educational settings and understanding its profound influence on language acquisition. Practical recommendations are provided to improve English language learning outcomes through mobile learning strategies.

ABSTRACT Dialogic pedagogy is well-established in English education research; however, it is typically enacted within highly regulated, assessment-driven classroom environments. This article offers a practice-led, autoethnographic account of teaching GCSE English Literature in a hyper-regulated secondary school context. It examines how institutional norms of surveillance and compliance shape students’ willingness to interpret. Drawing on classroom episodes, including changes to seating arrangements and exploration of patriarchal power in Romeo and Juliet, this study reframes current dialogic teaching as a method enacted under conditions of constraint. It explores how classroom conditions mediate whether context functions as sanctioned knowledge within a regulated school system, or as an independent critical lens, freely explored by each student. While grounded in the terminology of GCSE assessment in the UK, the analysis contributes to international conversations about teaching literature dialogically within increasingly regulated school environments.

Teaching English to large and varied student populations has made adaptive, learner-aware resource recommendation a pressing need, yet most deployed systems still lean on collaborative filtering or content heuristics that read learners only at the surface. Such systems tend to stumble in four recurring ways: they miss the finer grain of linguistic competence, they reason over sparse and brittle knowledge associations, they falter whenever a learner or a resource is new, and they rarely travel well to settings their training never saw. We address these problems together through a framework in which a large language model and a knowledge graph inform one another, their match to each learner mediated by a fitness function adapted from ecological niche theory. The language model reads a learner's own writing to estimate evolving competence and proposes relations that fill thin regions of the graph, while the graph keeps the model's inferences anchored to the prerequisite and difficulty structure of English. A niche fitness score then judges how closely each resource's demands meet a learner's needs, and a path generator orders the survivors into prerequisite-respecting study sequences. On logs from 3,214 learners, 12,486 resources, and 287,653 interactions, the method reaches a Precision@5 of 0.782 and an NDCG@10 of 0.724, ahead of five baselines. Ablation was, frankly, the part that surprised us: the niche filter matters more to ranking quality than the model's semantic re-scoring. A three-axis generalization protocol, splitting transfer across learners, resource types, and difficulty levels, yields a composite index of 0.863, with cold-start decay held to 18.3%.

Through innovative technology and pedagogy-based training, this community service program sought to improve the professional competency of vocational English teachers. The primary issue found was the inadequate use of cutting-edge digital technology and student-centered pedagogy in vocational English classrooms, which had an impact on both student engagement and teaching effectiveness. Focus Group Discussions (FGD), seminars, and workshops were used in a professional development program for fifteen English instructors at SMKN 2 Palembang in order to address this problem. Teachers were able to investigate technology-enhanced learning platforms, creative teaching methods, digital assessment tools, and vocational-context English education through the program's collaborative and participatory techniques. Observations, interviews, surveys, and reflective assessment sheets were used to gather data. The results showed that teachers' comprehension and practical abilities in incorporating cutting-edge technology and pedagogy into classroom activities had considerable improvement from 13.33% before the training to 86.67% after the training. Teachers showed greater assurance when utilizing digital technologies to create interactive, student-centered learning resources. The sustainability of technology-based professional development programs was positively perceived by the participants. The program came to the conclusion that innovative technology and pedagogy-based training successfully enhanced the professional competency of vocational English teachers and promoted more flexible, interesting, and pertinent English learning strategies in vocational education settings.

ABSTRACT Defined as a ‘link language’ in the Sri Lankan Constitution, teachers of English are encouraged to teach English as a local language that promotes communication and coexistence among diverse ethnoreligious communities in the country. However, little is known about teachers’ perceptions of Sri Lankan Englishes (SLE) that reflect local diversity. This study explores eight English language teacher educators’ narratively-constructed perceptions of the ethnoreligious diversity in student essays on Sinhala-Buddhist, Tamil-Hindu, Islamic, and Portuguese Burgher-Catholic festivals with a high number of multilingual SLE lexis. Their multiple, complex, and situated responses included deeply personal reactions, and the affordances and challenges of incorporating SLE in teaching and assessment. Overall, they presented a nuanced, practice-based assertion of a social justice-oriented role for teaching and researching ethnoreligious variation within country-based Englishes that could potentially decolonise some aspects of English language education in Sri Lanka and in comparable South Asian contexts.

ABSTRACT This article offers a critical comparative analysis of language-in-education policies and practices in two postcolonial countries (Ghana and Pakistan) and one non-colonial context (Nepal), examining how these policies sustain or challenge social (in)justice. Drawing on a comparative education policy framework and Nancy Fraser’s multidimensional model of social justice – encompassing redistribution, recognition, and representation – we analyse multilingual and English language education policies across the three national contexts, attending to both historical legacies and contemporary political-economic forces. Despite formal commitments to mother-tongue-based multilingual education, our analysis reveals enduring tensions between symbolic policy goals and the material realities of implementation. Across contexts, structural and ideological barriers continue to reproduce inequalities of multilingualism. We argue that meaningful linguistic justice in education requires more than policy-level recognition of Indigenous and local languages; it necessitates deeper structural and ideological transformations that disrupt entrenched hierarchies privileging dominant languages, particularly English.

ABSTRACT This paper examines how English education in South Korea has become a site of moral negotiation and ideological contestation. Once associated with global mobility, English now signifies both aspiration and inequality. Adopting a post-qualitative approach that ‘thinks with theory’, the study brings Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital and Foucault’s notion of governmentality into dialogue with policy documents, media editorials, and academic debates. It introduces the concept of moralised capital to explain how linguistic competence is evaluated not only economically but also morally. The analysis shows how moral vocabularies formed during early globalisation continue to shape contemporary debates on fairness and educational virtue. Situating English education within the moral economy of post-neoliberal Korea, the paper argues that the ‘English question’ constitutes a form of moral politics. It concludes by proposing pedagogical rationality as a way to decouple proficiency from moral judgement and restore communicative agency.

ABSTRACT English education in China is evolving with textbooks playing a key role in shaping student identities. This study presents a comparative multimodal analysis of two Chinese middle school English textbooks (used in 2012–2024 vs. post-2024). Drawing on social semiotics and critical discourse analysis, the study examines discourse as both representation and interaction, exploring how verbal and visual materials interplay to recontextualize both Western and local student identity. In terms of representation, findings reveal significant shifts in student identities, which are legitimated through the strategic use of social actors and tactics of intersubjectivity. In terms of interaction, analysis shows the earlier textbook potentially weakens student identity construction due to its relatively random pedagogical interactions, while the newer version strengthens identity construction by engaging learners with more task-essential representations. This study provides a new lens for understanding how intermodality in textbooks works to frame, reshape, and legitimate student identities.

Reframing English language teacher education through multiliteracies in the digital age: A self-efficacy-mediated model of pedagogical competence.

ABSTRACT With the increasing prominence and proliferation of social media influencers promoting ‘exam hacks’, ‘things your English teacher won’t tell you’ and even paid for predicted English exam papers, this article highlights the implications for English education and the professional teaching community. By applying a Baudrillardian framework, the essay explores the ‘murder of reality’ within the English classroom, arguing that digital simulacra, created by ‘influencers’ replace actual literary analysis with a hyperreal, commodified performance of knowledge. It is hoped that this can serve as a starting point for discussions regarding how English teachers and subject organisations might respond to the growing influence of these personalities on pupils’ attitudes. This is particularly problematic, as this essay will demonstrate, when the information shared by these influencers is, at best, tenuous and, at worst, factually incorrect.

ABSTRACT Coastal regions increasingly face climate-related hazards such as tsunamis, highlighting an urgent need for schools to equip young learners with disaster-preparedness knowledge in line with Sustainable Development Goal 13 (Climate Action). Yet SDG 13 is still rarely integrated systematically into English language education, particularly in EFL contexts. This study investigates the integration of SDG 13 (Climate Action) into English language education using 360° virtual reality (VR) to improve students’ vocabulary acquisition and tsunami awareness. A quasi-experimental design was adopted with 96 junior high school students in Taiwan, divided into two groups: an immersive VR group (HiVR) and a desktop video group (LiVR). Both groups engaged with the same SDG-themed 360° videos but through different interaction methods. Vocabulary and disaster knowledge were assessed using pre- and post-tests, and data were analyzed through independent samples t-tests and ANCOVA. The results revealed that the VR group significantly outperformed the desktop group in vocabulary acquisition and showed higher tsunami awareness scores after controlling for prior knowledge. These findings indicate that immersive VR offers an effective means of contextualized vocabulary learning and enhances student engagement in tsunami- and climate-related English education. The study highlights the potential of VR as a pedagogical tool that supports both language development and sustainability-oriented disaster education in EFL contexts.