Nicole Pettitt’s research while affiliated with Youngstown State University and other places

In this piece, the authors question whether critical language research, in its complex collection of researcher choices, is possible beyond the discursive imaginary of critical academic scholarship. In other words, how do (allegedly) anticolonial efforts re-orient towards contribution to the imperial record? We present three vignettes, through which we grapple with the notion that researcher choice exists within the solipsism of academia. In doing so, we frame research and scholarship as a collection of choices, which we believe are better understood as a collection of fraught dilemmas. These dilemmas recognize that all academic scholarship production and its processes are birthed from, and serve, an epistemology of hierarchical social configurations, which serve empire maintenance and expansion. As critical language scholars who bring overlapping and distinct sociopolitical, geographic, and methodological positionalities, these autoethnographic narrative vignettes allow us to begin to see the landscape of researcher choice in the processes and projects of accumulating knowledge production. We identify imperial straightening devices for legitimization into the imperial archive and examine how they work to orient and re-orient critical language scholars towards the ideological and material production of the imperial archive.

This article contributes to scholarship on migrant women’s second language (L2) education in North America and Europe. Questioning reductionist understandings of the relationship between female migrants, their receiving communities and L2 education, the authors consider existing literature as well as their own qualitative work to investigate the challenges, opportunities and agency of migrant women. Weaving together and thematically presenting previous scholarship and qualitative data from interviews, participant observations and classroom recordings from a mixed-gender L2 adult migrant classroom in Austria and an all-women L2 migrant classroom in the United States, they trouble conceptualisations which position women primarily as passive recipients of education and in need of emancipation, while simultaneously elevating communities as agentic providers of these. Specifically, the authors emphasise that (1) L2 proficiency is not a guarantee for migrant women’s social inclusion or socioeconomic advancement; (2) migrant women’s complex challenges and agency need to be recognised and addressed; and (3) all involved in L2 education of migrant women do well to become learners of their own experiences of oppression, including their complicity in it.

The practice of securing informed consent from research participants has a relatively low profile in second language (L2) acquisition research, despite its prominence in the biomedical and social sciences. This review article analyses the role that informed consent now typically plays in L2 research; discusses an example of an L2 study where complex issues of informed consent surfaced; and summarizes debates about informed consent that are underway in other disciplines, but which so far have been little recognized in scholarship on L2 acquisition.

This longitudinal study follows concurrent changes in a multilingual adult English learner's mastery of alphabetic print literacy and his oral learner language. The learner was 29 years old, and began to read and write an alphabetic script for the first time in English, his seventh language, during this study. Systematic observations were made of both his development of specific literacy skills and specific structures in his oral English over the course of six months during one-to-one literacy tutoring sessions with the first author; these occurred one to two times each week. Mixed methods were used for collection of data, including learner observations, oral language tasks, interviews and review of relevant documents. Results document the learner's development of a set of specific literacy skills during the six-month study. Findings include: knowing the names of the letters of the alphabet seemed unrelated to his decoding ability; some syntactic elements of his oral production became more complex with increasing alphabetic literacy, while oral fluency, lexis and pragmatics did not appear to be related to development of alphabetic literacy.