Editorial

Over the years, many of the papers presented at IALIC and published in LAIC have explored the ways in which cultural identities emerge from the complex relations between language, discourse, and the social contexts which are inhabited by social actors, rather than ascribing decontextualised attributes which are deduced from the ideal of unitary national identity. Over time, we intend that the cumulative influence of our research will not only consolidate generally accepted ideas of intercultural communication around a more socio-discursive view of the field but also have a bearing on the development of local, national, and international policies in education, social policy, and international development (see e.g., Footitt, 2017). Education in particular gives rise to a range of different types of contexts where students rub up against other languages and cultures. The nature of these environments, and the potential they give rise to for human interaction, in their turn open up a variety of possibilities for participants to communicate in one or more languages. This thematically selected, open collection of papers brings together four examples of international educational scenarios whereby young people communicate with each other in different languages, and explores the effect which these have upon the development of their identities: bilingual and bicultural schooling in Israel (Shalabny and Tannenbaum, this issue); EMI tertiary education in Finland (Shirahata, this issue) and Korea (Kang, this issue); and study abroad in Catalonia, Croatia and Limassol (Soulé, Vranješ and Cots, this issue). In all our research into intercultural communication, a balance has to be struck between the agency of the human actors, and the role of social context in shaping their actions, dispositions, and emotions. The studies which we bring together for you here each establish their very own, distinctive perspectives on this equilibrium. We have roughly tried to arrange the papers so that context, or ‘social structure’, as Maria Soulé and her colleagues refer to it, emerges as increasingly visible as an element of causation in this equation. We leave it to you, as reader, to make up your own minds as to where to stand in relation to this equilibrium after reading these papers.

IALIC emerged at the turn of the century principally as a forum where those dubbed ‘modern and foreign language teachers’ could get together to challenge the yoking of cultural and social values to monolithic views of the nation state. However, it is unsurprising that as our research has evolved over the past 25 years, intercultural communication has emerged as quite as much of an issue between social and cultural groups within the national polity as it is between the citizens of different nation states themselves. This is as true as anywhere in the state of Israel, where young people from both its (minority) Arab and (majority) Jewish population grow up and go to school within the same state but have been for the most part taught in different institutions, and learn in their respective languages of Arabic and Hebrew. However, in recent years, the number of Arab students attending Jewish schools, and being taught in Hebrew, has increased by almost a third. In our first paper in this issue, Shalabny and Tannenbaum deploy a mixture of methods to investigate Arab parents’ and their childrens’ perceptions of the effect upon both their personal and group identity of the immersion of cohort of Arab pupils into a language and culture which is different than the one in which they were brought up. Analysis of interview data enabled the researchers to generate the theoretical model that they display in the paper to illuminate both the positive and the negative elements which impacted upon the students’ journey of self-discovery that they went through in their new environments. These include both external and internal factors relating to stress and resources, as well as personal and collective elements of identity. Quantitative data suggested that while the acquisition of the Hebrew language emerged as the principal reason Arab parents sent their children to Jewish schools, nevertheless both parents and students still valued the maintenance of the Arabic language, both at school and in the home, as an essential aspect of their childrens’ identity. The paper suggests that, despite the long-held belief within the state that Arab and Jewish children should be educated in different schools, introducing children from a particular social and cultural group into the schools of the ‘other’ group has the potential to break down the longstanding and often fractious divisions that have existed between Arabs and Jews who co-exist within the state of Israel.

While our first paper investigates the impact of the negotiation of two distinct languages and cultures on students’ identity within a single educational institution, this becomes considerably more complicated when the students are engaged with a multitude of different languages and cultures. Such is often the situation nowadays in the many universities around the world where English is the medium of academic instruction (EMI) – a context with which many of us are familiar from our own day-to-day engagements in our lecture halls, seminar rooms, and classroom. In the second paper in this issue, Mia Shirahata investigates the role played in just such a context by the different beliefs held by students about a language and its speakers, which she calls ‘language ideologies’ (after Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994). These emerge from group discussions between students which take place under the aegis of an international postgraduate programme delivered by a university in Finland. In contrast to the mixed methods used by Shalabny and Tannenbaum, this paper’s methodological approach is adapted from critical discursive psychology (Wiggins, 2017). Crucially, Shirahata argues that language ideologies are ‘discursive building blocks for people to construct their identities to make sense of their interpersonal relationships with others, seeing language as shaping social processes of power and inequality and vice versa’ (after Heller et al., 2018). The fulcrum of this enquiry is the possibility that tensions might arise between those students who are particularly proficient in English, and which marks them as ‘belonging’ to a particular ethnicity or nationality – in keeping with the notion of native speakerism (Holliday, 2006); and those who are regarded as being somewhat less proficient in English, but are nonetheless able to speak it competently alongside a number of different languages – in keeping with the notion of lingua franca English (Canagarajah, 2007). However surprisingly, rather than students who might be regarded as ‘native speakers’ of English being ascribed a superior position within the group, it emerges that the participants in the discussion groups appear to extend the scope of their ideologies to generate wider ranging concepts such as ‘multilingualism’ and ‘languaging’. These seem to include those for whom English is their first language and serve to defuse their ‘native-speakerism’, despite their sometimes asymmetrical levels of proficiency in ‘other’ languages. This gives us some degree of reassurance that, however English continues to assert its centrality as a global language in academia and corporate communication, some young people and students are seeking collectively to level the discursive playing field in their spontaneous negotiation of interpersonal and intergroup relations.

As it is the case in Nordic countries such as Finland (as above) and Denmark (Tange & Jæger, 2021), regular readers of these pages will be aware that English is also promoted particularly keenly as a medium of instruction in Korea. While previous papers have reported on the relationship between language and culture in the perceptions of both home and international students in Korean courses taught in English (Kim et al., 2014), and indeed have gone as far as presenting evidence that there is considerable resistance to EMI by some Korean students (Choi, 2021), less attention has been paid to exactly how Korean students use language to express their emotional frustration with all their university subjects being taught through English. In our next paper, Dae-Min Kang addresses the question of how a small cohort of Korean university students use language to take a stance, or align themselves, towards their institution’s prevailing language ideology, i.e. the pervasive use of English-medium instruction. Kang reports on the findings of a longitudinal study which zooms in on the deliciously transgressive feature of how, and why, some students express their frustration with EMI during small group interactions with their peers by swearing profanely in the very language they are protesting against and in which they are supposed to be instructed. In keeping with the central thread of social context which runs throughout this issue, Kang argues (after Walby et al., 2012) that ‘a relational approach to emotions enables researchers to analyse the interface between the self and social structure’. Although Kang can only come up with three instances of taboo words in English which his students use over the course of his observations, he is nevertheless able to draw on a rich tapestry of his video-recordings, extracts from reflective student journals and semi-structured interviews to give a detailed analysis of the precise circumstances surrounding the utterance of these words, and in particular the dynamic of the students’ stance-taking at the time he or she utters the oath. Thus, not only can swearing signify the assertion of a student’s aversion to the university’s language ideology, but it can also signal a vehement switch in the student’s own point of view or a point of strong disagreement with one of her peers in group discussion. In particular, the group instructor’s insistence on the finer points of oral accuracy in general English appeared to be a source of irritation for students. Although the number of instances of swearing reported here can only constitute an exploratory study, it does draw our attention to an unusual, and not altogether harmonious, feature of student interaction in intercultural communication which merits further research.

In the three papers in this issue so far, social structure, which we have mostly been referring to loosely as ‘context’, has been to varying degrees a relatively implicit, though ever-present, force in background – with their principal focus being more on the agency of the particular participants. To round off this issue, our next paper sets out to redress a possible imbalance which exists nowadays in the relative attribution of social structure and human agency in our work (see, e.g., Block, 2009). This study is carried out in yet another type of context, the somewhat less permanent educational setting of study abroad: here at sites in Catalonia, Croatia, and Limassol. In some ways similar to Shirahata’s study, María Soulé, Sanja Vranješ, and Josep Cots focus on the manner in which the identities of their student participants develop as they are exposed to a multiplicity of different languages in their foreign surroundings. However, rather than referring to ‘multilingual identity’, our authors opt for the term ‘plurilingual identity’, which they argue captures more precisely the idea that ‘individuals do not always abide by clear language boundaries when attempting to communicate in an efficient and effective way’. Soulé, Vranješ, and Cots glean deductively from the semi-structured interviews carried out with their – once again small – cohort of participants examples which illustrate five realms of social structure which underlies the theoretical framework of this study (after Block, 2015) and to determine which operate as affordances and which operate as constraints for each participant. However, it is not so much the evidence they add to establish the existence of the five realms of social structure that is important about this paper, but rather the ways in which their interviews illustrate how these realms can combine in different ways to influence – some might still say ‘determine’ – their participants’ engagement with the different languages in their environment. In particular, the economic and psychological realms emerge as being of particular importance in the participants’ formation of their plurilingual identities during their respective sojourns abroad.

To round off this collection of papers, Yonghua Wang introduces us to some essential Autumn reading. It is an edited collection by former IALIC Chair, Prue Holmes, and former LAIC editor, John Corbett (2022), entitled Critical intercultural pedagogy for difficult times: Conflict, crisis, and creativity. As ever, we are grateful to Yoka for keeping us up to date and well informed about what is coming off the press in our field. As this is Malcolm and Hans’s last issue of the year, we here want to acknowledge the often arduous labour of our longstanding Reviews Editor, Vivien Zhou, in sourcing books from publishers, assigning them to reviewers, and meticulously editing the reviews. We look forward to our final issue of this volume coming out in December, which will consist of a special collection of papers on the theme of the inter-epistemic production of intercultural knowledge, guest edited by the diverse team of Alison Phipps, Fernando Fernandes, Hyab Johannes, and Jailson Silva.

Concluding thoughts

It is not often once we have written the editorial to deadline, that we have the energy left to draw one or two tangible conclusions out of the empirical studies which we have assembled for you. However, it seems to us that there are a number of identifiable courses of action that arise from the papers in this issue – albeit taking into consideration the relatively small sample size under consideration and their occasional exploratory nature.

• There seems to be a small but increasingly compelling body of evidence from around the world that integrating the education of children from social groups who have experienced longstanding internecine conflict can help to heal other historical divisions in society, not least also across the Irish Sea from Malcolm (see also Dunn, 2006).

• It is possible that in some social and educational contexts, decades of polemic against native-speakerism may well be being superseded by its incorporation into a discourse of multilingualism which is being constructed in the 21^st century by peer-to-peer interactions within groups of students and young people. This could well be acknowledged and tapped into by those of us who are professional educationists.

• There is an ever-increasing interest in the very particular, and often idiosyncratic, expressions of attitude or stance, which incorporate emotion and affect in often unexpected forms of language and paralanguage. To the best of our knowledge, these phenomena appear to be educationally ‘off-grid’, and this increasing body of research could well lead to expressions of emotion being better incorporated into the teaching of intercultural communication.

• Different elements of social structure can offer both affordances for, or constraints on, the development of a rounded plurilingual and pluricultural identity in educational settings. Further research would be warranted to investigate the ways in which these are calibrated in different educational and social contexts in order to usefully inform intercultural education.

Finally, we just want to set out a couple of current matters with respect to the LAIC journal and the Association.

Our journal

Publishing in academic journals rests on four pillars: authors, publishers, editors, and reviewers. We are grateful that we continue to receive a large number of submissions to LAIC from authors from around the world (on average, five per week), and we are pleased that the number of submissions we get from scholars from Asia and the Middle East is on the increase. The Taylor & Francis team is doing their best to deliver articles on time, and as editors, we hope that we are paying due diligence to your submissions. Increasingly, however, the fourth pillar – that of peer reviewing – is causing problems, slowing down the publication of your papers and sapping the energy of editors. The COVID-19 pandemic had many negative consequences for people, and for many academics, it seems to have led to a reprioritisation of resources. During and after COVID, we have found it increasingly difficult to get reviewers to review papers for the journal, and this means delays, which ultimately will make it more difficult for all of us to publish. In particular early career researchers are under pressure to publish and cannot afford long delays when they submit a paper. It has become the norm more than the exception that Hans needs to invite ten reviewers or more in order to get two reviews for the Open Issues which he edits; and Malcolm regularly has to boost the resolve of Guest Editors as they struggle to find reviewers for your papers. This means that for LAIC, as for other journals in the field, the review process – and therefore the time lag in getting your research into press – is taking considerably longer than it used to. We need your help to change this. This journal is after all our journal and the process of peer review is an essential pillar to support the publication of our research. We certainly hope that you will continue to support the journal by continuing to submit high-quality papers to us, but here we also ask you to:

• please accept our invitations (only 1–2 p.a.) when we ask you for help with reviews, even if its focus might appear a little outside your specialist field;

• please complete and return LAIC reviews promptly without us having to send you reminders.

Ideally, we would ask committed readers and authors to prioritize LAIC for your reviewing energies over the academic year.

Our association

The 23^rd IALIC conference is being organised by Constandina Charalambous in Nicosia, Cyprus; and will take place at the European University from Friday 1^st to Sunday 3^rd of December 2023. Its theme is Rethinking intercultural communication beyond verbal language: affect, materiality and embodiment in times of ‘crises’. You can savour the full scope of the conference in the call for papers (https://ialic2023.euc.ac.cy/). The conference will include plenary talks by well-known scholars, symposia, parallel sessions, poster sessions, and data workshops. The keynote speakers will be Elisabetta Adami (Leeds University), Zhu Hua (University College London), Karen Risager (Roskilde University), and Michalinos Zembylas (Open University, Cyprus). Selected papers from the Cyprus conference will be published in a Special Issue of LAIC on the conference theme, guest edited by Constandina. The call for papers is now closed, but why not register for IALIC 2023 anyway to chase the end-of-term blues away with a stimulating break in the spectacular, historic city of Nicosia? Alternatively, you can follow our conference updates on the conference website (https://ialic2023.euc.ac.cy/home/) and on the conference Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id = 100092845125417). Thanks to Dina for stepping at short notice to organise this year’s conference, and also for letting us borrow here from her blurb. Both Hans and Malcolm will be attending the conference, so don’t hesitate to talk to either of us regarding your concerns about LAIC, or about your ideas for your paper or special issue. We will be also giving a panel presentation and a Q&A session on the journal, where we welcome feedback, either on publishing your own papers or on reviewing others’. We both look forward to seeing you in Nicosia in December!