Vol 10, No 1 (2026)

This study examines how literature reviews in English and Vietnamese linguistics research articles construct research positioning through rhetorical move structure and interactional metadiscourse. Although literature reviews play a central role in establishing research territory and justifying new studies, comparatively little work has investigated how rhetorical organisation and interpersonal resources interact in this section across different academic writing traditions. The study analyses a corpus of English and Vietnamese linguistics research articles using Kwan’s model of literature review moves and Hyland’s taxonomy of interactional metadiscourse. Move analysis identifies how authors establish the research territory, create a research niche, and present their own studies, while corpus analysis examines the distribution of hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions across moves. The findings show systematic differences in both rhetorical organisation and interactional resources. English literature reviews contain a higher density of rhetorical strategies in the niche-construction stage and more frequent use of interactional markers associated with author positioning and reader engagement. Vietnamese literature reviews devote more space to definitional exposition and consolidation of prior knowledge, and they introduce research gaps more cautiously. These differences correspond with contrasting conventions of knowledge negotiation and authorial positioning in the two academic writing traditions. The study shows that rhetorical move structure and interactional metadiscourse jointly organise the literature review and regulate how authors position their research in relation to prior scholarship and readers. The findings advance cross-cultural genre analysis and establish systematic differences in rhetorical niche construction and authorial positioning across English and Vietnamese literature reviews.

Research on programming practice gives sustained analytical attention to source code and the written materials that accompany it, including comments, documentation, issue reports, and discussion threads. In these accounts, terms such as text, communication, discourse, genre, and sublanguage are recurrently invoked in addressing code and developer activity from a range of perspectives. Their repeated use points to a convergence with linguistic inquiry and invites consideration of code and developer activity in linguistic terms. The present study proceeds from a principle of a division of labour between fields and, to that end, identifies a baseline set of linguistic constructs appealed to in programming research to suggest directions for their investigation in line with linguistic tradition. The procedure combines systematic mapping of studies on programming practice with analytical classification grounded in distinctions established in the study of language. Following the identification of a stable set of constructs, the study clarifies the analytical capacity in which they are mobilised in programming research and advances a set of analytically grounded lines of inquiry in which these constructs may be examined in relation to textual cohesion, lexical organisation, syntactic relations, speech acts, discourse continuity, and indexical marking. The study has implications for recognising programming environments as a distinctive empirical setting for linguistic research, in which text, discourse, and communication practices are available for systematic analysis in established approaches to language study. The directions proposed here are not exhaustive and remain open to further empirical work.

Accelerating migratory flows, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic, are remodelling national sociolinguistic dynamics and raising significant institutional communication barriers for non-host-language speaking families. In this context, the Child Language Brokering (CLB) phenomenon emerges, positioning children as essential linguistic and cultural mediators for their families and communities. In multilingual and multicultural settings, CLB appears as a mediation practice with institutional and community implications for communication, inclusion, and diversity management. This study examines the CLB phenomenon in education to provide a structured scientific mapping analysis and thus contribute to the systematisation of the field. A bibliometric, thematic, and conceptual analysis was conducted to evaluate 144 publications (1998–2024) indexed in WoS and Scopus, using VOSviewer to explore co-occurrence networks and produce strategic diagrams. The results revealed sustained growth in scientific production, divided into three periods: 1998–2014, 2015–2020, and 2021–2024. Publications were concentrated in high-impact journals and were produced primarily by researchers based in the United States. The analysed publications originated mainly from universities. Disciplines covered Translation and Interpreting, Linguistics, Communication, Social Sciences, and Education. The thematic and conceptual evolution reflected a shift from immigration, acculturation, and identity towards bilingualism, heritage languages and the psycho-affective implications of CLB, culminating in multilingualism and education. Thus, CLB moves from being conceived as a family practice to a sociolinguistic phenomenon with relevant psycho-pedagogical implications. The study points out the need to acknowledge this reality to improve educational experiences of those involved.

The integration of artificial intelligence into higher linguistic education raises questions about how multicultural competence develops when students interact with AI systems that simultaneously represent multiple cultural perspectives and reproduce Western cultural bias. This study examines how such interaction affects the development of multicultural competence among language faculty students. The research proposes and empirically tests a metacognitive-cultural model (MCM) describing this process through four links: stereotype deconstruction, perspectivisation, cultural modelling, and reflexive integration. A mixed 3×3×3 factorial design with repeated measures was implemented with 180 first- to third-year students from three Russian linguistic universities. Participants were assigned to experimental (AI with metacognitive scaffolding), comparative (AI only), and control (traditional instruction) groups. During an eight-week intervention students interacted with a GPT-4-based chatbot. Data were collected using adapted Byram questionnaires, professional intercultural cases, log-file coding, stimulated recall interviews, and implicit association tests. Students in the experimental group demonstrated greater gains in multicultural competence (+12.6 points) than those in the AI-only (+5.9) and control (+3.1) groups (Cohen’s d = 0.92). The largest between-group difference occurred at the reflexive integration link (φ = 0.41). Mediation analysis showed that 43.6% of the intervention effect was explained through activation of MCM links. Students receiving metacognitive scaffolding also identified AI cultural bias more frequently (69.8% vs. 30.4%). The results suggest that AI interaction combined with metacognitive reflection can support critical cultural awareness in language education.