This case study investigates a migrant adult's identity work in playful talk occurring spontaneously in a classroom for Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults (LESLLA). Based on 12 hours of video-recorded interactions among four learners and their teacher, I identified five playful episodes. This paper focuses on two episodes…

Prior research points to many affordances of drama and storytelling for language learning, identity exploration, and intercultural dialogue (e.g., Belliveau & Kim, 2013; McGovern, 2017; Schewe, 2013) as well as ethical risks associated with engaging multilingual learners in performative pedagogies (Cañas, 2015; Piazzoli & Kir Cullen,…

Critical Pedagogy (CP) has been carried out in many contexts, and reports of its success in language teaching in various countries have increasingly appeared (Bennet 2018; West 2014). However, South Korea (henceforth Korea) is not well-known for critical inquiry in language education, especially in private language institutions, so-called hagwon.…

ChatGPT is revolutionizing education by offering innovative learning methodologies and expanding accessibility to language learning. Existing studies stated that exposure to language-rich environments can help learners study a new language. ChatGPT can potentially increase language learning outcomes and performances by providing real-time…

Critical pedagogy as an instructional approach to teaching and learning focuses on democracy, freedom, and the opportunity to challenge oppressive power structures founded upon hegemonic ideologies. This article presents a critical pedagogy approach to support the instruction of adult English language learners. Such an approach should adopt the…

In the United States, adult education for emergent multilingual language learners (EMLL) is governed by the American Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA). The AEFLA defines literacy as an individual's ability to read, write, and speak in "English." This definition erases the multilingual and multicultural assets that adult EMLLs…

Online English language teaching can now be facilitated by communication technology, which allows easy access to interaction with native speakers. Nevertheless, this industry subscribes to an assumption that native speaker English teachers (NESTs) are the gold standard of language whereas the non-native speaker English teachers (NNESTs) are…

Fundamental to complex dynamic systems theory is the assumption that the recursive behavior of complex systems results in the generation of physical forms and dynamic processes that are self-similar and scale-invariant. Such fractal-like structures and the organismic benefit that they engender has been widely noted in physiology, biology, and…

This study draws upon Mindful L2 Teacher Education (Johnson & Golombek, 2016) to explore how volunteer community tutors of adult English as a Second Language (ESL) conceptualize and enact their roles as creative teachers. Through three case studies, I explore community language teachers' preunderstandings, contradictions, and growth points.…

The purposes of this study were to explore the effect of dialogic activities on EFL students' utterances development by engaging with others, as well as the students' perceptions in the dialogic learning environment. The theoretical framework guiding this inquiry consists of the on-site lecture from the instructor and voice board feedback from the…

Dialogue journals have been used in a wide range of educational settings for quite some time. These written conversations between teachers and students are especially well suited for the ESL classroom. This article describes how many of the conditions known to foster second language acquisition are inherent in the dialogue journal. Traditionally,…

A tuition-free, vocational, English as a second language (ESL) program offered at a large community college suffers from high attrition as well as student dissatisfaction with curriculum. The purpose of this quasi-experimental, longitudinal study was to assess the effectiveness of a specific ESL curriculum supplement as an intervention to…