L2 Journal: An Open Access Refereed Journal for World Language Educators

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of increasing the intellectual viability of lower-level foreign language (FL) study while facilitating connections between academic practice, learners’ lives, and global communities. This article reports on a content-based role-immersion simulation (RIS) designed to incite a critical orientation toward language learning, as 16 postsecondary intermediate Spanish learners adopted alternate identities and took part in a culturally grounded scenario centering on resolving problems related to drug trafficking and violence at the U.S.-Mexico border. Self-reported data from this qualitative study reveal that a majority of participants considered the simulation to approximate an intellectually stimulating real-world immersive encounter; however, some learners approached it as a language-learning exercise. The article elaborates on criteria that contributed to these divergent perceptions and concludes with implications for foreign language curriculum design.

Little research has been conducted on the professional identities of L2 writing scholars despite the increasing number of researchers, teachers, and graduate students identifying themselves as L2 writing specialists. While the (re)construction of L2 writing scholars’ professional identities have real consequences for their career, the challenges and opportunities resulting from their work, situated in several related disciplines, have neither been explicitly nor adequately discussed. Through an analytic autoethnography (Anderson, 2006), this study examines the cases of two L2 writing faculty as they (re)construct their professional identities within their institutions and broader academic communities. Using identity in practice as its theoretical framework, the study provides a rich, in-depth account of how the focal L2 writing scholars continue to negotiate and reconcile their professional identities among adjacent fields such as applied linguistics, TESOL, composition, and education. Results reveal that L2 writing scholars (re)construct their professional identities by negotiating their identity positions within their institutional and disciplinary contexts, by defining the boundaries of their professional identities through community membership, and by participating in multiple academic communities. Drawing on these results, the study considers how L2 writing scholars’ professional identity (re)construction reflects the development of L2 writing as a field/profession.

A Spanish professor on sabbatical enrolls in a beginning swim class and comes face to face with old adage that learning a language is like learning to swim.

Responses from: Lisa Merschel, Diane Ceo-DiFrancesco, Natalia Jacovkis, and Amy Rossomondo