Calls for mobilizing linguistics research toward social justice are not new. Amongst the early voices was Anne Charity Hudley, one of the co-authors of this issue's Epilogue. Almost fifteen years ago, she asked whether and how linguists could become agents for social change (Reference Charity Hudley2008). More recently, including in this journal, scholarly attention has shifted towards new questions, like Who are we studying? (Anya, Reference Anya2020), Whose interests are served by our research? (McIvor, Reference McIvor2020), and How does our research interact with existing patterns of oppression? (Motha, Reference Motha2020). In the current issue of ARAL, we took a direct approach to enacting change in publishing. We were able to do this through the support of ARAL’s Editorial Board and its publisher, Cambridge University Press (Amy Laurent at CUP, Uju Anya, Anne Charity Hudley, Nelson Flores, Pauline Foster, Susan M. Gass, Rosa Manchón, Elizabeth Miller, Suhanthie Motha, Aek Phakiti, Luke Plonsky, Andrea Révész, Sheenah Shah, and Bryan Smith on the ARAL Board), and a team of mentor-reviewers, as we explain below.
New Approaches in Publishing
First, the Editorial Board decided to focus the issue on the work of emerging scholars which is a radically different approach from ARAL's historical mandate, where established scholars were invited to submit state of the art review articles. ARAL has been changing in multiple ways over the past six years, one of which has included creating slots for students and junior scholars with an eye towards issues of representation and inclusion. The current issue focuses exclusively on the work of those who are at the cutting edge of work on social justice in applied linguistics and who are, for the most part, early in their careers with long and bright trajectories ahead of them.
Following this decision, and informed by examples from other fields, the Editorial Board then decided to revisit the reviewing process to critically examine what the ultimate goals were. We questioned whether it was necessary to implement traditional gatekeeping review procedures in a journal like ARAL and began considering alternative processes like open and collaborative reviewing. Ultimately, the Editorial Board assembled a team of mentor-reviewers to advise the authors and work in a collaborative, supportive process where the mentor-reviewers worked with the authors, providing iterative feedback on drafts of the articles that, in lieu of gatekeeping, envisioned the reviewing process as a relationship-building, constructive process. The huge amounts of time, expertise, and investment in the vision and the practicalities of this issue that this team of mentor-reviewers invested was a testament to their dedication to making changes to the field. In alphabetical order, heartfelt thanks goes to our mentor-reviewers: Uju Anya, Alfredo Artiles, Mary Bucholtz, Peter de Costa, Fernanda Ferreira, Nelson Flores, Ofelia García, Jeff Good, Shelome Gooden, Socorro Herrera, Kendall King, Wesley Leonard, Rosa Manchón, Elizabeth Miller, Suhanthie Motha, Shondel Nero, Lourdes Ortega, Terry Osborn, and Bryan Smith.
After the articles were submitted, at least two members of our editorial review team (the authors of this introduction) also read each article, provided feedback from the perspective of an ARAL reader, and carried out APA-editing (i.e., a publishing style guide used by Cambridge University Press for ARAL). Articles were then sent to Cambridge for the production process.
Each mentor-reviewer was first paired with an early-career scholar based on specialization and subfield. Mentor-reviewers and authors corresponded about the authors’ work over the course of several months. This discussion-based approach entirely replaced the existing peer review process. All invited authors were guaranteed at the outset that their pieces would have a spot in the issue. This radical departure from the previous reviewing process envisions productive contact between more experienced and more junior scholars as an opportunity to foster new professional relationships, to build community, and to ensure that authors have the space to publish what they actually want to say—not what they think a set of anonymous reviewers would want them to say. These goals aimed to change the nature and the outcomes of the peer review process, and in the best-case scenarios where the match in content and style was particularly close, to hopefully provide support structures and research partnership possibilities for the future.
Finally, the Editorial Board decided that all authors would be able to publish abstracts in the languages, varieties, or dialects of their choice. While it would have been ideal for full papers to appear in the same way, space constraints meant this was not possible. We also requested that the whole issue become permanently Open Access. Although this was not possible, Cambridge did agree to make a selection of articles rotating open access.
By the nature of ARAL's structure, we are still limited in our access to emerging scholars because we rely primarily on the networks and expertise of the board. However, using this, or other issues, to delay action and continue discussing or looking for better options impedes progress. So, the ARAL board took the decision that we, as a field, need to start acting on calls for change, even if (or maybe especially if) the initial attempts are not perfect. Based on our experiences with the current issue, which were overwhelmingly positive, we encourage other academic presses and journals to pilot whatever alternative publishing approaches they may be discussing and be open to joining ARAL in the journey to a more socially just and inclusive applied linguistics publication environment. This might involve considering some version of collaborative peer reviewing—the approach followed in the current issue, where authors and mentors are connected and encouraged to correspond frequently and privately (i.e., with feedback, summaries and/or reports—which are not made public, or even shared with editors) with the goal of creating an informal, collegial environment in which authors (who were mostly more junior scholars, in the current issue) feel comfortable soliciting feedback on new ideas and refining existing ones. We ultimately chose this model of review because we viewed it as being potentially the most fruitful for emerging scholars who are looking to expand their professional networks and establish themselves within the field as well as in publishing.
The response of the community to our request to serve as mentor-reviewers was extremely positive. Almost everyone we contacted enthusiastically agreed immediately (with the exception of a couple of colleagues who were already over-loaded with mentoring and reviewing responsibilities, something we know is often the case for minoritized scholars), even though most of them had never done anything like this before. We received many communications from both authors and mentors documenting the value each derived from their interactions, for example:
From a mentor-reviewer: This paper is just beautiful. I predict it will have a major impact on the way we think about [topic]. It was such a pleasure to be part of this project. Thank you, ARAL organizers, for inviting me and linking me up with the amazing [author], and thank you, [author], for this wonderful collaboration.
From an author: I've attached my completed piece for ARAL 2022. I had so much fun writing this and I loved working with [my mentor]. This has been such a great experience. I'm looking forward to your thoughts and suggestions!
From a mentor-reviewer: I was privileged to work with this talented and dedicated young scholar. We established not just a working relationship, but I hope the beginning of a friendship that will keep us communicating and collaborating in the future. If this had been a traditional review process, I would have sent back an encouraging document with a few criticisms and suggestions for improvement and that would have been that. But the ways the work evolved during our interactions was exciting and rewarding. I look forward to citing this work (frequently!)
We now turn to what's new and exciting about the content. In short, we have been deeply impressed by the papers we have received. As you will see, the breadth of topics is extremely impressive, ranging from micro-level research on identity construction within L2 learners and programs to macro-level position pieces on applied linguistics methodology and ethics. Paper formats also range significantly with many (but not all) authors adopting a qualitative approach and presenting their material in a variety of ways, including through extracts of case study interviews and even a constructed narrative.
As mentioned above, papers in this issue include abstracts in language(s) and varieties of the author's choice, with over half a dozen languages represented: English, French, isiXhosa, Korean, Pohnpeian, Sesotho, SiPuthi, Spanish, and Swahili. The Board hopes this would increase the reach and readability of the papers. We weren't sure what to expect initially, but we all agreed that the abstract “for friends and family” in Rachel Elizabeth Weissler's paper “A meeting of the minds: Broadening horizons in the study of linguistic discrimination and social justice through sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches” was something that we didn't know was missing from the journal until she sent it to us. The Board will be discussing recommending abstracts in friends and family format to all authors in the future, in the same way we support Open Science and recommend all authors of empirical papers upload their materials to an open science database such as IRIS (https://www.iris-database.org/).
As noted above, each paper went through the mentor-reviewing process, and then received a second read by at least two of the ARAL editorial team members (the team who are co-authoring this Introduction), where we made recommendations based on the APA journal style, as well as changes we thought might help with reach and readability based on our perceptions about the typical readership of ARAL and the membership of AAAL. We tried to make sure that length was comparable as far as possible across the papers as the editorial board had initially agreed to comparability of papers in length save for the Epilogue piece, and one review article (As a side note, for us as a team, recommending cuts was very difficult and we look forward to seeing some of the words that couldn't be included in print in other venues!)
The papers appear in alphabetical order by last name, with the exception of this introduction, and the final piece, co-authored by Anne Charity-Hudley and Nelson Flores, which is fitting given that those two scholars both led the board in terms of suggestions for authors, and in mentorship, and with many other helpful suggestions for process and product.
The Issue
The issue begins then with Obed Arango's piece on translanguaging. Drawing on the framework of Critical Race Theory, he examines how translanguaging enables immigrant communities to create counter-spaces and counter-narratives “as a form of social resistance” (p. 11). Reflecting on his own experiences as a new immigrant, Arango, of the University of Pennsylvania, describes how the immigrant community resists suppression of immigrant language and recovers their sense of origin and positionality with its relation to cultural wealth. He reports a case study that centers its analysis around the town of Marshall (a pseudonym) in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and its RevArte collaborative. Throughout, Arango highlights how situating translanguaging in a CRT lens empowers the members of the immigrant community, becoming a catalyst for recovering their social, cultural, and linguistic identity.
The next study, by Katherine Barko-Alva, an Assistant Professor at the College of William and Mary, draws attention to the necessary resources and support that dual language bilingual education (DLBE) teachers require in order to develop multilingual lessons and, ultimately, effective classrooms. She explored data from pre- and post-lesson interviews that centered on how a Spanish language instructor harnessed her metalinguistic awareness to meet the needs of her learners. Her findings indicate that despite her pedagogic experience and language expertise, the teacher needed further scaffolding to bridge the two and build her Spanish pedagogical language knowledge. The paper concludes with a forward-looking discussion of how school districts can create professional development opportunities for their DLBE teachers to expand their pedagogical language knowledge and advocate for DLBE programs.
Cioè-Peña's position paper comes next and examines how the ideology of linguistic fidelity has harmed marginalized people throughout history. Looking first at the settler-colonial roots of linguistic discrimination through the harrowing example of the Parsley Massacre, then to the present-day English Language (EL) programs in the U.S. and Canada, Maria Cioè-Pena (an Assistant Professor at Montclair State University) highlights how contrasting evaluations of linguistic variations disproportionately affect learners who are viewed as “other.” More recently, this othering has resulted in the overrepresentation of racialized students in special and English learner (EL) programs in the United States. Drawing connections between linguicism, ableism, and racism in bilingual education, Cioè-Peña argues that addressing this “othering” and adherence to linguistic fidelity is the first step of many in decolonizing the field of applied linguistics. Her helpful paper provides a way forward for learning.
We then turn to a paper by Yaqiong Cui of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who presents another case study, this one centered around a language learner who is a member of the Uyghurs, a marginalized Chinese ethnic minority from Xinjiang province in western China. Cui uses poststructuralism to interrogate identity and elite multilingualism in a Uyghur woman's language learning journey. Throughout the multiple semi-structured interviews and observational data she reports, Cui probes the ways in which her focal participant, Maria (a pseudonym), used her linguistic repertoires to enact upward social mobility, using Chinese and English as tools to obtain access to elite schools and prestigious jobs. Leaning heavily into her L2s for personal and professional gains, Maria reported feelings of disengagement from her native language, Uyghur, leading her to report feeling that at home in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the “highly valued linguistic capital that [she] earned did not seem to be economically rewarded” (p. 38). Ultimately, Maria was able to find balance in her multiple linguistic identities by working with Uyghur university students who are following a path similar to the one she had forged for herself. This moving paper provides us with a window into issues of equity that demand our attention always, not just in a year when the Olympics brings focus on the plight of this minority.
In the next contribution, Megan Figueroa of the University of Arizona calls attention to power structures that take the form of paywalls—both financial and psychological—in keeping certain voices, experiences and epistemologies from having access to and participating in linguistic science. Figueroa advocates for the use of diverse media in the dissemination of linguistic research because it challenges these paywalls and allows for “a freer flow of information and consequent participation by more people in science” (p. 41). By drawing on her own experiences as a co-founder and co-host of the hugely popular and well-known podcast, The Vocal Fries, Figueroa shows how podcasting serves important social functions and greatly facilitates the debunking of racially offensive, deficit-based, and dangerously suspect research on the language of racialized individuals like the so-called “30-million-word gap.” If any of our readers haven't heard of The Vocal Fries, we hope this article will make them subscribers.
In a critique of dual language bilingual education (DBLE) programs in the U.S. through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), University of North Texas Assistant Professor Brittany Frieson next highlights exclusionary practices faced by Black American children in DLBE. Based on a 15-month ethnographic case study, Frieson employs the method of counter storytelling to masterfully craft a counternarrative that incorporates the voices and languaging of Black American children to challenge unquestioned dual language bilingual education policies and practices. These include the uncritical homogeneous framing of “English speakers,” the erasure of Black language and literacy practices, the consequent silencing of Black and Latinx children, and the reproduction of the status quo in service of the white populace. In so doing, Frieson movingly centers the potentially transformative and agentive role that students can occupy in shaping linguistic education if only their (counter)stories were heard.
We then turn to a paper by Pejman Habibie of the University of Western Ontario who researches novice and early career academics in the field of applied linguistics. This paper explores the role of social justice in the production and dissemination of knowledge. Habibie calls on all of us in the field to demonopolize and democratize the academy by investing in diverse, inclusive, multi-vocal, and transformative publishing systems. One initial step in this direction is the recognition by the field that by “rely[ing] on established members for initiation, socialization, and survival” (p. 58), emerging scholars must frequently subjugate their own academic interests, points of view, and innovations in order to navigate the power dynamics of the academy. Compounding this issue, too often the opportunity structures in place perpetuate the existing hegemony of access and prestige to elite institutions, meaning that scholars already on the periphery of the field's spotlights remain at the edges of the discourse. Habibie posits that technology's integrative capacity might help combat this issue, allowing for more diverse academic partnerships and democratizing access to scholarly publications. In a sense, this issue of ARAL is one way to respond to Habibie's concerns. Although, we acknowledge, of course, that relying on our Editorial Board in and of itself limits (because ARAL is an invitation-only journal) the network used to find and elevate the voices of emerging scholars.
Following this comes a study of Korean EFL classrooms by Jin Kyeong Jung, an Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University, who documents the ways in which Korean high school students employ English as a Lingua Franca to engage in cosmopolitanism. Jung's study follows an after-school EFL program designed to offer more authentic communicative practice to EFL students wanting additional instruction beyond the grammar-heavy lessons required at school. The program was designed to foster intercultural communication and a global mindset by means of collaborative, online writing. Using a discourse analytic approach, Jung found that the students’ collaborative writing projects indeed fostered not only effective problem-solving skills and intercultural competence in the L2, but also increased the students’ orientation to ideals of global citizenry. Her work can be taken up by others who seek to foster such an orientation.
Next, James McKenzie, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, provides a framework for instructors and researchers of indigenous languages to address the historical trauma, healing, and well-being of indigenous communities in their work. Himself a (re)learner of Diné Bizaad, the language of the Diné Nation (Navajo), McKenzie unpacks the effects of historic and generational language trauma that has impacted the Diné community and resulted in what he calls “silent speakers”—those “who understand but do not speak the language” (p. 80). These individuals endured unspeakable cruelty at the hands of those implementing racist assimilation policies—usually schoolteachers and other personnel. This silencing of the language resulted in a linguistic disjuncture that has prevented subsequent generations from growing up with ancestral stories of identity, love, and community. Optimistically turning away from “damage-oriented depictions” (p. 80), McKenzie instead calls the field to action, enumerating specific, actionable steps that can be taken to draw upon the knowledge and resilience of indigenous communities to help strengthen their revitalization efforts. We hope that his calls for these steps are heard and taken up.
After this, Shakina Rajendram, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, reprises the practice of translanguaging in a paper demonstrating its potential for promoting multilingualism by departing from colonial practices that perpetuate the siloing and hierarchization of languages. Rajendram's case study of two Malaysian elementary English-medium schools discusses the challenges associated with translanguaging in a postcolonial society scarred by a linguistic policy that imposed monologic pedagogy. Under British colonial rule, the Malaysian education system offered schooling in four languages—Malay, Chinese, Tamil, and English—with the language of instruction (as well as race) being closely tied to prestige, social mobility, and power. The project Rajendram presents here directly challenges this raciolinguistic hegemony by promoting translanguaging as a pedagogy—moving well beyond a practice of general tolerance of translanguaging in the classroom. Rajendram found that English-only policies had profound emotional and psychological impacts on students—a de facto continuation of the linguistic colonization that made one student feel like “a prisoner and a bird trapped in a cage” (p. 89) and resulted in a wide-spread “postcolonial shame” that made other students complicit in the marginalization of other languages. Together with the Malaysian teachers, Rajendram enabled the students to reframe their linguistic ideologies away from language as a fixed substance towards “national ways of languaging” (p. 90). Hopefully, this innovative reframing can be used by others too.
We then move to a piece by Vijay A. Ramjattan, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the University of Toronto whose paper explores the ways in which L2 accented speech interacts with (and reinforces) racist orientations in the English-speaking Global North toward labor migrants who speak English as an L2. Ramjattan outlines three functions of accent in racial capitalist systems: maintaining (a) labor control, (b) colonial power relationships, and (c) racist ideologies by credentialing English competence. First, by requiring (near) accent-less speech for the highest-paying jobs, racially minoritized migrant workers must accept lower-paying jobs if they have highly accented or markedly accented speech. Next, when low-wage workers attempt to ameliorate their accents, they must adopt the accent of the powerful in order to gain acceptance, resulting in adopting colonial accents. Finally, by requiring un-accented English proficiency, employers can continue to employ racist hiring practices that filter out minoritized job applicants while avoiding other kinds of racist behavior (e.g., citing an applicant's appearance, name, or national origin as reasons for rejecting an application). This moving and enlightening paper will hopefully be influential in raising awareness and consciousness of these practices.
The paper by Sheenah Shah (University of Hamburg and University of the Free State), Letzadzo Kometsi (National University of Lesotho), and Matthias Brenzinger (University of the Free State) is one of the first of its kind: a language documentation project that has centered a language speaker at the heart of the publication process. The three authors are an L1 siPhuthi speaker and two linguists who have been collaborating on this project over the past six years. Together, they stress the importance of collaboration by sharing the metaphorical microphone in the piece and speaking to their own experiences and the strengths of their colleagues within the siPhuthi language documentation and revitalization project. Together, the authors encourage other documentary linguistics to join them in a shift from extractive, linguist-focused research towards collaborative, community-rooted practice. By being involved at every step in the language documentation process, the siPhuthi-speaking community has been able to effectively advocate for SiPhuthi translations of policy, legal, and health information, funding for the creation of siPhuthi language materials (to support future siPhuthi-medium schools and programs), as well as the establishment of siPhuthi-language media organizations. There is an important contrast to be made between this paper and papers that thank those that the authors call variously “cultural guides,” “translators,” “linguistic informants,” or “hosts”, and those who provide demographic information that appears in publications solely authored by the fieldworker. We hope this paper will serve as a model and a call to action for other field and documentary researchers in what can be accomplished when linguistics work with—and, importantly, alongside—communities and center their voices in publication as well as other outcomes.
Next, we turn to criticality in the field where Jaran Shin, Assistant Professor at Kyung Hee University in South Korea, engages with the concept to question the current goals of (critical) applied linguistics and to discuss new horizons for the field. Importantly, criticality enables identity research that necessitates intersectionality—a “co-constructed, (non)negotiable, and spatiotemporal nature of identity” (p. 112). Such research adds dimension, depth, and insight into what we know about the interactions between linguistics and people's lived experiences, especially those who are marginalized linguistically, racially, socially, and in other ways. Shin synthesizes findings from a number of recent studies leveraging criticality to demonstrate how “unequal distribution of resources and discrimination [impacts] the marginalized” (p. 113). Shin then turns to ethics, combining criticality, identity, and a Foucauldian view of ethics to propose the construction of “ethical subjectivity” as a refocus in the field as it strives toward the public good. Under this poststructuralist view, being an ethical subject entails a view of the self that emphasizes constant reflexive thought and action in the form of an interrogation of privileges, the recognition of one's own complicity with hegemony, and transformative action toward collective issues. Shin also cautions against continuing to confine critical discussions to the academy, as sequestering them prevents us as a field from enacting social change—an essential message we plan to echo and amplify with our own work moving forward and we invite our readers to do the same.
In the next piece, Associate Professor Patriann Smith, of the University of South Florida, expounds on the global metaverse—a global virtual world in which all social activity and interaction take place (e.g., work, play, entertainment). Drawing on the Black immigrant experience in the United States, Smith explores the perception of Black immigrants as “languageless” and the marginalizing force this exerts upon these communities. She argues that transraciolinguistic justice “(1) creates opportunities beyond racialized [language] as a function of the imminent global metaverse; (2) disrupts the racialization of [language] for relegating citizenship based on national norms as a function of civic engagement; and (3) dismantles racialized [language] and borders that hold up the exclusion of ‘foreignness’ to transform the relational experience” (p. 120). In this way, the global metaverse can enable transcendence beyond racializing forces (including those embedded in language) to create a more just, affirming, inclusive reality. We predict this forward-looking piece will be of interest beyond our sub-field.
In another piece, Hassan Syed, an Assistant Professor at Sukkur IBA University, explores the tension he has observed in his own classroom between the “official,” sanctioned monoglossic language ideologies and the heteroglossic classroom realities of postsecondary education in Pakistan. Despite Pakistan maintaining an English-only policy in all higher education institutions for decades, the students—who are overwhelmingly multilingual already, due to the multilingual environment—often translanguage between a number of local dialects, regional languages of importance (e.g., Urdu), and English. Employing an autoethnographic methodology, Syed examines the multilingual discourse of his own classroom and challenges his own deficit ideologies regarding translanguaging that were embedded in his psyche over the course of his own language learning experiences. Syed proposes that instead of continuing to enforce an English-only policy, Pakistan's postsecondary institutions should embrace translanguaging in the classroom, as it enables students to confront unjust linguistic, social, and political structures embedded within monoglossic language ideologies.
In her auto-ethnographic essay, Jamie Thomas, Assistant Professor at Santa Monica College, criticizes the socio-racial power dynamic and the monolingual bias that is deeply embedded in applied linguistics research by using narrative storytelling as a framework. Framing the interview as a “multi-person, co-constructed research (and communicative) event” (p. 129), Thomas’ piece narrates interviews with users of Pohnpeian and Nukuoro in Micronesia and those of Korean and Swahili in Tanzania. Gathering data across the three different scenes—which Thomas brings to life through first-person narrative storytelling—the study highlights how dialogue can be shaped by people's perspectives on the marginalized languages and socio-racial power. Thomas reflects on the normative control monolingual English has had on her “fieldwork” (a term she rejects in for its colonizing methodologies) in the past how her data collection experiences have changed since adopting a multilingual approach—welcoming all of her interviewees’ languages, not just those that she shares with them. Thomas’ piece presents an important departure from “traditional” fieldwork data collection and reporting and she encourages other linguists to interrogate the role of English in their own work, documentary or otherwise.
The last piece before the Epilogue, by Rachel Elizabeth Weissler, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Oregon, begins with what the editorial team believes is the way of the future in its approach to abstracts. She provided one in traditional, academic language and another “For friends and family,” written in accessible, clear, everyday language. This was along the lines of what Anne Charity Hudley, who suggested people write abstracts in whatever way (language, variety, dialect and so on) would be most accessible to the community authors wanted to reach, was hoping for. We encourage more applied linguists to follow her lead and create space for research that can be read and appreciated outside of academia. Weissler's piece tackles the issue of linguistic discrimination and identity. By taking a socio-cognitive lens, Weissler investigates the ways in which language can be used to make predictions about one's interlocutors, shaping expectations about their racial identity(ies), personalities, and stereotypes. Weissler advocates on behalf of a combined social and cognitive approach in order to “empirically test ideological claims about linguistic varieties that are passively accepted, strengthen replicability, and broaden approaches to the study of minoritized varieties more generally” (p. 137).
The concluding Epilogue is written by Professors Anne Charity Hudley and Nelson Flores, of Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. Two leaders of the field and outspoken advocates for social justice in all applied linguistics research, Charity Hudley and Flores react to this issue's pieces, synthesizing the emergent themes and highlighting the ways in which these early-career scholars’ voices add to the field. Though we cannot give page space in this issue to all of the exciting research and fresh, challenging, and necessary perspectives that will help applied linguistics to continue to grow into its most socially just form, we hope that this issue will contribute to this goal and inspire others to join us as we work together towards a just applied linguistics.
As we publish this issue, the Board is beginning the first (of many) discussions of what worked as we hoped with this new approach, how we could fine-tune or improve it in future issues, and what other alternative models we could pilot. We plan to keep this discussion going over the course of the next several years, alternating between review types, as we refine our process, welcome new board members, and adjust to the evolving publishing landscape. ARAL's Editor-in-Chief, Alison Mackey, whose first issue was published in 2014 (Identity) and whose last issue as Editor-in-Chief will be in 2024 (with her final two issues being on Anxiety and Lavender Linguistics, respectively), is stepping down based on the belief that change happens when people make space for it to happen, and her hope that ARAL's Editorship and Board will continue to reflect important and necessary changes by continuing to diversify in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, L1s, country of origin, sexuality, and subfield as well as the myriad other things that make applied linguistics an exciting and rewarding field to work in.
We dedicate this issue to the peer-mentors to reflect the huge amounts of their time, expertise, and investment in the vision and the practicalities of this issue. In alphabetical order, our heartfelt thanks again goes to Uju Anya, Alfredo Artiles, Mary Bucholtz, Peter de Costa, Fernanda Ferreira, Nelson Flores, Ofelia García, Jeff Good, Shelome Gooden, Socorro Herrera, Kendall King, Wesley Leonard, Rosa Manchón, Elizabeth Miller, Suhanthie Motha, Shondel Nero, Lourdes Ortega, Terry Osborn, and Bryan Smith.
The Editorial Team
Along with the authors of each article in this volume, the co-authors of this introduction are also emerging scholars with exciting research agendas. Erin Fell, this issue's Lead Editorial Assistant, researches the intersections of learning differences like dyslexia and L2 learning as well as access to L2 education in under-resourced contexts. Felipe de Jesus, a dissertating student in sociolinguistics researches language, gender, and sexuality as they intersect with race and socioeconomic class in Brazil. Amber Hall, a returning member of the ARAL Editorial Team, researches indigenous language documentation and revitalization as well as heritage language education. She has contributed to the development of several indigenous language curricula. Yunjung (Yunie) Ku's research is primarily centered on the factors that impact the efficacy of interaction in promoting learners’ performances. Yunie has published articles using corpus linguistics methods to investigate English emotion collocations.