From the Editors

Welcome to our online journal, Scholarship of Teaching in Language Education (STiLE). We are excited to create a community where language educators can share and discuss their experiences and insights on language teaching and learning through publication of scholarly work.

In this first issue, we have a range of topics that demonstrate the diverse and innovative approaches to language education. From teaching technical English to exploring the use of artificial intelligence in language education, we aim to provide a platform for language educators to share their knowledge and expertise.

STiLE is committed to featuring empirical papers, reviews, reflections, and predictions that are motivated by pedagogy and grounded in theory. We believe that by focusing on the practice of language teaching and learning, rather than just theory, we can provide valuable insights and practical advice for language educators. We are also committed to the idea that as professional educators, we should be on the forefront, leading changes in education. For this reason, STiLE is a digital platform which prioritises multi-modal submissions, including learning objects that showcase innovative approaches to teaching and learning. These can include videos, podcasts, interactive modules, or any other form of media that enhances  learning experience.

The launch of STiLE is testament to developments in our field as language practitioners are becoming more and more active in producing their own scholarship, and seeking to understand and improve teaching and learning through rigorous and systematic inquiry (Ding, 2018). Scholarship in language education is based on the idea that teaching is a complex and multifaceted activity that can be studied and improved upon. By embracing this scholarship initiative, our journal aims to contribute to the development and advancement of language education.

We believe that scholarship, and this platform, should embrace multiple perspectives on teaching and learning, and promoting an inclusive community with a common aim of both understanding and improving language education in diverse contexts for everyone engaged in teaching and learning. For this reason, we welcome submissions about the teaching of any language, and published in any language. This demonstrates our commitment to ensuring that developments in language education have as wide an impact as possible. Though STiLE has been developed thanks to generous funding from the University Grants Council in Hong Kong, we are an open access journal. Our commitment to ethics includes openness to diversity in perspectives, contexts, challenges, experiences, and expertise. Our distinctive ethos means that we take a supportive, constructive approach to reviewing. Our starting point is that every submission has the potential for publication. Through dialogic interaction, using as many rounds of review as needed, we hold a commitment to doing all that we reasonably can to support an author who is willing to invest in their work until it reaches the standard needed for publication.

We are motivated by the nature of language education, as one that is inherently collaborative. Just as many of us are used to working within larger teams of teachers, we believe that scholarship should be collegial and collaborative. We hope to encourage critical debate in an environment which is supportive and empowering. With this in mind, we encourage practitioners to share their experiences, including not just success in the classroom, but also those experiences which might have led to unexpected and even unwanted outcomes. We invite a view of scholarship as one of taking risks, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not, but always experimenting and being open to change. We believe that by sharing our experiences, we can learn more, thereby continuously improving language education. We also see this as modelling the kind of practice we expect of our students. After all, our students deserve the best knowledge and understanding that we can offer as language educators.

For these reasons, we encourage all language educators to contribute their knowledge and understanding to the public domain by engaging with STiLE. We are excited to see what the future holds for this online journal and the language education community. We hope that you will join us in this journey and contribute your own scholarly insights and experiences. 

Thank you for your support and we look forward to reading your submissions.

The STiLE Editorial Team

References

Ding, A. (2018). Manifesto for the scholarship of language teaching and learning. The Language Scholar. https://languagescholar.leeds.ac.uk/manifesto-for-the-scholarship-of-language-teaching-and-learning/.