Article by College of Education’s Emma Britton and Theresa Austin Highlighted as Editor’s Pick by the Journal Language Awareness

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A recent research article co-authored by the College of Education’s Emma Britton and Theresa Austin has been highlighted as the ‘Editor’s Pick’ in the most recent issue of the journal Language Awareness.

In the article, “Learning and teaching trans-inclusive language and register hybridity for multilingual writers,” Britton and Austin report on practitioner research led by one classroom teacher in the context of ENG101, a university developmental English writing course. It explains how the teacher sought to raise the “critical language awareness” of English as a second language (ESL) writers in the course and explores how one Chinese learner, Wesheng, explored transgender themes during an academic writing unit in this course.

Focusing on Wesheng’s written and oral discourse, the article shows how his teacher developed a deeper understanding of his textual practices, which informed improvements in her teaching. The article also shows how Wesheng exhibited hybridity in gender-inclusive and academic forms of English and reveals how Wesheng’s interactions with instructional resources informed his enactment of egalitarian and multilingual voices in his text. It concludes with a discussion of how register analysis can support second language teachers in implementing critical language pedagogies in writing classrooms and identifies instructional strategies that teachers can implement to simultaneously increase gender inclusivity and support students’ writing development.

“Within the second language (L2) writing field, there has been ongoing debate about the extent to which the integration of critical and socio-political content helps L2 writers to achieve their academic and professional goals, and there is resistance to integrating it,” says Britton, a lecturer in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies (TECS).

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“There is a likelihood that as L2 programs and instructors around the globe engage with texts from countries using English, the instructors and students may become aware of the non-paradigmatic use of pronouns and other lexicon that better represent the gender orientation of writers,” adds Austin, professor and educational sociolinguist in TECS and the Language, Literacy and Culture Concentration. “This evidence is found in texts that range from newspapers, magazines, to songs and movie descriptions, to blogs and social media.”

Ultimately, the article advocates for a more sociolinguistic orientation, where learners become attuned to the ways that gendered language forms are fluid and evolving in various modes of communication, which Britton and Austin argue is particularly needed in countries where such social identifications are prohibited.

The article is supplemented by a downloadable video of an interview of Britton and Austin about their research conducted by the editor of Language Awareness, Masatoshi Sato of the Andrés Bello National University in Chile.

Language Awareness is an international peer-reviewed journal that publishes theoretically and methodologically rigorous studies related to language awareness. The journal strives to be inclusive in terms of languages and contexts at all educational levels. It includes research conducted in naturalistic and instructed learning settings with different theoretical and methodological approaches.