Is an open-access academic journal operating under a double-blind peer-review system. It provides a platform for dialogue around research in the fields of (Applied) Linguistics and Literature from critical perspectives. The journal invites contributions from those whose studies are centred on language—whether in its poetic expressions or its realisation as language-in-use in various discourses and genres. Its aim is to stimulate, disseminate, and contribute to the development of literary and linguistic studies, as well as their many points of convergence. Submissions are accepted in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.
Departamento de Lingüística y Literatura, Facultad de Humanidades. Universidad de Santiago de Chile
As we enter Scopus, discussion of editorial processes and artificial intelligence continues
Árboles y Rizomas celebrates its inclusion in Scopus as a collective milestone that ensures its editorial reach and highlights the support of editors, authors, reviewers, and the Dicyt USACH Journal Coordination Office. Against the backdrop of the shift toward open access and the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence, the publication reaffirms its commitment to critical thinking and the dissemination of the humanities in complex national and international environments. The Editor analyzes the growing influence of generative artificial intelligence on authorship—including that of literary texts—and on intellectual ethics, contrasting the coldness of the algorithm with the depth of human consciousness. It also denounces the lack of government support for scientific inquiry and defends the value of critical thinking in the face of purely productivity-based metrics. The ten articles and two reviews included in this issue are presented.
Copyright (c) 2026 Miguel Farías https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Desire, female sexuality, and agency in Sabrina Carpenter’s lyrics: a corpus linguistics analysis
This study examines how desire, female sexuality, and agency are discursively constructed in the lyrics of Sabrina Carpenter’s three most recent studio albums (2022–2025) through a corpus linguistics approach. Drawing on a corpus of 46 songs analyzed with AntConc, the study combines lexical frequency analysis, KWIC concordances, and collocational patterns to identify recurring linguistic strategies associated with the expression of desire. The findings reveal that Carpenter constructs female desire through a lexicon characterized by humor, irony, intimacy, and self-awareness, while recurrent terms such as love, want, need, hot, and bed appear in contexts that foreground agency, boundary-setting, and active participation in romantic and sexual relationships. The analysis further suggests that these representations reflect a postfeminist sensibility in which desire is expressed as playful, explicit, and self-determined, while remaining embedded within broader cultural and commercial frameworks. By integrating corpus linguistics with discourse analysis, the study contributes empirical evidence to research on gender, sexuality, and popular music. It also demonstrates the value of corpus-assisted approaches for examining contemporary cultural texts and highlights the relevance of Sabrina Carpenter’s work as a site for exploring current discourses of femininity, sexuality, and agency.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ninoska Cecilia Herrera Araya https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Argumentation and originality in writing research articles in literature
This study aims to understand how research articles in literature establish and argue for the originality of their arguments. To this end, a corpus of 28 Spanish-language articles from this discipline is used, and a thematic analysis focused on their content is conducted to identify the various ways in which the desire for originality manifests itself, both in literary interpretation and in the delivery of new knowledge resulting from novelty and dialogue with the field. Through this analysis, it is possible to observe whether argumentation and originality appear in a manner like that described by critics of academic papers in the humanities, whose objections cite a lack of originality as one of the negative consequences of implementing/imposing argumentative paper writing in the humanities. In contrast to this criticism, the interesting aspect of this research is the possibility of recognizing disciplinary particularities that differentiate academic writing in literature and that, therefore, demand new and more systematic analyses of its characteristics. These analyses should foster improvements in both the understanding and production of academic writing, as well as the implementation of more appropriate forms of evaluation for the discipline.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marcela Rosas Lira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Mapping LGBTIQA+ identity through systematic metaphors: a Grounded Theory and Discourse-Based Analysis
This study analyzes the metaphorical discourse of LGBTIQA+ people in order to understand processes of self-perception and identity formation, drawing on a constructivist Grounded Theory approach (Birks & Mills, 2015). Based on individual interviews and focus groups, the research examines how systematic metaphors articulate LGBTIQA+ identity, the process of coming to terms with a LGBTIQA+ sexual orientation and/or gender identity, and social representations of LGBTIQA+ people as narrated by the participants themselves, addressing a gap in existing studies on the role of metaphorical language in identity construction. Methodologically, the Metaphor Identification Method (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) was combined with open, axial, and selective coding through constant comparison and theoretical sampling until data saturation was reached. The results reveal coherent metaphor systems that shape differentiated identity narratives. On the one hand, metaphors of agency and transformation (JOURNEY, CONTAINER, NATURE) conceptualize the identity process as dynamic and situated. On the other, stigmatizing metaphors (DISEASE, ALIENS, HIERARCHY) reinforce processes of othering and exclusion. The study proposes an emergent theory that demonstrates how metaphors mediate between subjective experience and social structures, contributing to cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis in heterocisnormative contexts.
Copyright (c) 2026 Camila Victoria Mardones-Alarcon, Paola Alarcón Hernández https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
SDG 13 as Discursive Container: Technocratic and Relational Climate Futures in Indonesia and Ecuador at COP21
Climate change governance is increasingly structured through global frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 13 (Climate Action), which standardize climate action through targets and indicators while allowing discursive variation in how climate futures are imagined. This article examines the discursive construction of climate futures in tropical state climate communication by comparing head-of-state national statements delivered at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21), the summit that culminated in the Paris Agreement. Using qualitative comparative discourse analysis (Witajewska-Baltvilka et al., 2024), the study analyzes speeches by the Presidents of Indonesia and Ecuador and introduces two analytical heuristics—technocratic climate language and relational ecological climate language— developed in this study to distinguish contrasting modes of climate discourse. The findings show that Indonesia’s COP21 speech predominantly frames climate futures through technocratic language emphasizing governance capacity and policy implementation, while Ecuador’s speech articulates relational ecological futures grounded in moral responsibility and intergenerational justice. The article argues that SDG 13 functions as a discursive container whose later institutional form crystallized climate imaginaries articulated at COP21, demonstrating that climate futures are actively produced through language.
Copyright (c) 2026 Prapti Wigati Purwaningrum, Haryo Sutanto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“I feel like they don’t understand me”: the construction of affect in the narratives of Chilean patients with fibromyalgia
This article approaches the experience of chronic pain from male perspectives, specifically those of patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Drawing on the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study seeks to analyse the experience of illness through the affective meanings constructed by Chilean men diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Two semi-structured interviews with patients diagnosed with this condition were analysed. The data were classified according to the type of affect expressed, based on the Appraisal System (Martin & White, 2005). Subsequently, relationships were established between these meanings and the entities evaluated (Hood, 2010). The results indicate a marked predominance of two types of affect: dissatisfaction (displeasure) and insecurity (disquiet). Displeasure was significantly associated with fibromyalgia (its effects), medical specialists, family members, and work. Notably, there were few or no instances of affective meanings related to happiness (cheer—only two instances—or affection—none) in these narratives. The concluding observations offer reflections on how these patients construct their experience of suffering through affective meanings that reveal underlying tensions, as well as the need for greater understanding and support from key social actors, such as family members and medical specialists.
Copyright (c) 2026 Natalia Díaz Alegría https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Review. Fim por Nomear by Sandra Santos. Self-published. 116 pages.
This review examines the relationship between authorship and the artistic element. Based on a study of the poems in this collection, it is undeniable that there is a reflection between author and work, and consequently, a continuous driving force of variation. These elements are also inherent in the play on ambiguity; therefore, the condition of naming—in life and art—remains perpetually open. In light of the author’s biographical background, this review explores her work, particularly its underlying layers. While these layers reveal a unity in their abstraction, they also rekindle literary memory and the experience of the self as tradition through their multiple meanings.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ana Claudia Rodrigues https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Native categories of shōjo manga reader communities of practice
This study proposes a relational systematization of native categories, understood as the terms and classifications that readers themselves use to name, evaluate, and interpret their readings, mobilized by Chilean shōjo manga readers. The problem addressed by the study lies in the fact that these ways of naming and evaluating reading experiences circulate widely within fan communities but have been scarcely described and analyzed in research on youth reading cultures and, when mentioned, tend to appear in a dispersed manner, without an analytical grouping that allows an understanding of their internal relations and how they function as a system of valuation. Methodologically, the study developed an exploratory qualitative design based on 27 semi-structured interviews with regular readers who actively participate in both in-person and digital circuits. Through open and axial coding, recurrent terms, oppositions, and discursive functions were identified, leading to the elaboration of a heuristic microtopology of four axes: (1) affective and experiential categories; (2) aesthetic-narrative categories; (3) moral and relational categories; and (4) belonging and legitimacy. The results show that these categories operate as a relational system of valuation that articulates affect, form, morality, and belonging, organizing the reading experience and the hierarchies of taste within the community.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jorge Sánchez Sánchez, Victoria Jiménez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Of sacrifice, torture and hope: representations of the body in Agustina Bazterrica’s Las indignas
This article analyses the physical and emotional portrayal of the women living in the Casa de la Hermandad Sagrada in Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Las indignas (2023). Drawing on André Le Breton’s (2010, 2018) notion of the body as a sensitive and material space, and Sara Ahmed’s (2015) political perspective on affect, we examine the figures constructed by Bazterrica to explore the coexistence of a community of women isolated from the rest of the world amidst a post-apocalyptic context characterised by a hierarchical, violent and misogynistic structure. We propose, on this basis, that Bazterrica develops a variety of recurring symbolic images that form a circuit of affects, in the style of Vladimir Safatle (2015), where the women of the Sacred Brotherhood survive through bonds arising from fear, hatred and envy. According to our hypothesis, these images, which we have termed ‘figures of the body’, are constructed from the symbolic characteristics of the characters and provide depth to the representation of the corpo-affective networks that emerge in a dystopian world marked by sacrifice and violence.
Copyright (c) 2026 Valeska Solar Olivares https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Adjectivization in the Chilean school curriculum: functions, uses and expected learning outcomes
This study examines the treatment of adjectivation, defined as the ability to use adjectives to modify nouns and provide additional information about their nature, characteristics, and qualities (Redolfi y Melloni, 2024) in the Chilean curriculum. This descriptive-exploratory research involved a content analysis of two official documents: the Curricular Bases [Bases Curriculares] and the Study Programs [Programas de Estudio]. Within these documents, the Learning Objectives [Objetivos de Aprendizaje] and Assessment Indicators [Indicadores de Evaluación] that promote the use of adjectives were identified and quantified. The analysis focused on the 4th and 8th grades of primary education across five school subjects. The findings revealed that in 4th grade, adjectivation is most strongly promoted in Visual Arts, whereas in 8th grade it is observed in Natural Sciences. In general, a progressive decrease in evaluative adjectivation is observed as grade levels advance, with a particularly marked reduction in Visual Arts and Language and Communication, known as Language and Literature at higher levels. In contrast, Mathematics exhibits the lowest promotion of adjectivation at both levels. The study concludes that the Chilean curriculum undergoes a process of progressive academization, favoring descriptive objectivity over evaluative expression, which may constrain the development of critical and expressive skills.
Copyright (c) 2026 Carola Alvarado, María Corina Vásquez, Rosita Carvajal, Carlos Miranda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Holding friction: toward a politics of translation in Guadalupe Santa Cruz
This article addresses the problem of translation understood solely as a technical transfer of meaning governed by equivalence, fidelity, and transparency, and examines its limitations in accounting for critical translational practices. Its objective is to analyze translation in the work of Guadalupe Santa Cruz as a politics of translation oriented toward sustaining friction, foreignness, and the non-closure of meaning. The methodology is qualitative and analytical, based on a close reading of a translational corpus that includes Santa Cruz’s Spanish translation of Julia Kristeva’s Sense and Nonsense of Revolt and her translations of Jean Remy’s texts on Georg Simmel, with particular attention to lexical choices, syntactic strategies, and paratextual devices such as Translator’s Notes. The results show that Santa Cruz’s translations do not aim to stabilize meaning or resolve untranslatability, but rather to expose and activate it within the target language. The article concludes that her translational practice constitutes an ethics of obstruction: a material intervention in language that renders loss, failure, and foreignness productive, affirming untranslatability as a political condition of thought and of the critical circulation of knowledge in the Latin American context.
Copyright (c) 2026 Claudio Reyes Lozano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Pragmatics at the Margins: English Language Teacher Education and Curricular Tensions in Chile
This mixed-methods descriptive study investigates how pragmalinguistic competence is positioned within English Language Teacher Education (ELTE) programmes in Chile, with particular attention to the perspectives of English Teacher Educators (ETEs) and the representation of pragmatics in formal curricular documents. Survey data from 30 ETEs from across 26 programmes were combined with a qualitative content analysis of 12 undergraduate curricula. Results show that ETEs report high levels of metapragmatic awareness and strong support for integrating pragmatic instruction into teacher preparation. They emphasise contextual variation, register, and appropriacy as central to their pedagogical work. Nevertheless, the curricular analysis revealed that these dimensions are rarely made explicit in programme structures. This discrepancy points to a disconnect between teacher educators’ pedagogical understandings and the ways in which curricula formally conceptualise communicative competence. The findings highlight the need for systematic and explicit integration of pragmatic competence in ELTE curricula, along with assessment practices that recognise appropriacy and contextual sensitivity as core components of communicative ability in EFL teacher education contexts.
Copyright (c) 2026 Francisco Matus-Alarcón, Anita Ferreira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
With a farewell to mother and highlighting some milestones, we present this issue of AyR
The editor-in-chief pays a heartfelt tribute to his mother who passed away while the final edition of this issue was being prepared. The figure of the mother is highlighted with references to Nicanor Parra’s and Pablo Neruda’s tributes to Violeta Parra. Next, we review some recent intellectual milestones relevant to the editorial policies of open access journals committed to open science. The first relates to funding cuts for research in key areas of the humanities carried out by the United States government. The second reports that in France, the National Center for Scientific Research will suspend access to Web of Science following a change in research evaluation policies from quantitative bibliometric indicators to qualitative, open, and transparent evaluations. The third milestone highlighted is the publication of the Cervantes Institute Yearbook (2025), El español en el mundo (Spanish in the World), which mentions that Spanish now reaches 635 million users worldwide, ranking just below Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. The dossier commemorating the 80th anniversary of Gabriela Mistral's Nobel Prize is announced, and the works included in the miscellaneous section are reviewed.
Copyright (c) 2025 Miguel Farías https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Approaching the Mistralian legacy 80 years after the Nobel Prize: a (semi) dialogic presentation
As an incentive to prepare the presentation of this dossier commemorating the 80th anniversary of Gabriela Mistral's Nobel Prize, the editor asked the two guest editors, Elizabeth Horan and Nain Nómez, a few questions. The questions and answers outline a promising landscape for Mistral studies, opening up several avenues to explore, ranging from her circle of poets and readers in the Elqui Valley in the early 20th century to the cultural diplomacy that made her, as she said in her Nobel acceptance speech: “by a fortune that surpasses me, I am at this moment the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice of the very noble Spanish and Portuguese languages.” Following the dialogue, the three articles and two notes that make up the dossier are described.
Copyright (c) 2025 Miguel Farías, Elizabeth Horan, Nain Nómez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Note: Mistral in Paris. International conference on the work of Gabriela Mistral, its translation, and its legacy.
The following note describes the conference “Gabriela Mistral Yesterday and Today: Between Poetic Winepress and Political Message,” held in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of her Nobel Prize. The event was organized by Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III, Université Paris-Nanterre, Sorbonne Université, the Embassy of Chile in France, and Université Paris VIII, and took place November 19-21 at the Maison de l’Amérique latine in Paris. The various paper, presentations and activities that were held in Paris are briefly described, highlighting Gabriela Mistral as a central figure for fostering a transnational dialogue. This allows us to reflect upon the still present impact and trajectory of a poet and intellectual who, eighty years after receiving the Nobel Prize, remains a figure of inspiration and subject for academic, literary, and artistic reflection.
Copyright (c) 2025 Macarena Urzúa Opazo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Review. Caguama: escritos de una lesbiana gorda. Gabriela Contreras. Fea Ediciones, 2022, 73 pages.
This review offers a critical and essayistic examination of Caguama: escritos de una lesbiana gorda (2022), a work by the Chilean poet, editor, and activist Gabriela Contreras, who presents a decolonial feminist poetic framework. To provide an approach commensurate with the conceptual challenge posed by the author, the analysis centers on the dialectic between the 'uncomfortable' body and structures of oppression. It poses a central thematic question: is it possible for the lesbian body to de-border itself through a zoomorphic alterity in order to resist, transform, or simply evade the current system? In response, the analysis suggests that zoomorphism operates as a strategy of resistance—a locus wherein the fat body exists undisguised within alterity, inhabiting a simulacrum that slips through the grasp of the systemic apparatus, ultimately rendering its capture impossible.
Copyright (c) 2026 Claudia Kennedy Moreno https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Shared contradictions: links between Gabriela Mistral and Herminia Brumana. Between motherhood and female emancipation (1920–1945)
Our article is the first to analyze the friendship and correspondence between Chilean educator, writer, and diplomat Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) and Argentine writer and educator Herminia Brumana (1897–1954). We thus establish Mistral's links with Argentine women educators of the left, who clearly transcended the elite. They shared bonds of friendship with the Chilean-Argentine Marta Samatán and the Argentine educator Marta Salotti. Both Mistral and Brumana embraced the cause of women's emancipation, while openly objecting to bourgeois feminism. To examine their critical and contradictory positions in relation to hegemonic femininity, we analyze three key moments: the 1920s, when Mistral was writing in the context of the achievements following the Mexican Revolution, and Brumana was writing in Buenos Aires, in a context marked by the renovating echoes of university reform. Then, the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War; and finally, the 1940s, during World War II. We will see that both Mistral and Brumana take conservative positions on motherhood as a “natural instinct of women,” while discussing key aspects of gender roles and sexual morality of the time.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marina Becerra, Elizabeth Horan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Friendship between Cecília Meireles and Gabriela Mistral: Education, Journalism and Folklore
This article examines the surviving letters from the Brazilian writer Cecília Meireles (1901-1964) to Gabriela Mistral in the 1940s, now collected in the Biblioteca Nacional Digital de Chile. It begins by reconstructing Mistral’s and Meireles' friendship, especially in earlier years, and proceeds to discuss the information these letters provide to understand both Meireles’ career in journalism and Mistral's contributions to the Brazilian press during the period.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luiza F. Moreira, Elizabeth Horan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Note: “Estimable… hermana de alma”, unpublished letter from Lucila Godoy Alcayaga to Rosa Elvira Sepúlveda Concha.
This note presents an analytical approach to an unpublished letter from Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, dated 1908 and addressed to Rosa Elvira Sepúlveda Concha. This document—discovered and preserved in the Archaeological Museum of La Serena—allows us to partially characterize Lucila’s epistolary relationship and reveals clues to her aesthetic conception, authorial identity and intellectual networks. This letter contributes to the assertion that Mistral’s corpus remains open and that its constant reconfiguration poses challenges to understanding her work.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nelson Santibañez Rodríguez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Terms of address in Brazilian, Italian and Uruguayan women’s requests: a Contrastive Pragmatics analysis
This exploratory study focuses from the perspective of Contrastive Pragmatics on the forms of address used in three seemingly similar languages: Uruguayan Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Italian. Forms of address play a key role in interactions because they reveal how languages and cultures encode relationships between interlocutors, reflecting the sociocultural norms of a particular speech community. Requests in the three languages were collected through a Written Discourse Completion Task in which the contextual variables of social distance and degree of imposition (Brown & Levinson, 1987) were manipulated. Based on these data and previous studies (Carricaburo, 1997; Silva et al., 2017; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2011), a classification of forms of address was established on three levels: nominal, pronominal, and based on verb ending. To investigate occurrences of forms of address, we focused on the part of the request called alerter (acto apelativo), used to capture the interlocutor's attention. Clear differences were observed across the three languages, both regarding the presence or absence of address forms and the specific types employed—insights that carry implications for various fields, such as language teaching, learning, and translation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cibelle Correia da Silva, Adriana Marcelle de Andrade Freitas , Adriana Mendes Porcellato https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Gabriela Mistral and the International Institute of Educational Cinematography in Mussolini’s Italy
The article examines Gabriela Mistral’s strategic participation between 1928 and 1934 in the International Educational Cinematographic Institute (IECI), an organization affiliated with the League of Nations and based in Rome during the government of Benito Mussolini. The study seeks to clarify the commitments and tensions within this seemingly paradoxical collaboration: although during the 1920s cinema gained great relevance as a social and pedagogical instrument, the creation of the IECI was only possible thanks to funding from the Italian fascist regime. Within this context, Mistral’s contributions to the Institute’s journal are analyzed to explore her relationship with educational cinema and international cultural policy. Drawing on a selection of essays, journalistic articles, and private letters, the study highlights the transnational nature of Mistral’s intellectual networks and her role within the cultural politics of the time—marked both by international cooperation and by resistance to the official culture of fascism. Her writings on educational cinema shed light on the debates surrounding state intervention in education and the ideological complexities of the interwar period.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gloria Medina-Sancho https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reimagining Reality: Challenging Lukács through Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
This article examines how Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) engages with the social and historical realities of early twentieth-century Britain, challenging Georg Lukács’s claim that modernist literature “negates outward reality.” While Lukács interprets techniques such as interior monologue, shifting focalization, and narrative fragmentation as retreats into private subjectivity, this study argues that Woolf’s formal experimentation offers a historically rooted mode of modernist realism in which consciousness registers social structures and historical pressures. In line with recent scholarship that reconsiders modernist form as socially responsive and historically situated, this article shows that Woolf’s narrative techniques make visible the ideological and material conditions that shape consciousness. The argument is developed through three sections. The first explores how Woolf integrates class hierarchy, gender norms, and social anxiety into the individual thought, presenting interiority as a form of social understanding. The second examines how bourgeois perception and domestic ideology produce gendered silences and structural absences that restrict what characters can notice or comprehend. The third analyzes how Woolf conveys historical rupture - especially the trauma of World War I - through temporal disconnection, omission, and structural fragmentation. By bringing together interiority, social perception, and formal disruption, To the Lighthouse demonstrates modernism’s capacity for subtle, historically attentive social critique.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gabriel Romero Karlsson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Note: Linguistic and cultural marginalization in Las Niñas Quispe: A Sapir-Whorf approach
This note presents a review of the film Las niñas Quispe (Sepúlveda, 2013) through the lens of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Based on the true story of three Colla sisters in the Chilean highlands during the 1970s, the film portrays a world marked by silence, illiteracy, and limited interactions and communicative resources that restrict the characters’ ability to imagine alternative futures. The film reveals how symbolic exclusion operates beyond material deprivation, constraining not only expression but also access to broader worldviews. From a moderate interpretation of linguistic relativity, it can be observed that language does not strictly determine the sisters’ tragic fate, but it does profoundly shape their ways of perceiving and engaging with reality. Ultimately, the film stands as a powerful metaphor for how the impoverishment of language can narrow the horizon of what is thinkable, turning silence into both a survival mechanism and a forced choice.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jessica Vega-Abarzúa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reinterpreting English as a Lingua Franca in Latin America
This presentation offers a brief overview of knowledge production on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in the Latin American context, highlighting that the growing interest in the topic has been accompanied by efforts to reinterpret the role of the English language (EL) from critical, local, and decolonial perspectives. In contrast to earlier perceptions of limited Latin American engagement with ELF studies (Jenkins et al., 2011), it is possible to observe now a situated and politically engaged interpretation of the concept by some Latin American researchers. This dossier aims to give visibility to this body of knowledge emerging from the Global South. Drawing on the contributions of these scholars, the articles gathered here offer reflections on the meanings of the EL in contexts shaped by historical inequalities and contemporary challenges.
Copyright (c) 2025 Telma Gimenez, Camila Haus, Jacyara Nô dos Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
On editorial bots, algorithmic discrimination, and critical approaches in (Applied) Linguistics and Literature
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a recurring theme in the recent intellectual landscape, which we have discussed in previous presentations. We try to approach it from references on comprehension and memory in linguistic learning processes and then call on specialized literature. The specialized references allow us to discuss the implications of AI for editorial processes, with the use of bots that can perform editorial tasks such as text revision, and its disadvantages, such as hallucinations and algorithmic biases. We agree that AI cannot replace the human editor because it cannot ethically discern the appropriateness, creativity, and relevance of the voice inscribed in texts. Next, we announce that English as a lingua franca (ELF) is the topic proposed by three Brazilian academic guest editors for this issue’s dossier and give a brief review of ELF in Chile. Finally, we present the papers and note included in the miscellaneous section of this issue.
The Aesthetics of Financialization: Market Influence on Cultural Production in Ben Lerner’s 10:04
Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) offers an unusually precise literary lens on the financialization of U.S. cultural production after 2008. Adapting Fredric Jameson’s mandate to historicise, this essay reads the novel both as narrative and as tradable asset, calibrated to the speculative mechanisms that now organise the publishing industry. Within the story world, the prestige of a short‑story credit is parlayed into a “strong six‑figure” advance; competitive auctions monetise symbolic capital; and the author’s labour circulates as human capital. Through self‑reflexive scenes, the text shows how abstraction sutures finance, reproduction, ecology, and aesthetics. Its formal oscillation between granular documentary detail and forward‑looking projection mimics the volatility of fictitious capital, exposing the friction between artistic autonomy and commercial mandate without lapsing into nostalgia for an art‑for‑art’s‑sake enclave. Placed against the longue durée shift from industrial production to finance capital, 10:04 emerges as a fragmentary yet revealing cartography of the circuits through which culture, money, and life are co‑valued under neoliberalism. As such, the novel becomes a critical resource for reconsidering how literary form registers– and critiques – the speculative logics that now dominate the arts.
Copyright (c) 2025 Matheus Camargo Jardim Matheus, Matheus https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
English as a lingua franca in language teacher education in Argentina: unpacking teacher educators’ voices
This duoethnographic study examines how two teacher educators in an Argentine English Language Teacher Education (ELTE) programme have constructed their understanding of English as Lingua Franca (ELF) and sought to align their curricula accordingly. Recent debates have increasingly focused on tensions between neoliberal and social justice agendas, particularly regarding conceptualizations of English and pedagogical responses to the rise of English as a global language. Despite the growing influence of ELF and EIL, traditional views continue to dominate both theory and practice (Marlina, 2018; Rosa, 2021). While research has heightened the need for ELF-informed curricula and teacher education (Crowther et al, 2024; Matsuda, 2017), there remains a gap in understanding how ELTE programmes concretely foster such engagement. Through reflective dialogue and narrative inquiry, the study provides evidence of two teacher educators’ epistemological and pedagogical shifts, institutional constraints, and the co-existence of diverse perspectives within the same programme. By centering educators’ voices and professional agency, this research contributes to emerging work on transformative ELF pedagogies and offers critical insights into the local enactment of global English paradigms in ELTE. The study also underscores the value of duoethnography in examining intra-institutional perspectives and practices.
Copyright (c) 2025 María Gimena San Martín, Ana Cecilia Cad https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Regional multilingualisms and language teaching in indigenous schools in Mexico
Humanity is experiencing a global cultural and sociolinguistic reorganization expressed in open societies that evidence great mobility and inequalities. In this context, the phenomenon of multilingualism represents a space of change that impacts all social domains. This paper outlines this situation in language teaching and learning in Indigenous school education in Mexico, with abundant "informal" communicative practices based on the natural learning of Indigenous adults and children of a dominant diglossic and asymmetric multilingualism promoted by migratory flows that favor hegemony of Spanish and, to a lesser extent, English. This text presents results of a sociolinguistic investigation that promoted the use of community multilingualism in two relevant pedagogical functions in language teaching: preparatory and organizational stage of the school group for the language class and the construction of cognitions about language. This experience employed the pragmatic category of "communicative school action cycle," a unit of analysis in the microethnography of educational communication, to identify, interpret, and intervene the qualitative and time-based action structures and cycles of communicative tasks in a language class (Gumperz&Hymes, 1972; Erickson, 1989, 2007; Heinrichsmeier, 2022).
Copyright (c) 2025 HECTOR AMADOR MUÑOZ CRUZ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
ELF awareness in a Phonetics and Phonology course: exploring English language ideologies in teacher education
Language ideologies are omnipresent in English language teaching and English teacher education. They reflect societal beliefs and practices about language use, learning, and teaching, often reflecting the power of Inner Circle English varieties and native English speakers. These ideologies do not reflect the reality of English in a globalized world and perpetuate discriminatory practices against non-native speakers of the language. English as a lingua franca (ELF) challenges those dominant discourses allowing for more pluricentric and diverse linguistic and educational frameworks. This study reports the findings of an exploratory case study conducted in a pre-service teacher education course on English Phonetics and Phonology in Colombia. The course was designed with an ELF awareness approach. Data gathering included virtual in-class participant observations, class video recordings, and individual semi-structured interviews to explore pre-service teachers’ ideologies about English. Findings show that participants transformed their language ideologies by embracing the pluricentric nature of English and questioning the existence of standard English. However, they upheld some of their ideas about English language proficiency. The study highlights the need to introduce ELF- awareness in the language training of pre-service English teachers to foster their critical reflection and agency as future ELT professionals.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anderson Stiven Pulgarín Pérez, Adriana González Moncada https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
English as a lingua franca in Colombia: insights from an emerging field
English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is a field that has steadily gained traction around the world, and Colombia is no exception to this growing interest. Although there is still a relatively limited number of initiatives centered explicitly on ELF in English Language Teaching (ELT), researchers in the country are approaching the topic in diverse and enriching ways. In this article, I, an English teacher educator, non-native speaker, and researcher engaged with ELF, explore how Colombian scholars have been appropriating and engaging with ELF. By analyzing both empirical and conceptual initiatives that address not only ELF but also related notions such as World Englishes (WE), Global Englishes (GE), and even Global English Language Teaching (GET), I aim to illustrate how the field is gradually expanding within the territory. Rather than offering a superficial overview of ELF’s growth in Colombia, this critical reflective piece seeks to share with the national and international ELT academic community the multiple ways in which ELF can be meaningfully addressed. In doing so, it invites broader dialogues aimed at moving away from long-standing Anglo-centric dynamics that have shaped the field for too long.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jhon Eduardo Mosquera Pérez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0