English in Texas, Vol. 55.2—Fall/Winter 2025

THEME: Moving the Needle: A Paradigm Shift to Language Architecture.

MANUSCRIPT DEADLINE: September 1, 2025

Call for Submissions: “Teachers [can] support . . . language exploration by providing students with opportunities to break down and analyze the language choices of speakers and writers to determine if and how they are using particular language forms for particular effects.  [They bring] together the language choices of published authors and their personal language choices as racialized students navigating a range of different communities of practice. Adopting the perspective of language architecture frames  . . . students as already understanding the relationship between language choice and meaning through the knowledge that they have gained through socialization into the cultural and linguistic practices of their communities”--Nelson Flores (2020, pp. 25, 29).

For the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of English in Texas, we ask you to consider the theme, Moving the Needle: A Paradigm Shift to Language Architecture.

The Fall/Winter 2025 issue of English in Texas draws upon Flores’ (2020) concept of language architecture. According to Flores (2020), language architecture emphasizes the need to rethink how language is taught and understood, particularly for bilingual, multilingual, and multidialectal students. “State standards are not demanding mastery over academic language but are rather calling for students to be language architects who are able to manipulate language for specific purposes” (p. 25). Students who draw upon linguistic and cultural influences craft and mold language every day, constructing language with interconnected and complementary parts. They make arguments daily; they explain topics they care deeply about; they are constantly crafting a new language to communicate in digital spheres never imagined; they are already architects. Leveraging the work students are doing and teaching them to recognize the architect's role in their own craft helps teachers close the gap between a simple understanding of academic language to success in state standards—identifying how and why authors craft tone, meaning, purpose, and point of view. This approach calls upon educators to acknowledge and celebrate cultural backgrounds and linguistic talents as integral to academic achievement and success.

For this issue, we welcome insightful and reflective contributions from educators, researchers, and practitioners about language architecture and architects, with the following questions serving as a springboard:

​

• How do you position your students as language architects who can use cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge to analyze craft, read critically, and write persuasively?

• How does positioning students as language architects vs. language academics connect to culturally sustaining or asset-based pedagogy (Alim et al., 2020)?

• How have you used texts to model language architecture in your teaching environment?

• How can a language architecture approach help students develop as readers and/or authors?

More broadly, you may also consider the following:

• How do you incorporate and celebrate students’ cultural and linguistic practices in your instruction?

• What new and supportive classroom structures and practices are needed for PK-12 educators to “move the needle” from the more typical academic language approach to the more inclusive language architecture stance?

• What is needed for teacher development specialists, administrators, or educator preparation programs to “move the needle” from the more typical academic language approach to the more inclusive language architecture stance?

FOCUS ON THE THEME: We invite interested individuals to submit manuscripts, conceptual, creative, reflective, student-authored, pedagogical, research-based, and/or theoretical, as related to this topic of Moving the Needle: A Paradigm Shift to Language Architecture.

INQUIRIES AND INNOVATIONS: Additionally, we welcome educational research relevant to the work of ELAR educators. These submissions could either be theme-dependent or could be more generally relevant to the ELAR education community.

STANDING COLUMNS: We also encourage brief contributions in the form of standing columns. These center on topics that interest you but do not necessarily align to an issue’s theme or full-length manuscript requirements. (See table below.)

References

Alim, H. S., Paris, D., & Wong, C. P. (2020). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A critical framework for centering communities. In Handbook of the cultural foundations of learning (pp. 261-276). Routledge.

​

Flores, N. (2020). From academic language to language architecture: Challenging raciolinguistic ideologies in research and practice. Theory Into Practice, 59(1), 22-31.  https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2019.1665411