In the past decade, there has been increasing scholarly interest in language teachers’ emotional experiences, how they regulate and manage their emotions, and how their experiences and emotion-related practices are related to their cognition, practice, well-being, and professional development. A systematic and critical review is needed to help language teaching professionals to benefit from the insights generated by these studies. This review aims to explore this growing body of research on the emotions of language teachers published between 2015 and 2024 by outlining four major research themes: 1) emotional experience; 2) emotion labour; 3) emotion regulation; and 4) emerging emotion-related concepts. This review critically discusses these themes and draws on relevant research findings to visualise the results in an emotion-focused map of language teachers’ professional development. It concludes by proposing a research agenda to stimulate further inquiry into the emotions of language teachers.

This study compares the uses of the acronym wtf (‘what the fuck’) in digitally mediated text-based interactions in three typologically distinct languages: American English (source language), and Finnish and Chilean Spanish (recipient languages). The data consist of tweets extracted from the social media platform X. Interactional Linguistics and Digital Conversation Analysis are employed to examine the functions performed by wtf in different positions in a tweet and interaction. Instances of wtf were annotated to describe its uses in the source language and to compare them with those observed in the recipient languages. The study shows that in all three languages, wtf is used in various tweet-internal and sequential positions. These uses expressed the writer’s disbelief, astonishment, and a problem in acceptance towards prior content. The analysis concludes that the pragmatic functions of wtf in American English undergo a narrowing when it is used in Finnish and Chilean Spanish.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) preschoolers have difficulty comprehending and producing English plural morphology. This study investigated their comprehension and production of the plural at primary-school age using novel words, to better understand their mental representation of plural morphology. Thirty 5- to 9-year-old DHH children and 31 children with normal hearing (NH) completed a two-alternative forced-choice comprehension task and a wug production task. Performance was not significantly poorer for DHH children, though some morphophonological contexts proved challenging for both groups. Performance was correlated with vocabulary size. This suggests that, if DHH children have sufficient vocabulary, they may perform like primary school NH peers in plural comprehension and production.

Generative AI (GenAI) offers potential for English language teaching (ELT), but it has pedagogical limitations in multilingual contexts, often generating standard English forms rather than reflecting the pluralistic usage that represents diverse sociolinguistic realities. In response to mixed results in existing research, this study examines how ChatGPT, a text-based generative AI tool powered by a large language model (LLM), is used in ELT from a Global Englishes (GE) perspective. Using the Design and Development Research approach, we tested three ChatGPT models: Basic (single-step prompts); Refined 1 (multi-step prompting); and Refined 2 (GE-oriented corpora with advanced prompt engineering). Thematic analysis showed that Refined Model 1 provided limited improvements over Basic Model, while Refined Model 2 demonstrated significant gains, offering additional affordances in GE-informed evaluation and ELF communication, despite some limitations (e.g., defaulting to NES norms and lacking tailored GE feedback). The findings highlight the importance of using authentic data to enhance the contextual relevance of GenAI outputs for GE language teaching (GELT). Pedagogical implications include GenAI–teacher collaboration, teacher professional development, and educators’ agentive role in orchestrating diverse resources alongside GenAI.

This article discusses the family language biographies of two Spanish-Catalan speaking, white middle-class mothers living in Catalonia, who raise their children in English. The rationale behind their choice is informed by the mothers’ experiences when trying to learn English as young adults in the late 1980s, mediated by their present socioeconomic conditions. In order to lay the groundwork for what is framed as a ‘good’ future for their children, these mothers embark upon a course of action designed to expose their children to English. The analysis, drawing upon a language biography approach and social positioning, reveals the role of parents’ pasts for the construction of the future. Beyond the widely understood tropes regarding the commodification of English within neoliberalism, the families’ actions reveal ideologies and future orientations informed by a complex interplay of historical, political, and economic factors wherein speaking English has become one of the markers of social access. (Family language biographies, Catalan children raised in English, anticipation, futurity)

This study investigated the interaction between oral task enjoyment and task repetition and the effect of this interaction on second language learners’ speech complexity, accuracy, and fluency. In the context of task-based language teaching, task enjoyment is a context-specific, situational emotion that arises during task performance and is hypothesised to enhance engagement, motivation, and overall task performance, whereas task repetition is a classroom procedure shown to improve fluency, and possibly also complexity and accuracy. Fifty-two Polish young adult learners of L2 English completed the Oral Task Enjoyment Scale before exact task repetition. Their oral task performances were analysed before and after immediate exact task repetition. Results from Generalized Linear Model analysis reveal that 1) task repetition enhances lexical diversity and marginally improves fluency, 2) higher levels of oral task enjoyment positively influence learners’ lexical diversity, correct verb forms, and speech rate, yet 3) its interaction with task repetition is not significant, suggesting that task repetition benefits are consistent across different levels of enjoyment. These findings imply that task repetition is an effective strategy for improving language performance, regardless of learners’ emotional engagement with the task.

An avenue for the progress of areal linguistics in South America is the investigation of the geographical distribution of specific features, such as the expression of sociative causation. Sociative causation is a particular type of causation where the causer not only makes the causee do an action but also participates in it (Shibatani & Pardeshi, 2002). Guillaume & Rose (2010) hypothesize that dedicated sociative causative markers are an areal feature of South America, in particular western South America. The aim of the present paper is to reassess the spatial distribution of these markers based on a large worldwide sample of 325 languages. The results show that dedicated sociative causative markers are significantly more frequent in South America compared to the rest of the world.

This study examined how word identification is influenced by interword spacing and morphological complexity in Thai, a script without interword spacing. While previous research supported the facilitative effect of interword spacing on Thai word identification, they did not account for the potential effects of the words’ morphological structure. The challenge of word identification becomes more pronounced when readers have to identify compound words (e.g., bathroom) when reading sentences without interword spacing. In an eye-tracking experiment that manipulated interword spacing (unspaced, spaced) and noun type (bimorphemic compound, monomorphemic) in Thai sentences, we confirmed previous findings that interword spacing has a facilitative effect on word identification, as evidenced by shorter first fixation duration, gaze duration and total fixation time. Furthermore, we observed an interaction effect indicating that interword spacing had a larger facilitative effect on the identification of compounds compared to monomorphemic words. Our results also revealed that the morphological structure of Thai words can influence saccadic movements, e.g., the first fixation landing position was closer to the beginning of compounds than to simple words. We suggest that the orthography-language interface, a language-specific feature, should be considered a major component in eye movement models of reading.

We investigated how the presence of linguistic labels, their iconicity and mode of presentation (cued vs not cued) affect non-linguistic cognitive processing, focussing on the learning and visual discrimination of new categories. Novel species of aliens that mimicked natural categories were paired with iconic labels, non-iconic labels or no labels across two tasks. In the Training task participants learnt to categorise the aliens, with results showing that both labels and iconicity improved categorisation. We then used a Match to Sample task to test how these variables affect rapid visual discrimination. Results showed that the presence of labels, their iconicity and label cueing all lead to more rapid and accurate visual discrimination of newly acquired categories. We argue that this is due to iconicity exaggerating sensory expectations provided by linguistic labels, made more readily accessible by cueing. We also examine the possible implications of our results for the discussion about language evolution.

Non-native languages tend to be acquired through a combination of explicit and implicit learning, where implicit learning requires coordination of language information with referents in the environment. In this study, we examined how learners use both language input and environmental cues to acquire vocabulary and morphology in a novel language and how their language background influences this process. We trained 105 adults with native languages (L1s) varying in morphological richness (English, German, Mandarin) on an artificial language comprising nouns and verbs with morphological features (number, tense, and subject-verb [SV] agreement) appearing alongside referential visual scenes. Participants were able to learn both word stems and morphological features from cross-situational statistical correspondences between language and the environment, without any instruction. German-speakers learned SV agreement worse than other morphological features, which were acquired equally effectively by English or Mandarin speakers, indicating the subtle and varied influence of L1 morphological richness on implicit non-native language learning.

One of the peculiarities of Falkland Islands toponymy is its multilingual character: French, English, and Spanish names coexist throughout the archipelago serving as a reminder of its busy history. American Spanish gaucho place names were coined after the British settlement in 1833. These toponyms mostly identify inland locations, reflecting the new practical need for orientation, delimitation, and land management for the livestock business of the new colony. However, such place names have not yet received exclusive attention. Until now they have been only mentioned in gazetteers with reference to their Spanish origin. The present work resorts to both traditional toponymic approaches and fieldwork to identify toponyms, understand how they work, and analyze how Islanders perceive them. This is done under the assumption that studying Islanders’ attitudes contributes to revealing historical facts as well as relationships between the Islands and the mainland.

Demonstratives and locative adverbs cross-linguistically are typically acquired relatively late, with children initially overusing proximal forms. However, these findings are largely based on research in languages with only two or three demonstratives. It is unclear whether the findings extend to languages with more complex systems. The present study examines data from Inuktitut, a language of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan family, which has 20 demonstrative roots and 10 locative adverb roots representing six spatial distinctions. It uses data from 18 Inuktitut speakers (8–60 years) to investigate the target-like use of demonstratives/locatives and data from eight Inuktitut-speaking children (1–4 years) and their mothers to determine the acquisition trajectories of these structures. Children initially used only the proximal demonstratives/locatives, which aligns with prior research. The proportion of proximal forms out of all others decreased significantly with mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLUm), and by MLUm 2.50, children were using the full demonstrative/locative paradigm in a target-like manner. This differs from prior research and highlights the importance of language diversity in acquisition research.