The past few years have witnessed an emergent growth of both academic and practical works on English medium instruction (EMI) teachers' professional development. This paper presents a critical analysis of 30 empirical studies on EMI teacher development in a wide range of higher educational settings from 2018 to 2022. Through a systematic process of paper selection and review, we have identified three general routes to EMI teacher development, namely: (1) formal training activities; (2) opportunities for teacher collaboration; and (3) self-initiated practices. For each route, we presented a critical appraisal of their design and implementation, as well as reported gains and challenges. Meanwhile, we also conducted a critical analysis of the methodological issues pertaining to the selected papers. Overall, we argue that EMI teacher development in higher education is largely construed as a hybrid, contested, and transformative enterprise featured by EMI teachers' constant boundary-crossing at different levels to seek professional growth in linguistic, pedagogical, cultural, and psychological domains. During this process, EMI teachers may encounter conflicted dispositions, power asymmetries, and individual contradictions. Such a process thus requires EMI teachers to rethink, reexamine, and reflect critically on their accustomed preconceptions and practices, in order to facilitate transformation and achieve sustainability in the long run. The review also presents implications for EMI teachers, teacher educators, policymakers, and researchers on effectively facilitating EMI teacher development in higher education.

When describing motion events, English encodes Manner of motion in the verb and Path of motion in a satellite (s-framing). Brazilian Portuguese (BP), however, encodes Path in the verb and elaborates Manner adverbially (v-framing). This study investigates at what stages of L2 proficiency L2BP and English learners’ acceptability ratings converge with those of L1 speakers when rating sentences with Manner elaborated in the verb (Manner-verb) or in an adverb: a prepositional phrase (Manner-prep) or subordinate clause (Manner-AdvClause). Participants (n = 176) consisted of L1/L2English and L1/L2BP speakers. L2ers were grouped according to language proficiency (Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced). Results of ordinal logistic regressions show that Intermediate proficiency is associated with Manner-verb (L2BP) and Manner-prep ratings (L2English), and that Advanced proficiency is associated with Manner-verb (L2English) and Manner-AdvClause judgments (L2English and L2BP). These findings contribute to the limited body of work on the acquisition of v-framed L2s and the development of low-proficiency learners.

As Kathleen Graves argues in her 2023 article, the belief that students learn best when teachers deliver a curriculum exactly as written is a common fallacy, based on an underlying assumption that ‘the institutional curriculum is the most important determinant of what happens in the classroom’ (p. 200). Graves stresses that, in reality, the institutional curriculum itself does not guarantee effective learning and that, instead, it is up to teachers to modify, adapt, or ‘enact’ the curriculum for it to make sense and work effectively in each unique context (p. 200). In our roles as academic writing instructors at a university in Japan, we are simultaneously teachers and curriculum developers. As such, we were drawn to this article and have examined how Graves’ ideas relate to our teaching beliefs and experiences. In this response article, we first discuss issues caused by an overemphasis on the institutional as well as on the enacted curricula. We then highlight the importance of building a program culture that invites open dialogue about how teachers creatively adapt a given curriculum in order to involve teachers meaningfully in course development.

In this study, we describe the performance of 62 newly immigrated children to France at a nonword repetition task (LITMUS-QU-NWR-FR) designed to evaluate bilingual children’s syllable structure. Children were between 6;0 and 9;1 and had diverse language backgrounds. They participated in our study during their first year of exposure to French. The majority of our children exhibited a good performance on the task. The variation observed is related to: (i) the properties of the nonwords: items with complex syllables are more difficult, as are items with three syllables in length; (ii) phonological awareness: children with a more developed L2 phonological awareness perform better at the task; and (iii) receptive vocabulary size: children with a larger L2 vocabulary size perform better at the task. Overall, our findings provide support for the argument that the LITMUS-QU-NWR-FR task can be used shortly after the onset of exposure to the L2.

The timing of corrective feedback (CF), alternatively called feedback timing, refers to the choice of a timepoint for providing corrections on second language (L2) errors or making comments on the appropriacy of L2 learners' verbal or nonverbal behaviors. A typical distinction related to the notion of feedback timing is between immediate and delayed feedback, but what constitutes immediate or delayed has been interpreted and defined in different ways. In one stream of research, immediate feedback is operationalized as feedback provided during a learning task and delayed feedback as feedback provided after a task is completed (Arroyo & Yilmaz, 2018*; Li Zhu & Ellis, 2016a*; Quinn, 2014*). One methodological variation in this distinction is interim feedback, which is provided after the first task is completed and before the second task is started (Li, Li, & Qian, under review). Interim feedback is relevant or possible when multiple tasks are performed. It refers to feedback provided during the interval(s) between tasks. Interim feedback is different from delayed feedback in that the latter refers to feedback provided after the task (if there is only one task) or all tasks (if there are multiple tasks) are completed and there is no further task performance following the feedback session. This way of conceptualizing feedback timing is based on the positioning of feedback during a task cycle, instead of the proximity to errors. Another way to examine feedback timing is to distinguish feedback provided immediately after an error is made and feedback delayed until a later time in the instructional cycle, such as one week later (Lavolette, Polio, & Kahng, 2015*). In this case, both immediate and delayed feedback can occur either during or after the completion of a learning task. A third way is to define feedback timing options in terms of their relation to instruction, namely whether feedback is provided immediately after explicit instruction or at a later stage after learners complete some practice activities (Fu & Li, 2022*). It should be clarified that this way of operationalizing feedback timing is markedly different from that in other studies in that it focuses on feedback's relation to instruction instead of errors. To conclude this section, it is necessary to point out that the conceptualization and operationalization of feedback timing should be reconsidered in L2 research. Feedback timing is not merely a matter of the length of interval or the distance between errors and feedback, and other parameters of the instructional system where errors occur are also involved or relevant, such as the distance between feedback and instruction, the positioning of feedback in a task cycle (such as within, after, or between tasks), and so on. These parameters are important because they contribute to the effectiveness of different timing options. Despite the variation in the operationalization of feedback timing, we argue that it is a unified construct that is theoretically justifiable, empirically examinable, and pedagogically valuable.