A new issue of the European Journal of Language Education & Language (2/1)

When I was invited to become one of the founding editors of the European Journal of Education and Language Review (EJELR), I found myself hesitating. Did language education, a field already well served by a wide range of journals, really need yet another publication outlet? And what kind of niche should such a journal cover? After all, there are already quite a few journals that are academic-facing, others that address the needs of teachers, and yet more that cater to specific niches from technology-enhanced teaching, to younger (and older) learners, to CLIL, and more.

I did not wish to replicate any of that, but I wanted to create a space for the kinds of dialogues that I find rewarding. I will readily admit, this is not a very clearly defined space, not yet at least, but I would still like to try and explain how I imagine this space and what I want this journal to be like.

The European Journal of Education and Language Review

If there is one thing that sets the EJELR apart from many other spaces, it is its intellectual stance. I wanted this to become an outlet that treats language education as a social, politically informed issue; an issue best understood through the critical perspectives that defined my own intellectual formation (e.g., Edge, 2006;¹ Pennycook, 2021;² Tollefson, 1995³).

This means that, as a journal, we are less interested in narrowly technical questions of method and measurement (however valuable these may be elsewhere); rather, we are keen to publish work that situates language teaching and learning within the social structures that shape it. We have known for a long time that language education is a context-specific process – so much that it’s difficult to transfer the methods and practices across settings without risking ‘tissue rejection’. But why is that the case? What are the exact processes that shape, sustain and constrain these context-specific manifestations of language education? And what are the consequences these manifestations have on the context? We welcome work that helps us probe answers to such questions.

This orientation does not commit the journal to a single theoretical school (although work that uses Complex Systems Theory to make overarching connections between theoretical perspectives is always very welcome). Our commitment is to work that takes the entanglement of language education with power, identity, and social justice seriously, whether its focus is a national policy framework, a refugee classroom, or the affordances of a new technology.

I take some pride in the belief that the newest issue of the EJELR, published on July 10th, reflects these commitments just as closely as the first one did.

Reading across this issue: Common themes and open questions

Practice, against rhetoric

The key theme to which the newest issue of the EJELR (Volume 2, Issue 1) draws attention is the (often imperfect) overlap between the declared objectives of language education and their enactment. In one article, Charmaine Bonello and her colleagues at the University of Malta show how language policies in Malta declare bilingualism, but do not consistently provide effective implementation mechanisms. In another, written by one of our MA in Language Education for Refugees and Migrants graduates, Maria Giousef and her thesis supervisors show how declared policies of statelessness nevertheless leave people in legal limbo. Elsewhere, my own student, Konstantina Rizou (and her proud supervisor)⁴ document how top-down structures and bureaucratic inflexibility hollow out formal educational entitlements for refugees. Similarly, Rhian Webb reports that teacher roles and practices lagged behind post-pandemic shifts in the beliefs and feelings of individual teachers.

Rights, against deficits

The articles that make up the issue also share the perspective that education for minoritised and displaced populations is a rights issue, rather than a deficit-management problem. Refugees and migrants in Rizou and Kostoulas, stateless persons in Giousef et al., speakers of marginalised L1s in Bonello et al., and the English Language Learners in a study by Charles Martin all appear as populations whose linguistic and educational exclusion is the product of structural forces and constraints. Deficit ideologies, like the “symbolic violence” in Maltese language policies and the framings in Greek teachers’ talk, are explicitly named and critiqued. At the same time, Martin’s translanguaging-as-mode argument offers a constructive counterpart, with home languages appearing as pedagogical resources, rather than just tolerated deviations from ‘correct’ teaching.

Agency, against structure

A third common theme in the articles, which resonates with the ideological commitments of the journal, concerns the role of teachers as a pivotal mediating layer between declared objectives and implementation. Throughout the issue, we read of teachers as the point where policy, technology, or ideology either becomes educational reality or fails to do so. Webb centres teacher development directly; Rizou and Kostoulas treat teacher perceptions as data about pedagogical ideology; Bonello et al. repeatedly identify teacher education as the missing implementation mechanism. Notably, “teacher mediation” appears as a formal condition in Martin’s Design Continuity Framework.

Contributions to this issue

Having made these comments, I would now like to write a few more words about each article in turn, before closing with a note on the review process behind them.

A few closing words

If the kinds of conversations outlined above resonate with your own work, I hope you will consider contributing to the European Journal of Education and Language Review. In the journal, we welcome theoretically informed, empirically grounded, and critically engaged scholarship that explores language education in all its social and political complexity. Whether your work examines classroom practice, language policy, teacher education, multilingualism, technology, or questions of power and justice, we would be pleased to receive your submission and to continue this conversation together.

One last word: No issue of a journal comes into being through the work of authors and editors alone, and we want to close by acknowledging the labour that is least visible in its pages. Each of the articles in this issue was strengthened by the generous, critical engagement of our peer reviewers, who gave their time and expertise without compensation, and often under considerable pressure from their own institutional workloads. We are grateful, too, to the authors who trusted a young journal with their work, and to the readers who, we hope, will engage with these articles, cite them, contest them, and build on them.

---

---