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. [Language Gap, poverty, education, language socialization] bs_bs_banner

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. KEYWORDS mobile-assisted language learning, tandem learning, service learning, virtual communities This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Zooming out of the crisis: Language and human collaboration, which has been published in final form at

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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.

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