Challenges and affordances in digital spaces

The landscape of language education is experiencing a profound transformation driven by the rapid evolution of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. This volume offers a critical exploration of how digital spaces, interactional competence, and social identity converge to reshape pedagogical practices, arguing that technology acts as a sociomaterial force rather than a mere delivery mechanism. Through a variety of innovative methodologies, the articles investigate several key digital frontiers: cross-cultural discussions of conflictive topics within Virtual Exchanges; the social, equitable, and evaluative complexities of Digital Multimodal Composing (DMC), and the affordances and limitations of Virtual Reality (VR) and Spoken Dialogue Systems in assessing interactional competence and navigating rater bias. Furthermore, the issue critically examines the role of AI in modern learning. It highlights multilingual students’ use of neural machine translation for “transknowledging,” explores the ethical boundaries of Generative AI as perceived by students and language instructors, and addresses the increasing commercialization of teacher identities on social media platforms. Ultimately, this collection serves as a collective call for critical reflexivity. It provides a comprehensive roadmap for the next decade of applied linguistics, advocating for longitudinal research, the integration of AI-driven learning analytics, the dismantling of the digital divide, and a pedagogical shift toward deliberate human-AI collaboration to empower 21st-century learners.