Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly transforming education, including the ways students learn languages and experience motivation. While recent research has focused mainly on the affordances of GenAI, much less attention has been given to its potential risks for learners’ motivation and engagement. This paper addresses this gap by examining how GenAI may both enhance and undermine language learning motivation. We discuss how GenAI can affect the satisfaction or frustration of the three basic psychological needs – autonomy, competence, and relatedness – and how these effects may shift motivational orientations from intrinsic to extrinsic forms. We then explore how GenAI might reduce cognitive engagement, critical thinking, and assessment integrity when used uncritically. We also consider key methodological opportunities and challenges in researching GenAI-mediated language learning motivation. Based on this analysis, we identify key directions for future research agendas, including the balance between autonomy and dependence, sustaining motivation beyond novelty effects, rehumanizing digital learning, and redefining teachers’ roles in GenAI-rich contexts. We also call for theoretical renewal, ethical awareness, and methodological innovation in the study of GenAI-mediated motivation. A deeper understanding of these processes will allow future research and practice to harness GenAI’s potential responsibly, promoting motivation that is both sustainable and self-determined.

This paper develops an interdisciplinary perspective, which combines ideas from anthropology, sociolinguistics and interface design, on how AI chatbots project recognizable social identities. Specifically, it brings together Silvio’s notion of animation, the social practices through which “humanness” is projected onto nonhuman entities, and Blommaert’s notion of enoughness, the idea that the authenticity of linguistic performances is a matter not of the accuracy of a performance but of how audiences collectively evaluate it as socially recognizable. The analysis draws on a corpus of metapragmatic artifacts posted on social media sites related to ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode and Sesame.ai’s hyper-realistic voice interface. Analysis of these artifacts reveals how designers, users and AI systems co-produce boundaries of authenticity through the deployment and uptake of linguistic and discursive features such as accent and stance. In doing so, they continually recalibrate what counts as culturally competent performances, shaping emergent norms of identity and sociality around AI. The paper highlights how humanness and culturality are distributed across technical systems, corporate discourse, and human interlocutors, with important implications for understanding how generative AI reproduces cultural stereotypes by drawing on the linguistic labor of users.

This article examines how digital misogynistic discourse produces real-world consequences through platform affordances in post-digital conditions. The study focuses on LIHKG, a popular online forum in Hong Kong, where users collectively target female influencers with persistent verbal abuse. Through critical discourse-centred online-offline nexus ethnography (CD-OONE), which builds on established traditions of entextualization and discursive circulation, the study shows how users creatively appropriate platform features for sustaining misogynistic language. Unlike algorithmically mediated social media, LIHKG operates largely through human agency, such as strategic upvoting/downvoting, nested quoting, custom emoji, forum slang, and serial threads. The analysis reveals how these affordances-in-practice amplify and normalize misogynistic discourse strategies on the forum. A case study traces a 5-year aggression cycle targeting one female influencer, drawing on forum threads, the influencer’s own social media posts, and mainstream news coverage to show how forum discourse produces offline reputational damage that recursively triggers additional online attacks. Theoretically, the study extends critical discourse analysis by showing how sociotechnical conditions shape scalar amplification of harmful discourse online and offline. Methodologically, it provides a practical framework for documenting, tracing, and analyzing discourse circulation and the real-world consequences of digital aggression.

“Conversational” technologies, products, and services are in the headlines more than ever. But what does it mean to be “conversational?” We address this question through the lens of six decades of empirical research in conversation analysis, which has identified and described the foundational structure and interactional machinery of human sociality. We consider not only how tacit notions of “conversationality” manifest in technologies, products, and services, such as role-play, communication training, and chatbots, but also in research methodologies such as focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and laboratory studies – all of which rarely acknowledge how researcher–participant interaction shapes the data collected. Drawing on a range of examples from different institutional settings, we consider how and whether such technologies can or should leverage “conversation” in ways that reproduce “naturalistic” interactions – and ask what might count as “naturalistic” in this context anyway? We argue that if human conversationality becomes a benchmark, then humans themselves will fail tests derived from normative, not empirical, understandings of how social interaction works.

Avoidable research waste – that is, research that is unnecessary, poorly designed, or insufficiently communicated – limits the value of scholarship. Building on our earlier work, where we drew lessons from healthcare research to describe five sources of avoidable waste in applied linguistics research, this article focuses on the fifth source: quality of research reporting. Inadequate reporting limits understanding, constrains evidence-informed practice, undermines efforts to replicate or scrutinize empirical claims, and impedes research synthesis. Drawing on precedents from healthcare, particularly the development and widespread adoption of the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials reporting guideline and the work of the Enhancing the Quality and Transparency Of Health Research Network, we illustrate how coordinated, consensus-driven reporting guidelines can improve the transparency, completeness, and usability of published research. A survey of instructions to authors across leading applied linguistics journals reveals fragmented and uneven guidance. While promising examples exist, field-wide reporting standards remain absent. We argue that applied linguistics is well positioned to develop design-specific, applied linguistics-focused reporting guidelines through a collaborative, international process involving methodologists, editors, research synthesists, and practitioners. Such an initiative would represent a critical step toward reducing research waste and enhancing the usability of applied linguistics research.

Healthcare spaces are “contact zones,” where care may be practised using a lingua franca, or in various configurations of language codes. This paper examines two foundational constructs, communicative competence and health literacy, that are implicated in the contact zones of health care. I propose a heuristic framework of spheres of activity for locating, articulating, and understanding the facets and workings of measured constructs as a basis for a multiperspectival, interdisciplinary research agenda. The framework is applied to a health literacy test to explore the multilayered texture of construct activity. Moving to the applicable world of the hospital ward, I consider what “health literacy” may look like in authentic doctor–patient interaction. Finally, I discuss the relationship between the different activities: what is operationalized in tests, what is wished for in policy, and what is evident in practice. Even though the capacity to communicate is considered a key ingredient in mobilizing health literacy for shared decision-making, communication is barely represented in operationalized constructs. An orientation to the interactional repertoires of health care and the dynamic nature of knowledge co-construction in health decision-making could generate useful development in theory, measurement, and practice.

This article applies corpus linguistic methods to legal interpretation to clarify the meaning of the Appointments Clause of the United States (U.S.) Constitution. Our corpus-based linguistic analysis raises doubt about whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of this provision is consistent with the way the Constitutional text uses the well-studied construction “such + noun phrase + as.” We use data from the Corpus of Founding Era American English as well as from a large corpus taken from an online resource created by the U.S. National Archives: public and private correspondence, public actions and speeches, government documents, and political writings from 1751 to 1836 relating to James Madison, an important figure in Founding Era America, to investigate how the “such + adjective + noun + as” construction was used in Founding Era American English. Our analysis suggests that the text of the Appointments Clause does not support the approach taken by the Supreme Court over the past 50 years and further suggests that, by using a “such… as” construction as a discretionary qualifier, the constitutional text points toward giving Congress rather than the courts the final say as to whether Congressional approval is required when appointing federal officials.

The present study addresses the question of whether an individual who does not understand a sentence might still be able to repeat it verbatim. To answer this question, we examined paraphrasing and repetition data from two previous studies: Pavlenko et al. (2019), which analyzed L1 and L2 participants’ paraphrasing of seven Miranda warning sentences, and Akbary et al. (2023), which compared L1 and L2 participants’ paraphrasing and elicited imitation (EI) performance on 30 commonly used EI sentences. We formulated our questions into four predictions, two of which directly addressed whether rote repetition without comprehension occurs at all. Our results confirmed both predictions, identifying 36 (5.6%) of the 646 instances of verbatim sentence repetition in the data as potential cases of repetition without comprehension. However, a broader analysis showed that the evidence for a lack of comprehension was relatively weak and ambiguous. We conclude with recommendations for overcoming the limitations of the present study and resolving the ambiguity of our findings.

This study investigates the role of working memory (WM) in the development of receptive and productive abilities in Spanish among intermediate second/additional language (L2/A) learners. Participants completed WM assessments and receptive and productive language tasks targeting grammatical gender agreement on articles and adjectives (receptive: acceptability judgment task [AJT]; productive: information gap activity). Results showed group-level improvement for productive performance, but substantial variability in growth for both receptive and productive performance. WM did not significantly predict growth in either ability, suggesting that WM may not strongly influence the development of gender agreement accuracy at this intermediate proficiency level. To extend the analysis beyond behavioral outcomes, an exploratory post hoc analysis examined associations between WM and neural responses during receptive processing. By examining parallel receptive and productive performance and integrating behavioral and neurocognitive approaches, this study highlights the value of interdisciplinary methods moving forward for understanding the role of WM in L2/A development.

Understanding how attitudinal prosody is processed in a second language (L2) remains an open question, particularly regarding its neural mechanisms and the role of real-world experiences. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined how native Japanese learners processed attitudinal versus linguistic prosody in their L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English) during a forced-choice judgment task. Across languages, attitudinal and linguistic prosody engaged partially dissociable networks: attitudinal prosody recruited socio-cognitive regions involved in inferring speakers’ intentions, whereas linguistic prosody engaged phonological-motor regions. Critically, L2 attitudinal prosody elicited distinct frontal modulation, with the left inferior frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus showing stronger prosody-type differentiation in English than in Japanese – indicating greater reliance on controlled interpretive and executive processes during non-native attitudinal prosody comprehension. Individual-difference analyses revealed that informal L2 exposure predicted enhanced activation in the thalamus and left hippocampus, as well as better attitudinal prosody identification. These converging neural and behavioral patterns suggest that socially grounded experience plays an important role in developing sensitivity to attitudinal prosody in an L2. Together, these findings provide novel neural evidence for how L2 learners interpret attitudinal prosody and show that L2 exposure is associated with differences in pragmatic prosody at cognitive and neural levels.

This essay centers on issues regarding epistemic labor. Drawing on recent thinking that pushes for decolonizing y/our minds, it invites consideration of what happens to y/our imaginaries when you/we allow y/ourselves the freedom to (re)imagine (an)other wor(l)d(s). Through reflections on the nature of human communication and terms related to diversity, empowerment, inclusion/integration, justice… within and outside academic labor, I push for a stance that centers the entangled primacy of epistemic, existential (E2) work in tandem with sustainable, solidarity-based (S2) work, i.e., an E2-S2 stance. Drawing on southern waves and ways of being within academia, this essay calls for transcending the implicit/explicit binary of the naturalized (mono/mainstream-)disciplinary versus prefixed (cross/inter/multi/trans-)disciplinary labels to embrace undisciplinary thinking for engaging with E2-S2-based work. One of many iterations of southern thinking, a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP) framework is explicated to enable (re)imagining issues in the educational and language sciences through E2-S2-based work. Here, a mobile gaze across scholarly domains and planetary spaces reinforces previous calls for sidestepping binaries, boundaries, and epistemic slippages, enabling alignments with analytical vocabularies that contribute to non-dichotomized Third Positions. It centers new ways to think about language and the human condition through a revitalized metalanguage that has relevance for equity.

This position paper chronicles and critiques my attempts to help establish sport as a field of application for applied linguistics. In this way, it is a nontraditional article: a first-person, autobiographical, position paper. As background to this endeavor, the paper first acknowledges the critical role of collaborative publications and the establishment of a research network. The paper then explores the affordances and complications associated with building a sports-based community of applied linguistics, especially given preexisting scholarship in sports linguistics, as well as considerable scholarship in the related discipline of communication studies. The paper then briefly recounts my own research in sports linguistics with the aim of bringing to consciousness my goals and purpose. Drawing on Bakhtin’s imagined audience, I reflect on how these motivations not only shaped my research agenda but, in turn, my conceptions of the relationship between linguistics and sport and applied linguistics. I then turn to Bernstein to further reflect on my classification of sports linguistics – the discipline, its knowledge and knowers – and its influence on my attempts at community building. As a position paper, I conclude with some insights for readers who find themselves engaged in similar attempts at community building.