A translanguager's take on a synergy‐driven SLA/T

As (trans-)languagers, we actively engage in meaning making as we orchestrate linguistic, semiotic, embodied, and other resources. We are active agents as meaning flows from, through, and toward us, operating in context, drawing upon whatever affordances are available to us—which, by definition, are neither static nor stable. As (trans-)languagers, we are socialized into how to language “appropriately” so that we do not raise any eyebrows. We are familiar with the implications of mislanguaging, and their impact on our sense of self and socioemotional well-being. We also know that the norms defining correctness reflect environmental pressures, what one can language here, and what should be translanguaged elsewhere to adapt to a different context. Context includes other (trans-)languagers around us who, in and of themselves, are their own universes with their own cosmologies, on their own trajectories. Context is also the ideological framework that surrounds us, and which we are socialized into to save us from languagelessness, hoping to higienizarnos into social opportunity. Context becomes us and we become context, inadvertently letting it shape us, as we learn to perpetuate it as true. As (trans-)languagers, our repertoires are always in flux. They change with(-in) us. Named languages are one important component of those repertoires, but they are only real in abstraction, and become our version of the theory as we perform it into action, which is always, again, affected by everything that envelopes us. Making sense of the transdisciplinary nature of being and becoming (trans-)languagers in a post-multilingual world requires a complex, decolonial tool kit that only now are we starting to carve out, guided by our translanguaging instinct. This special issue advances an inclusive, interdisciplinary vision of SLA/T that is in line with this complexity. Their theorization explicitly underscores how the emergent nature of language (in) education requires a relational and procedural view (Atkinson et al., 2025, this issue) supported by bridging theoretical paradigms (Sato et al., 2025, this issue), expanding methodological approaches (Zheng et al., 2025, this issue), and enhancing our attention to equity and social response-ability. In doing so, the special issue emphasizes the role of collaborative innovation in knowledge (re-)production systems, while illustrating what this might look like in a renewed second language acquisition and teaching (SLA/T) arena. A synergies perspective gears us toward the meta-exercise of rethinking teaching (and the teacher), learning (and the learner), and by extension, what is taught and learned (e.g., named languages and knowledges), by whom (agents and subjects), where (spaces), and how (methodologies and ideologies). The implications of such an exercise will take us beyond innovation toward re-(co-)construction, co-production, and power re-distribution, redefining SLA/T's foundations, means, and objectives. But what does the futurity of the field hold through such an approach? If we dare to reorganize (some of) the foundations of the house, we must be prepared for parts of it to collapse. We might, in fact, be excited to see them collapse, as each partial collapse is an opportunity to engage in re-(co-)constitutive practice, juntxs/together. As we reassemble SLA/T, new phenomena will emerge. But what will we call them? How will we work with them? How will we recognize their value? More critically, whose reality do these new insights reflect, and whose methods shaped them? And just as importantly, who will be left behind, once again, in our pursuit of a synergistic SLA/T? While reflecting on the reterritorializing potential of the synergies approach, Barad's (2014) earthworm metaphor comes to mind as a means to visualize our individual and collective activity. Just as earthworms burrow and twist through the soil, destabilizing fixed structures, we must learn to disrupt rigid methodological frameworks and challenge established assumptions. This disruption should be seen as (re-)generative, enriching our intellectual soil to strengthen, rethink, or debunk old idea(l)s—and recognize new ones. Like earthworms, we are embedded in our environments, as is the embodied, situated nature of our knowledge(s) and knowledge production systems. The earthworm's resistance to capture and its movement reflect the fluidity that a synergy-driven agenda promotes as it asks us to shift from clockwork to wormwork, from the atomic to the dynamic. As we learn to queer our disciplinary loyalty and develop new forms of ontoepistemological confidence, we will also learn to disobey. The in-betweens—those spaces where disciplinary boundaries blur and new connections emerge—will become gradually more hospitable, and in doing so, the cracks within and between Western scientific disciplines, and between knowledge eco-systems spanning the Globe, will reveal themselves as potential new homes. As a result of this reterritorialization, some researchers may pursue new forms of disciplinary emancipation. This emancipatory ethos characterizes a contemporary wave of researcher–practitioners who have entered the field through the multilingual turn and whose activities have been shaped by the pursuit of harmony in diversity as a form of justice. Much of what constitutes our scholarly ambitions has been profoundly shaped by “unacademic” concepts such as conscientização/consciousness and esperanza/hope. Many of us are, perhaps, less interested in applied linguistics, and more in applying linguistics and testing its transformative force. This emancipatory activity may take each of us in a different direction. I encourage you to explore your own. It may look like the pursuit of better classrooms, the preparation of more dexterous teachers, the development of classroom materials that leverage different learner profiles; it may look like the bringing together of sociocognitive and neuromotor elements in unexpected ways; it may look like art or food; it may look like activism, like interaction between humans and nonhuman animals, or with robots. At times, it may not look like linguistics, and that might be because we have successfully seized the synergies the contributors to this special issue describe. Regardless of the synergetic pathway you become involved in, and whatever the disciplinary in-between you find yourself lodged into, I hope that, as you worm your way through, whatever you leave behind is a little better, a little more grounded in liberatory practices, and a little more oriented toward the collective good. Perhaps a kind (of) linguistics is the most applied we can get

Business · Second Language Learning and Teaching

• Praxeology, humanism, equity, and mixed methods

  Open Access•Yongyan Zheng, Lourdes Ortega et al.•Modern Language Journal•2025

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• Relationality, interconnectedness, and identity

  Open Access•D Atkinson, Jorge Andres Mejía-Laguna et al.•Modern Language Journal•2025

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• Language, people, classrooms, world

  Open Access•Masatoshi Sato, Steven L Thorne et al.•Modern Language Journal•2025

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• Diffracting Diffraction

  K Barad•Parallax•2014

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