In his Perspectives article, Van Gorp (2026, this issue) argues that the transformative promise of the multilingual turn has only partly been realized. So far, insights into multilingualism and theory-driven proposals for multilingual education have not resulted in system-level change. To achieve a better alignment of principles and practice, Van Gorp makes the case for a re-envisioned task-based language teaching (TBLT) where critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) provides an ideological grounding. He suggests that CMLA can provide “the stance needed in teacher education to counter monolingual policy pressures” (p. 1) and that in the implementation of an equitable multilingualism, TBLT should be viewed “as a leading pedagogical approach” (p. 2). In advocating for a teacher education in which “CMLA is lived rather than merely learned” (p. 17), Van Gorp sets out proposals where a reenvisioned TBLT provides an overarching framework that connects language, pedagogy, and curriculum, and that positions multilingualism and social justice as foundational concerns. Arguing that CMLA provides a logical step in the development of TBLT, he suggests that teacher education and in-service development can provide the means “for carrying TBLT into its next phase: one attuned to sociopolitical realities and dedicated to equitable practice” (p. 17). Van Gorp's proposals are ambitious. With often limited time to prepare teachers for practice, few opportunities for systematic in-service training, and increased top-down steering of pre- and in-service education, space to work with a transformed TBLT might be hard to find. While Van Gorp proposes “a reorientation of the language education field” in which the cognitive–interactionist strengths of TBLT are integrated with “a critical, translanguaging-informed view of language use” (p. 1), it should be noted that there is no universally accepted approach to TBLT. Nor is there an approach that has been demonstrated to be “correct” (Long 2016, 28). Furthermore, there is no robust evidence of the acquisitional or other advantages of a translanguaging approach to language education (Berthele 2021). Importantly—and a point central to this commentary—little is known about the extent to which TBLT currently informs language teacher education, or how pre-service teachers develop an awareness of their role as teachers of linguistically diverse students (Morea and Fisher 2025). With these issues in mind, I consider possible constraints on the innovation that Van Gorp proposes and suggest that a focus on identity in teacher education can provide the conditions for a fuller engagement with multilingual pedagogies. Teachers must translate theoretical principles into practice within institutions shaped by monolingual curricula, standardized testing, and limited time. Research shows that while teachers value the communicative and motivational potential of task-based approaches, they often struggle to integrate them coherently across pedagogy and assessment (East 2021; Van den Branden 2016, 2021). Similar tensions arise when teachers attempt to enact multilingual or critical pedagogies: enthusiasm is tempered by uncertainty, institutional constraints, and emotional labor. The obstacle is rarely lack of knowledge but rather lack of ideological and structural support—the freedom and confidence to act on multilingual principles. (p. 19–20) Van Gorp is probably right in emphasizing how pre- and in-service teachers can recognize the communicative and motivational affordances of task-based approaches, and how they can be enthusiastic about working with multilingual pedagogies. However, a lack of knowledge of multilingualism and multilingual practices can present a major obstacle to the implementation of the proposals. As is well documented in the TBLT literature, one of the biggest challenges facing teachers involves task design. While teachers new to TBLT might readily appreciate the importance of structuring tasks around an outcome, the need to create a gap that can be closed by communication and to incorporate elements that encourage students to draw on their own resources can be far more challenging (Erlam 2016). Also missing in Van Gorp's analysis is need. Engaging with TBLT's unfulfilled promise and endorsement by the teaching profession, Bygate (2020) has argued that teachers need to have a genuine interest in working with TBLT procedures. As he has made clear, the “innovation of TBLT practices is likely best grounded in teachers’ current practices and understandings, their current concerns and needs and the ways they formulate them” (p. 283). Coupled with knowledge and need, there is also the question of confidence. It may not be the “confidence to act on multilingual principles” (Van Gorp, p. 20, emphasis added) that is challenging, but rather confidence in acting. As East (2025) has argued, apprehension among teachers about their role when students work with tasks can cause them to question the value of TBLT, not only in relation to students’ language development, but also in comparison with more instructivist forms of teaching. To illustrate how knowledge, need, and confidence might affect the successful implementation of a CMLA-informed TBLT, I draw on the study of a workshop carried out as part of a research–practice collaboration that provided in-service training to teachers of English in a municipality in Sweden. In this workshop, an affordance-based approach was explored. In an affordance-based approach, the aim is to identify elements in authentic texts that can provide opportunities for working with L2 development (Elgemark et al. 2023). In the Nordic countries, English is embedded in social life, and students can have extensive extramural encounters (Schurz and Sundqvist 2025). In a context where many students view classroom activities as lacking authenticity and as poorly related to the (often) rich experiences they can have beyond the classroom, teachers are making greater use of authentic materials (Henry et al. 2018). However, working with authentic materials is challenging. Teachers can lack both the time and the competence needed to work with materials brought into the classroom in ways that meet the full spectrum of students’ linguistic needs. In contexts where students respond positively to activities constructed around authentic texts, a priority for practice involves the development of enhanced skills of language awareness (Henry et al. 2019). In the workshop, teachers worked with an Instagram post in which the actor Will Smith apologized for his behavior at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony.1 The work had four main aims: (a) to locate affordances for working with motivation, (b) to capitalize on these by identifying possible activities, (c) to locate affordances for working with language development, and (d) to capitalize on these by identifying activities. Of the four tasks, the teachers found it easiest to identify motivational affordances in the Instagram post. After brainstorming ideas, they were also able to sketch out activities that students would be likely to experience as engaging (e.g., exploring remorse, providing advice, and writing an imaginary response) (Elgemark et al. 2023). However, they found it harder to identify linguistic forms to which students’ attention could be directed. It was harder still to produce coherent and contextually framed explanations that could support students’ understandings, and to create form-targeted activities. For the teachers who participated in the workshop, identifying linguistic affordances, explaining grammar in context, and creating form-focused activities were hard. For some, it was a way of working that placed significant demands on their linguistic competence. For others, the challenge involved providing accessible explanations and creating targeted activities. When working with grammar in context, teachers not only need to have a thorough linguistic understanding of the target structure; they also need to be able “to adequately shepherd learners’ in-the-moment hypotheses toward a shared, linguistically adequate conclusion” (Toth 2022, 30). For the teachers in our workshop, content knowledge (linguistic competence) and pedagogical content knowledge (language awareness and design skills) (Shulman 1986) constituted significant barriers to working with an affordance-based approach. Thus, while an affordance-based approach might resonate with how researchers frame problems, implementation can be challenging. The same can be true for the CMLA-informed TBLT that Van Gorp proposes. As Bygate (2020, 276) has noted, there is a fundamental challenge in translating TBLT methods “from research and theory to the widespread practice that its proponents claim for it.” With the addition of a CMLA element, the challenges of implementing TBLT further increase. In relation to need, while the participating teachers fully embraced the motivational value of authentic texts—for many already a part of their professional practice—a need to work systematically in identifying and capitalizing on affordances was not obvious. It was easier to adopt a softer stance, where authentic texts could provide a means to create variety and to complement textbook-based instruction. Here, too, Bygate (2020, 283) has advised caution in relation to TBLT, noting that “the need for the innovation will often not be apparent to the teacher.” The addition of a CMLA element into TBLT can mean that the need becomes even more difficult to see. Most of all, the teachers expressed a feeling of lacking confidence in working with an affordance-based approach. While some recognized that, like any new method, it would take time to integrate into practice and become an accepted way of working (for themselves and for their students), others were openly skeptical. For some, the time investment required—finding texts, identifying affordances, and preparing activities—was regarded as disproportionate to the value of the approach. For others, it implied a way of working that brought uncertainty and risk. Set against established practice and methods with which they were familiar, the application of an affordance-based approach as a means of fully leveraging the potential of authentic texts was not appealing. It was much easier to rely on the textbook, to use authentic texts as a means of introducing variety and topicality, and to teach in ways that felt more comfortable. As Bygate (2020, 283) has commented, “innovative practices will nearly always require more work and are more subject to misfire. As in all walks of life, change is painful, time-consuming, unsettling, and can undermine practitioners’ confidence, affecting the teachers’ relationships with their students.” When change is as complex as Van Gorp has sketched out, few teachers are likely to have the resources needed to invest in an extensive reorientation and one that can additionally risk damaging the teacher–student relationship. Collecting our own and the teachers’ reflections at the end of the workshop, it was apparent that the teachers could see the value of an affordance-based approach and its importance in a context where students could have extensive experiences of English beyond the classroom. There was no sense that it was flawed, misguided, or, if carefully executed, an ineffective approach. The teachers were, moreover, actively interested in supporting students’ motivation and were aware of the importance of working to develop their linguistic competence. However, even with something as intuitive and flexible as an affordance-based approach, translation into practice was daunting. For these teachers, knowledge, need, and confidence presented significant barriers. The question, thus, is how might conditions more favorable to the reception of practice innovations be created? For initiatives such as our affordance-based approach and Van Gorp's CMLA–TBLT program, what types of preparation might be required? For teachers working in linguistically diverse classrooms, the idea of a socially responsible, multilingual, task-based pedagogy can have intuitive appeal: the value of working in ways that promote empathy, connections, and equitable participation is hardly contestable. However, for an initiative designed to translate the ideas and principles of the multilingual turn into practice, the barriers identified by Bygate (2020) and that emerged in our workshop seem likely to thwart successful implementation. As conditions necessary for the successful translation into practice, knowledge, need, and confidence need to be nurtured. As research on language teachers’ conceptual change has demonstrated, the effect that a method, model, or approach might have on practice will be dependent on teachers’ own conceptualizations of appropriate practice (e.g., Golombek 1998; Johnson 1994), the beliefs that they hold as professionals (e.g., Borg 2006), and who they strive to be in their educational roles (Kubanyiova 2015). At a more fundamental level, successful adoption of an approach or program can be dependent on teachers’ personal histories, their lived experiences, and their aspirations (Donato and Davin 2018a, 2018b). For an initiative with the aim of developing a translanguaging-informed view of language use and the development of a socially responsive multilingual pedagogy, it becomes important to consider how teachers themselves might experience the flexible use of multiple languages and their own experiences of being and becoming multilingual. As Kramsch (2009) has argued, multilingualism is not so much an accomplishment as an experience. Describing the central role of the imagination in shaping multilingual experience, Kramsch has referred to a capacity to rethink the ways in which a story can be told, an event can be remembered, and a future can be imagined. Drawing on this work, Henry (2017) has described how a multilingual identity—experiencing oneself as a multilingual person—transcends language-specific identities and derives from a curiosity about languages and language use. For Fisher et al. (2020, 449), a multilingual identity is an “umbrella identity.” It emerges through awareness of one's language repertoire and is constructed at the interface of three domains of experience: the individual (psychological development and cognition), the relational and social, and the historical and contextual. Developing this idea, Forbes et al. (2021) have offered a conceptualization of a multilingual identity as comprising three sub-dimensions: experience, emotion, and evaluation. In this model, experience refers to a person's “exposure to and interaction with languages across their lifespan” (p. 435). It can “include languages encountered in a range of different contexts such as in the home, at school, in the wider community, on holiday, or through books or other forms of media” (p. 435). Drawing on these ideas, we can think of multilingualism not as a state or form of being, but rather as an ongoing process (Kramsch 2009). Informed by research on episodic future thinking (D'Argembeau 2020)—a future-focused form of mental time travel—Henry (2023) has emphasized the importance of experience and the historically contextualized nature of the multilingual identities. When “representations of desired states can become integrated within an autobiographical history that connects knowledge of the self in the past, in the present, and in the future,” goals and behaviors that support multilingualism can be affected in positive ways (Henry 2023, 185). If experience is central to a teacher's development of a personal multilingual identity, it is similarly central to processes of professional development and the ways in which language teachers learn, grow, and change. Emphasizing the centrality of experience, Donato and Davin (2018b, 467) have argued that to gain conscious control of language teaching, “teachers need to become aware of their own history-in-person,” a set of personal experiences that values certain ways of acting and that can explain resistance to others. Without such awareness, they argue, “attempts at changing classroom practices (e.g., changing the learning tasks) may fall short of creating deep and lasting conceptual change about the nature and goals of classroom-based learning” (p. 467). There are compelling reasons to view experience, autobiographical knowledge, and awareness of one's own history-in-person as shaping the ways in which pre- and in-service teachers might respond to the “reorientation of the language education field” (p. 1) that Van Gorp has proposed. Van Gorp is, of course, aware of the importance of experience and identity. However, in his reenvisioned version of TBLT, identity is relevant primarily in relation to the critical element of CMLA. It is relevant in terms of reflexivity and positioning in relation to social justice and sociopolitical inequalities. It is important as a means of engaging with policy pressures associated with monolingualism, the interrogation of monolingual ideologies that are embedded in education, and the historical and political forces that shape language hierarchies. Drawing on research highlighting how discourses and practices of (in)equity, privilege, and marginalization can shape contemporary language teaching, Van Gorp argues that the “capacity to enact socially just language pedagogy depends on sustained engagement with reflection that connects personal experience, classroom practice, and broader sociopolitical structures” (p. 16). He emphasizes a need for critical engagement with teacher identity and monolingual normativity and the ways in which they connect to the realities of classrooms shaped by racialized language ideologies. In highlighting the emotional and identity-related dimensions of this work, Van Gorp acknowledges that CMLA “requires teachers to confront linguistic insecurities, privilege, and potential complicity in reproducing inequities—processes that can provoke discomfort as well as transformation” (p. 18). While these types of engagement are central to Van Gorp's proposal, if a reconceptualized TBLT is to have the effects on practice that are envisioned, and if it is to transform language education in the way that Van Gorp suggests it might, engagement with identity needs to be broader in scope. We need to understand how identity influences investment in multilingualism as a pedagogical principle, and how it can shape engagement with the challenges involved in developing tasks and assessment practices that promote multilingual language use, and which position linguistic competence as a flexible and socially situated practice. Investments of this kind hinge on personal experience, the ability to reflect on experiences, and the imagination to link experience to language, language learning, and language teaching. As Kramsch (2009, 201) has put it, “a multilingual imagination opens up spaces of possibility not in abstract theories or random flights of fancy, but in the particularity of day-to-day language practices, in, through, and across various languages.” Making a similar point, Morea and Fisher (2025) have argued that in programs of language teacher education, preservice teachers should be provided with opportunities to with and reflect on their multilingual In for the of an identity and multilingual element in preservice Morea and Fisher suggest that to reflect on the of being multilingual and consider an view of multilingualism may encourage future teachers to challenge beliefs about It is by engaging with one's own identity as a teacher working in linguistically diverse classrooms and what is possible that the conditions needed for teachers to invest in multilingual might It reflection on identity where the preservice teacher is “to themselves what it for to et al. this question involves the of autobiographical knowledge (Henry and engagement with personal (Donato and Davin 2018a, 2018b). In the context of a multilingual pedagogy, it involves the story of who one has been as a multilingual L2 who one currently is as a pre-service and who one will one be as a teacher in multilingual engaging with personal histories, knowledge, a how can be by need and confidence, a and For the of TBLT into classroom teaching and the development of practice, East has argued that there is a need “to the important role of the teacher.” has a similar that proposals from the in the or from the pedagogical of research should be viewed as to be in the of teachers’ own classrooms and experiences of learning and To the of knowledge, need, and confidence, and to create conditions in which pre- and in-service teachers can multilingualism as a pedagogical and might be to invest in a CMLA-informed TBLT, there is a need to work with identity. as the of CMLA in teacher education “requires more than an on multilingualism, or critical (Van Gorp, p. 17), so the of spaces for working with identity.
Alastair Henry (Mon,) studied this question.