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Language teachers are often masters of using the physical space in their language classrooms, rearranging furniture, groups, and artifacts to facilitate meaningful encounters with and among learners. Indeed, during the COVID‐19 crisis, many language teachers are sharing that these human encounters—reading learners' needs through body language, moving in and out of conversations, or engaging each other face‐to‐face—are the biggest felt loss in their emergent digital language classrooms. Yet, the new digital realities do not necessarily mean that teachers must sacrifice real collaboration among their learners. Digital tools were often designed to explicitly facilitate multimodal collaboration, and, with a wider variety of humans and human stories than may be found within the four walls of the typical classroom. This article aims to help language teachers facilitate more diverse interactions in the target language through the use of tools, spaces, and strategies that can be easily incorporated into our digital classrooms. We describe three categories of such activities (mobile‐assisted learning, tandem learning, and service‐learning) and explain how these can be most effectively incorporated into an online language class. The Challenge Videoconferencing tools such as Zoom are being widely used as an immediate response to remote language teaching needs. However, these tools are rarely ideal as a replacement for the classroom's physically embodied engagement. What alternatives exist for educators facilitating students' language growth and human collaboration?

Language teachers are often masters of using the physical space in their language classrooms, rearranging furniture, groups, and artifacts to facilitate meaningful encounters with and among learners. Indeed, during the COVID-19 crisis, many language teachers are sharing that these human encounters- reading learners' needs through body language, moving in and out of conversations, or engaging each other face-to-face-are the biggest felt loss in their emergent digital language classrooms. Yet, the new digital realities do not necessarily mean that teachers must sacrifice real collaboration among their learners. Digital tools were often designed to explicitly facilitate multimodal collaboration, and, with a wider variety of humans and human stories than may be found within the four walls of the typical classroom. This article aims to help language teachers facilitate more diverse interactions in the target language through the use of tools, spaces, and strategies that can be easily incorporated into our digital classrooms. We describe three categories of such activities (mobile-assisted learning, tandem learning, and service-learning) and explain how these can be most effectively incorporated into an online language class.

The study reports on a telecollaboration exchange between two teacher education classes in the United States and Turkey. In synchronous and asynchronous conversations, preservice teachers (PTs) engaged in social justice issues and made discourse choices that captured culture(s) and communities as diverse or essentialized. These choices were affected by PTs’ positionings and impacted how PTs connected to individuals only and/or to broader society.  PTs asked questions that created space for critical discussions and facilitated awareness of diversity, yet sometimes led to overgeneralizations. The study has implications for designing telecollaborations that promote language and practices to unpack the issues of social justice.

This Forum provides a range of voices on the Language Gap, as our aim is to shed light on the need for more critical dialogue to accompany the proliferation of political initiatives, policymaking, educational programs, and media coverage. We highlight some relevant background on the Language Gap and describe some of the research used to support the concept. The diverse slate of Forum contributions that we have assembled approach the Language Gap topic from a range of linguistic anthropological perspectives—theoretical, empirical, political, ethnographic, personal, and experiential. Based on an acknowledgment of the need to improve educational access for economically and culturally diverse students, the subsequent discussions provide a range of perspectives designed to move away from denouncing and altering home language skills as a panacea for academic woes and social inequity. Linguistic anthropology's focus on language learning ecologies, and the sophistication therein, provides a novel perspective on the Language Gap. The contributions included below problematize existing ideologies, demonstrate the wealth of resources within various communities, and propose new directions for school practices and policymaking in an effort to bridge the \"language gap\" toward a more inclusive and discerning view of linguistic practices across diverse groups.

This dissertation develops a theoretical and empirical framework for the model of metalinguistic community, a community of positioned social actors engaged primarily in discourse about language and cultural symbols tied to language. Building upon the notions of speech community (Duranti, 1994; Gumperz, 1968; Morgan, 2004), linguistic community (Silverstein, 1998), local community (Grenoble & Whaley, 2006), and discourse community (Watts, 1999), metalinguistic community provides a novel practice-based (Bourdieu, 1991) framework for diverse participants who experience a strong connection to a language and its speakers but may lack familiarity with them due to historical, personal, and/or communal circumstances. This research identifies five dimensions of metalinguistic community: socialization into language ideologies is a priority over socialization into language competence and use, conflation of language and culture, age and corresponding knowledge as highly salient features, use and discussion of the code are primarily pedagogical, and use of code in specific interactional and textual contexts (e.g., greeting/closings, assessments, response cries, lexical items related to religion and culture, mock language). As a case study of metalinguistic community, this dissertation provides an in-depth ethnographic analysis of contemporary secular engagement with Yiddish language and culture in the United States. The project is based upon nearly three years of fieldwork in Southern California, Northern California, and New York in over 170 language classes, programs, lectures, and cultural events, resulting in more than one hundred hours of video- and audio-recorded interactional and interview data. It has also investigated literature, print media, and online sources related to Yiddish in secular milieus. In order to capture the diversity of actors and contexts through time and space, the study examines meta-Yiddish literature in historical context, conflicted stance (DuBois, 2007; Goodwin, 2007; Jaffe, 2009) toward linguistic alternatives as socialization practice, Yiddish \"endangerment\" as interactional reality and discursive strategy, a person-centered ethnographic approach (Hollan, 2001) to Yiddish as a heritage language, and epistemic ecologies in intergenerational contexts. This project explores the multiple ways that metalinguistic community members engage in \"nostalgia socialization\" into an imagined nationhood (Anderson, 1983) of the Jewish diaspora, demonstrating the central role of language as identity maker and marker within multilingual contexts.