Trauma‐Informed Language Teaching: Considerations, Challenges and Possibilities

Trauma has been front of mind for many language teachers in the tumultuous first decades of the 21st century, but until quite recently, language teaching research that names trauma as such has been relatively scarce. In this short paper, I give a brief overview of different understandings of trauma, and draw on orienting principles and frameworks to make a case for language pedagogy that is informed by local and empirical wisdom about trauma so that it can be more trauma‐responsive. I also look at how teachers and scholars of language have engaged with, and responded to, trauma as concept and reality across a variety of language learning contexts around the world, and consider trauma in light of insights from the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies to explore how we might renew our commitment to fostering conditions of linguistic safety in language teaching and learning.