Dear Colleagues,

Ortega (2013:14) is often credited for using the term ‘the multilingual turn’ for the first time to explain one of the challenges in second language acquisition (SLA) in the 21st century. In fact, she believes that situating second language acquisition in a bi/multilingual context “will most radically impact on the field’s [i.e. SLA’s] continued and growing transdisciplinary relevance in the 21st century”. In a world where English is taught and learnt for multiple purposes, it seems facile to say that it needs to find its place as one language among many, and yet, for many teachers, their students’ multilingual background is ignored, or at best, regarded as a hindrance. Garcia, Flores, Seltzer, Wei, Otheguy and Rosa (2021:5) point to “the lack of attention to racialized bilingual students, whom teachers evaluate only through what they can do in English”. From the decolonial perspective of Garcia et al. (2021:6), they strive “to engage educators and their students in critical decolonial thinking about language and education”, a battle cry also raised by Gerald (2020) in his challenge to all English language teachers to decenter whiteness and the ‘ideal’ of sounding like a white native speaker of English. As Ortega (2018:65) points out, despite the growth of World Englishes, “SLA and WE seem to have led parallel, incommensurable lives” for the past sixty years, and she calls for a “multilingually-attuned ethos” among researchers and teachers.

Against this backdrop, we call for papers that address the teaching of English in a multilingual world, with a focus on issues such as:

• English language teacher education for a multilingual world;
• Researching English language acquisition beyond middle-class, higher education students;
• Decolonising English language teaching in a multilingual world;
• The place of translanguaging in English language teaching;
• Linguistic superdiversity and English as a medium of instruction;
• ‘Troubling the waters’, using lingua receptiva in multilingual ESL classrooms;
• Languaging and languagised learning.

Prof. Dr. Christa Van der Walt
Prof. Dr. Nhlanhla Mpofu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• English language teaching
• English language teacher education
• multilingual education
• multilingualism
• translanguaging
• world Englishes
• decoloniality
• critical language awareness