TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 42, No. 4, December 2008

In This Issue Ⅲ The articles in this issue focus on ecological considerations in language learning and teaching After having treated these considerations as secondary factors that only have implications for language, we are beginning to perceive the environment as a critical mediating force in communication and pedagogy Considering the environment complicates the neat rules and conventions formulated by focusing on language in isolation from the contexts in which it is embedded and practiced Forms and conventions emerge as diverse, variable, and heterogeneous when language and texts are seen as ecological We have the unsettling but creative task of formulating new explanations for language practices and devising new pedagogies for teaching them to English language learners Danielle Molle and Paul Prior demonstrate what happens when academic writing is situated in the pedagogical, communicative, and institutional contexts in which it is practiced They show that academic genres can’t be seen as isolated and discrete but become part of a chain of other texts and genres Furthermore, verbal signs are integrated with nonverbal signs, such as images, graphs, and charts, to make academic writing multimodal Even at the level of linguistic signs, there is considerable hybridity Different tense and register structures appear not only across moves but within them These realizations complicate our view of academic writing as a monolithic entity, as reflected in the collective noun we use for this literacy activity They motivate the authors to recommend a pedagogy to help students navigate multimodal chains of semiotic encounters, to focus on ways of linking different encounters and artifacts together, and to develop sensitivities and flexibilities that will enable students to learn from the discourse practices they encounter In the next article, Ana Christina DaSilva Iddings and Eun-Young Jang adopt an ecological approach to analyze elementary-level classroom learning They show that though the presumed silent period of language learning may not demonstrate verbal output, it definitely involves hectic psychological activity, engagement with the environment, and socialization processes They argue that certain characteristics of routine classroom practices (i.e., shared objects, infrastructural elements, and speech patterns) provide key interactional and contextual resources for the understanding and internalization of a shared system of symbols (linguistic and nonlinguistic) and thus for the emergence of the L2 Their research suggests that their focal student was intentionally and actively engaged in L2 learning during this period of silence Although their bilingual immigrant subject might not have had the necessary linTESOL QUARTERLY Vol 42, No 4, December 2008 537 guistic base in the L2 to fully engage with the content of instruction, by participating in the various classroom practices that permitted him to establish joint-attentional frames (with the teacher and peers), he was able to understand others’ communicative intentions The student makes considerable advances in developing a student identity that is suitable for school as the practices encouraged in the classroom serve as affordances for socialization Iddings and Jang go on to argue that if content learning is to take place, teachers have to reimagine teaching and the classroom to provide for contexts and activities that foster such learning As teachers lose the certitude and control that comes with providing rules and forms in isolation, they have to look for affordances that enable students to develop emergent forms and meanings The next two articles introduce us to diverse forms of affordances teachers may exploit for language pedagogy Akio Suzuki, Takeshi Sato, and Shunji Awazu first show how tapping the nonlinear forms of spatial arrangement of nonverbal communication can enhance language processing They show that sentences formed in linear/temporal structure can be made to communicate more easily when they are rearranged spatially The findings of this experiment reveal the processing advantages of items that were displayed in spatial representations, permitting simultaneous processing, over sentential representations requiring sequential processing The reduction in processing time saves cognitive resources for other acts of meaning making The authors go on to show how a creative pedagogy that encourages students to reorganize linear sentences into spatial display can help in comprehension and interpretation Culture is another affordance that we sometimes fail to use well because we tend to focus on language devoid of ecology Julia MenardWarwick couples this consideration with teacher identities to show how teachers too are resources in classrooms Teachers are not just the medium for teaching; they are themselves the lesson Given that nonnativeEnglish-speaking teachers bring resourceful multicultural identities, intercultural strategies, and metacognitive awareness, Menard-Warwick demonstrates how we should move beyond the native/nonnative debate that focuses excessively on language proficiency at the expense of cultural awareness and other resources Though the two teachers whose life and pedagogy Menard Warwick narrates use their transcultural status differently, there is a healthy interconnection with language pedagogy in both cases Cultural reflection and discussion start from the most microlinguistic concerns of phonology or vocabulary and presumably lead to greater linguistic development among students Menard-Warwick doesn’t demonstrate the linguistic outcomes in this article—perhaps because they are not always the main concerns in an ecological approach Cultural resources feed into language learning in “silent” and invisible 538 TESOL QUARTERLY ways Considering that both students and teachers come from diverse national and cultural backgrounds in the context of globalization, intercultural awareness is an important resource to activate in language learning It is not surprising that many of the articles in this issue invoke conceptual models such as activity theory, sociocognitive theory, sociocultural perspectives, and chaos/complexity theory in addition to ecological models These paradigms have many things in common They encourage a conceptual shift from form to activity in language communication; from perceiving learning as preceding use to seeing them as fused; from treating competence as rational to developing it as multisensory; from single dimension explanations to polyscalar orientations that accommodate different levels of consideration as integrated and embedded in language learning and communication; from learning as instrumental to constitutive of those ends; from communication as solely verbal to multimodal or polysemiotic in the way it richly works with environment to construct meaning These conceptual shifts portend significant changes to the way we practice language teaching They shift our preoccupation from teacher control of the learning process to contextual affordances that students can tap into for creative and self-directed learning; from predictability of form and competence to emergence of new meaning and awareness We are still far from exploiting all the rich ecological resources available for English language teaching Editor’s Note Ⅲ I welcome Diane Belcher and Alan Hirvela as the new editors of TESOL Quarterly They are well known in TESOL circles and bring with them sound editorial experience They have been associated with TQ in the past as authors and reviewers They begin working as Associate Editors in January 2009 John Flowerdew has asked to step down from his role as section editor for Brief Reports and Summaries I thank him for his service to this department John Levis, who was away on sabbatical last year, will resume working as joint editor of the section with Ali Shehadeh Finally, we note with profound sadness the passing away of Phillipa “Pippa” Stein after a brief illness on August 6, 2008 Pippa served on the Editorial Advisory Board and helped represent the knowledge and scholarship of African authors She was the Head of Applied English Language Studies and a professor at University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, where she worked in the areas of English education and EDITOR’S NOTE 539