The rapid development of digital technologies has impacted the ways in which researchers create and communicate knowledge. Novel forms of knowledge communication and researchers’ self-representation online have entailed changing language uses. Luzón and Pérez-Llantada’s (2022) book Digital Genres in Academic Knowledge Production and Communication: Perspectives and Practices published by Multilingual Matters taps into precisely these developments by examining the dynamics between technological innovation and researchers’ communicative practices.

Hur bra studenter i Sverige är på engelska varierar mycket; ofta är de bra på att läsa och prata engelska, men har relativt sett större svårigheter med att skriva akademiskt och att förstå talad engelska, särskilt i samband med föreläsningar. För att främja en mer inkluderande och realistisk syn på studenters engelska är det viktigt att lärare på tidigare utbildningsnivåer förstår både hur bra studenter faktiskt är och att språkfärdighet är ett (mycket) komplext begrepp.

The chapter focuses on key features of digital academic discourse (DAD), broadly defined as content created by academics with the support of digital media, including interactions surrounding this context. It zooms in on digital academic genres that resulted from the emergence of Web 2.0. Compared to traditional academic discourse, DAD contains more explicit writer-reader interaction, including communicative exchanges between author and reader. There is also more tolerance toward non-standard language forms. Its key features include hybridity, dialogicity, recontextualization, and multimodality. Since the emergence of large language models (LLMs), DAD has been subject to increased standardization and may exhibit more homogenous discourse features in the future.

Developing strong listening skills in a second language (L2) can be challenging for a variety of reasons. Within the context of L2 use in higher education, accurate and timely processing of aural input can be crucial for academic success, particularly because vast amounts of disciplinary-specific content are delivered via academic lectures in the students' and/or teacher's L2. This brief report introduces and shares early observations from the ReMoDEL project (Real Time Monitoring of Dynamic English Listening), which focuses on student listening comprehension in English as a medium of instruction (EMI) courses set within a multicultural, multilingual context, namely, Sweden. Employing a novel footpedal device to register moments of comprehension and noncomprehension, ReMoDEL identifies instances within EMI lectures when students report challenges in understanding and investigates the cause(s) of those challenges with the overall aims of identifying the myriad influences on comprehension of lecture content, cataloging student recovery strategies, and working to raise teacher awareness of the volatile and individualized nature of listening in EMI. The combination of footpedal data and stimulated recall interviews yielded 89 coded instances of noncomprehension (including multiple coding, when appropriate) that arose during a pilot study, of which a majority related to top-down aspects of listening (53), followed by affective, multimodal and environmental factors (10 each). Bottom-up processing issues were sparsely reported (four), and two mistaken pushes occurred. This brief report describes the project as well as quantitative and qualitative data from the pilot study.

The move towards EMI in higher education has been connected to university internationalisation, which reflects neoliberal trends. Research has underscored the need to consider socio-economic factors, materialities and ideologies surrounding EMI. Our study taps into this line of inquiry by focusing on how Swedish universities promote EMI programmes in business and economics in four videos. We take a novel approach to examine discursively constructed ideologies surrounding EMI by conducting a critical multimodal analysis of the videos. The analysis reveals how the use and representations of English – combined with different symbols, artefacts and concepts – are used to position these EMI programmes as both global and local. References to international rankings and multinational business partnerships position them on the global education market. At the same time, the programmes are locally situated in the academic tradition and entrepreneurial context of Sweden. Images of nature, the fika, or Scandinavian design present them in a way similar to tourist destinations. Tokens of economic and cultural eliteness create an extra layer of distinction, contributing to the added ‘elite’ value of EMI, where English is both taken for granted and serves a gate-keeping function. Findings provide insight into how EMI is promoted to international students.

Research communities across disciplines recognize the need to diversify and decolonize knowledge. While artificial intelligence-supported large language models (LLMs) can help with access to knowledge generated in the Global North and demystify publication practices, they are still biased toward dominant norms and knowledge paradigms. LLMs lack agency, metacognition, knowledge of the local context, and understanding of how the human language works. These limitations raise doubts regarding their ability to develop the kind of rhetorical flexibility that is necessary for adapting writing to ever-changing contexts and demands. Thus, LLMs are likely to drive both language use and knowledge construction towards homogeneity and uniformity, reproducing already existing biases and structural inequalities. Since their output is based on shallow statistical associations, what these models are unable to achieve to the same extent as humans is linguistic creativity, particularly across languages, registers, and styles. This is the area where key stakeholders in academic publishing—authors, reviewers, and editors—have the upper hand, as our applied linguistics community strives to increase multilingual practices in knowledge production.

This edited book focuses on the ways in which contemporary societal challenges are constructed, mediated and lived through language and other semiotic modalities in new on- and off-line spaces. It conceives of linguistic repertoires as part of dynamic assemblages that can enable an understanding of the ways in which different bodies, lived experiences, discourses, semiotic resources, and objects intra-act, change and 'become' together in unpredictable ways. The chapters reveal the conditions under which such assemblages occur and the nature of the entangled elements that enable certain practices to emerge and then either to endure or disappear, drawing on a range of critical sociolinguistic and discourse analytical methods to explore how histories, languages, bodies, and the material realisation of each space intra-act in the production of determinations of (linguistic) legitimacy and worth, shaping contemporary ideologies of belonging and, thereby, other possibilities. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in fields including sociolinguistics, anthropology, migration studies, and education.