It is with great satisfaction that L2 Journal presents to you this special issue on “Transdisciplinary approaches to language learning and teaching in transnational times,” guest edited by Julie Byrd Clark from the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

The corpus-informed pedagogical intervention described in this article was developed for an advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) course designed for prospective International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) and implemented over the course of two class periods. Its primary goal was to offer students opportunities to gain language awareness of “smallwords” (Hasselgren, 2002b), with the broader goal of developing their ability to make pragmatically appropriate lexicogrammatical choices and to enhance their communication as ITAs. The article situates this pedagogical unit vis-à-vis the goals of the class in which this unit was implemented, describes the progression of activities, and provides an appraisal of the unit.

I am delighted to introduce this fifth special issue of L2 Journal, titled Critical Perspectives on Neoliberalism in Second/Foreign Language Education, guest-edited by five doctoral students from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education: Katie Bernstein, Emily Hellmich, Noah Katznelson, Jaran Shin, and Kimberly Vinall.

The guest editors introduce L2Journal readers to an emerging field of translingual literature--texts by authors using more than one language or a language other than their primary one. The diverse contributions by scholars of literary translingualism presented here contribute to multilingualism studies a unique lens of literary texts infused by multilingual creativity.

Eugene Jolas, the first-time publisher of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939 / 2012), started his career as a translingual journalist and poet. A French-German bilingual, Jolas acquired English in adolescence, crossing the Atlantic to refashion himself as an American man of letters. A Man from Babel, as he styles himself in his posthumous autobiography of the same title (1998), Jolas published poetry in English, French, and German and eventually arrived to an understanding of his linguistic predicament as representative of humanity's path back to a pre-Babel state. Thus, he repeatedly called for a new language, a poetically-charged polygloss, Atlantica, that would surpass Esperanto and allow poets to lead humanity out of a post-war malady of language. Here as elsewhere, this self-identified homme migrateur presque symbolique” was right in his claim: “je fais toujours partie du cosmos inter-racial et inter-linguistique, …. j'appartiens au futur (“The Migrator and His Language”, 1948; French draft Box 4, Folder 100; translation Jolas, 2009, p. 458). This paper explores Jolas’ largely unpublished legacy as a multilingual poet. In addition to published collections of poems in three languages, Jolas left a largely forgotten legacy of multilingual, macaronic, and outright nonsense texts that baffle by their inventiveness. These curious poems, which oscillate between virtuosic linguistic creativity and the construction of a new language, carve out a niche within the modernist movement for literally and metaphorically non-native use of poetic language. Jolas does more than simply create a multilingual collage; he is reconstructing the experience of a creative mind that knows no borders between linguistic systems. By forcing us into a world where any words can enter into any relationships, this experiment in a multilingual poetics invites the critic to think not in terms of poetic value alone but also in terms of method, and it is an extrapolation of this method that this article seeks to achieve.

One of the more remarkable developments in translingual literature over the past decade has been the rise of a new wave of Soviet-born authors writing in languages other than their native Russian. Autobiographical elements have always figured prominently in their fiction, and some of these authors have recently crossed the boundary into non-fiction by writing memoirs. The process of writing in a second language about becoming a writer in a second language gives these books a particular self-referential quality. This essay surveys the latest memoirs and auto-fiction (published 2012-14) of five Soviet-born immigrant novelists in the U.S. and Germany—Gary Shteyngart, Lena Gorelik, Lara Vapnyar, Olga Grjasnowa, and Maxim Shrayer. It argues that constructing a narrative of the self for a foreign audience serves as a crucial step in the gestation of a translingual novelist. This narrative urge often predates the actual mastery of the new language. Rather than as the result of an already-achieved acquisition of a new linguistic medium, telling one’s story in a non-native language emerges as a means toward language learning and integration.

With the increase in globalization, the study of English has become common in Saudi Arabia, but students’ experiences of foreign language anxiety (FLA) have been underexamined. Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries are culturally distinct from the Western world, where the most popular assessments of FLA were developed. Through a qualitative and then quantitative study, the current research examined the suitability of the most popular existing FLA questionnaire, the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS), for use with students of English in Saudi Arabia. In Study 1, Arab women studying in an English preparatory program at an English medium college in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, responded to a single-item, open-ended questionnaire prompting them to list the situations in which they experience anxiety while trying to learn English. A new questionnaire drawing on the women’s responses and the FLCAS and incorporating new items pertinent to the context was then created. In Study 2, the AFLAQ questionnaire was administered to a new sample of Arab women studying in the English medium college, and their responses were analyzed to determine whether the situations described were actually common causes of anxiety, and to identify the most common causes of anxiety. The new questionnaire, called the Arabic Foreign Language Anxiety Questionnaire (AFLAQ), presents a modified version of the FLCAS that was designed to identify and understand specifically what the female Arab students studying in Saudi Arabia experience. A particular emphasis on concerns about self-presentation and embarrassment is fundamental to the AFLAQ due to the importance of honor and respect in Saudi Arabian culture, a concern that does not play as significant of a role in the FLCAS or in Western culture.

The individuals listed below served as referees for the L2 Journal in the calendar year 2014. We wish to express our sincere gratitude for their insightful contributions to the quality of the articles published in this journal: Heather Allen; Alan Astro; David Franklin Ayers; Zehlia Babaci-Wilhite; Catherine Barrette; Usree Bhattacharya; David Block; Carl Blyth; Claudia Brovetto; Brigitta Busch; Christopher Bush; Daniela Augusta Cavalli; Bee Chamcharatsri; Jinhyun Cho; Christian W. Chun; Anthony Cordingly; Jean Marc Dewaele; Pedro Erber; Nikolaus Euba; Sunao Fukunaga; Adolfo García; Thomas Garza; Eva Gentes; David Hanauer; Rachel Harris; Yoko Hasegawa; Monica Heller; Emily Hellmich; Inez Hollander; Diana Holmes; Jin Kyoung Hwang; Adriana Jacobs; Gabriela Borge Janetti; Adam Jaworski; Michael Kelly; Celeste Kinginger; Aurelia Klimkiewicz; Andreas Kramer; Juergen Kurtz; Jet van Dam van Isselt; Nirali Jani; Brian Lennon; Glenn Levine; Adrienne Lo; Nadia Louar; Donaldo Macedo; Suzanne Majhanovich; Dave Malinowski; Mark Nelson; Jean Pacquement; Joseph Park; Kate Paesani; Alfonso Del Percio; Mary Louise Pratt; Jim Ranalli; Lyudmila Razumova; Norbert Ricken; Jörg Roche; Silvia Rodríguez-Sabater; Dinorah Sanchez-Loza; Trevor Sanders; Jean Schultz; Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza; Ania Spyra; Tamar Steinitz; Jason Vivrette; Adrian Wanner; Paige Ware; Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo; Lionel Wee; Lihua Zhang

SLA research on foreign language pedagogy has long demonstrated that culture is essential to language learning. However, presenting culture in the language classroom poses certain problems. For learners, there is a tendency to stereotype others and to rely excessively on the teacher. For teachers, there is a tendency to transmit isolated facts without elaboration and to associate a target language with a single monolithic culture. This article presents a pedagogical approach to culture that not only exposes students to networks of authentic texts but also motivates them to research for themselves the many subtleties of the target culture. By learning how to approach a network of texts, students gain deeper insight into the target culture and develop their ability to interpret texts that they will subsequently encounter on their own. This approach will be illustrated by a detailed lesson plan as well as an analysis of the responses of students who engaged with these materials in an advanced intermediate level French class.

The MLA Report (2007) accords considerable weight to the role of culture in a transformed approach to language education in the U.S. and outlines “one possible model” for developing transculturalunderstanding that involves the interpretation of the “cultural narratives” inherent in all forms of cultural representation (p. 238). How exactly students might be engaged in interpreting cultural narratives in the foreign language classroom, though, remains to be further specified, imagined, practiced, and studied. Moreover, expanding this model of culture-in-language education to include active production and negotiation of meaning around cultural narratives, in addition to interpretation of these, has important pedagogical and learning implications. This paper highlights how engagement with historical narratives is a natural site for the kinds of interpretive and meaning-making practicesthat foster the deep cultural learning discussed in the MLA’s report. Reporting data from an ethnographic, discourse-analytic study of a university-level French classroom, this paper illustratesthat through the instructional environment created by the teacher and through the students’ engagement in class activities, many rich opportunities for perspective-taking from multiple points ofview were made available to students, ultimately weaving a dense web of meanings around French experiences of World War II. Close analysis of excerpts from classroom interaction show how aconstellation of instructional features and patterns of student engagement allowed the class to access the repertoire of more or less plausible storylines attached to this historical period and to practice with interpreting perspectives embedded in cultural texts. Interview data further highlight both the challenges and great potential of inviting multiple perspectives and voices into culture pedagogy in the foreign language classroom.