We welcome this second issue of 2023 with good news regarding the most recent report of the Scimago Journal & Country Rank. The Profile journal maintains the positions in Quartile 1 in the Linguistics and Language area as well as the classification in Quartile 2 in the area of Education. Once more, we acknowledge the contributions of the key actors of our publication: the authors, who persevere in the editorial processes; the members of the editorial committees, who dedicate precious time to review the manuscripts and assist us in selecting quality contents; and our readers, who ultimately consult the published articles and, we hope, find valuable information there. They all encourage us to keep up our work and fill us with a sense of satisfaction when we see such a robust academic community built around the journal. Thanks again!

Before depicting the contents of this edition, we should point out that the articles selected revolve around two key areas: teachers’ well-being and language policies. The former shows an increasing interest in the individual—the teacher and future teacher—and their emotions. In times when we have faced challenges like the ones brought by virtual and hybrid modalities to language teaching, it is good to witness educators’ and researchers’ commitment to examining situational factors, feelings, and opinions that invite to bear in mind the implications for successful teaching performance as well as for the optimal conditions that should characterize our professional and personal life.

Regarding language policies, the challenges and tensions reported by experienced and prospective teachers entering the teaching job or starting it in relatively new settings stress the need for an articulation between the mandates of laws and the human being. Likewise, the reflections on the conception of such policies insist, as pointed out in the past two decades in academic publications and different fora, that policies should be detached from instrumental viewpoints aligned with productivity, test measures, and hegemonic strategies aimed at supporting socioeconomic perspectives. Thus, if language policies claim the relevance of equal access to education in a foreign or second language and stress the role of the teacher in attaining this goal, they should take into consideration those who do the teaching job, that is, the teachers; their needs and the circumstances in which they work should not be taken for granted. Because of the disconnection between policy makers and the teacher or professional communities, we hope that more teachers and researchers get engaged in examining the different factors that can effectively articulate policy conception and implementation.

In this issue, we are delighted to share with you 13 articles—ten correspond to the section Issues from Teacher Researchers, two to Issues from Novice Teacher-Researchers, and one to Issues Based on Reflections and Innovations.

The topics discussed by researchers in the current issue concern preservice and in-service teacher education and professional development, teachers’ identity permeated by the use of technologies in pandemic times in different contexts, evaluation/assessment, emotions, language teaching methods—including task-based learning—, national curricular plans for general and specific contexts, community knowledge, agency, hegemonic discourses and decolonial practices in higher education, and the development of pragmatic competences.

The section Issues from Teacher Researchers opens with an article by Daron Benjamin Loo (Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Malaysia). This autoethnographic study examined the tensions affecting the identity of a teacher in charge of an online English for academic writing module during the COVID-19 pandemic. These tensions highlight the teacher’s performativity when using technology, which ultimately configured his teacher identity.

The second article is from Tatiana Becerra-Posada and Diana Cristina Arroyo (Universidad de Córdoba and Universidad del Norte, Colombia). These researchers explored qualitatively how preservice teachers make sense of task-based language teaching principles and characteristics, especially amidst remote instruction. The discussion centers around the challenges preservice teachers face when adapting task-based language teaching to the demands of new teaching contexts.

Next comes the article written by Verónica Ormeño and Minerva Rosas (Universidad de Los Lagos, Chile), who wanted to analyze the teaching practices during the pandemic from the perspective of preservice teachers, in particular the context and conditions under which these practices unfolded and the way the process influenced the participants’ pedagogical and professional knowledge development.

Our fourth article comes from the cooperative efforts of three Colombian researchers: Ingrit Juliana Díaz (Universidad del Cauca), Catalina Ipia Salinas (Institución Universitaria Colegio Mayor del Cauca), and Liliana Cuesta Medina (Universidad de La Sabana). The researchers conducted an exploratory qualitative study to delve into the gaps in the preservice teacher education and professional development of 15 English language teachers in a Colombian public university regarding their teaching knowledge and practice. Findings reveal several teacher deficiencies, classified into three axes: language proficiency, teaching awareness, and teacher challenges. The article offers a discussion on reconceptualizing teacher education in Colombia.

M. Martha Lengeling (Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico) and Melanie L. Schneider (University of Wisconsin, USA) present the experiences of an American teacher teaching English in the Mexican context. The researchers wanted to explore, through a qualitative case study, the growth of the visiting teacher and its relation to teacher education practices. The results revealed the teacher’s growing sensitivity to teaching context as she gradually recognized differences between teaching English in the two countries, prompting a shift in pedagogy to one more compatible with teaching English as a foreign language.

Three researchers—two from Monash University in Australia and one from Colombia—analyze the enactment of the Colombian language policy called Programa Nacional de Bilingüismo (National Bilingual Plan). Diego Cardona-Escobar, Melissa Barnes, and Marc Pruyn found that the differentiated enactments of the plan raise unequal access to opportunities to build language capital and unequal levels of achievement among three public schools.

In tune with the discussion presented by the previous authors, five Colombian authors examine hegemonic discourses of English and socioeconomic development from the perspective of English, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese teachers. Ferney Cruz-Arcila (Universidad Pedagógica Nacional), Vanessa Solano-Cohen (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana), María Liliana Briceño-González, Ana Rincón, and Antonio Lobato-Junior (Universidad EAN) scrutinize the positionings of the foreign language teachers about the predominant narrative of English as the language of development and the role that the languages they teach may also play. Findings suggest that, although there is a strong tendency to uncritically accept and accommodate instrumental and anglonormative views of development, “small hopes” for configuring plural, locally sensitive, less instrumental, and ecological understandings are emerging.

The eighth article is a contribution by Karol Castillo, Luz Dary Cárdenas, and Sandra Lastra (Universidad del Tolima, Colombia). The researchers carried out a two-cycle action research to explore how Colombian students from rural and urban areas construct community knowledge when exploring funds of knowledge. Results revealed how students learned to see and re-signify their communities, territory, and funds of knowledge by exploring the knowledge held by their families and community members.

The following contribution to this section comes from teacher-researchers Frank Giraldo (Universidad de Caldas, Colombia) and Xun Yan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA), whose research aimed at designing an online language assessment course. The course addressed assessment challenges, new methods, and authentic, valid, and ethical assessments. The findings suggest that the teachers wanted a course that mixed theory, practice, and principles of assessment.

Our last article in this section comes from researchers Azadeh Hassani and Zari Saeedi (Allameh Tabataba’i University, Iran). This case study explored the evaluation criteria applied by six supervisors of a private language institute. Several themes emerged: English and content knowledge, teaching skills, personal traits, fulfilling workplace expectations, and parents’/learners’/peers’ feedback. The proposed framework can help increase language supervisors’ teacher evaluation literacy.

The second section—Issues from Novice Teacher-Researchers—includes two articles. The first article is a contribution from Lucía Belmonte Carrasco and Guadalupe de la Maya Retamar (Universidad de Extremadura, Spain), whose exploratory, descriptive study reports on the emotions of content and language-integrated learning for preservice teachers. Participants showed more positive than negative feelings. The study highlights the affective dimension of teaching content and language-integrated learning.

The second article of this section is a joint effort between Cindy Valdelamar González and Luzkarime Calle-Díaz (Universidad de Córdoba, Colombia). This team aimed to show the enactment of the National English Suggested Curriculum by the Ministry of Education. Using the ecological model of agency as a framework, the researchers situated teachers’ actions within projective, iterational, and practical evaluative dimensions of agency to expand theoretical and empirical knowledge in the field. Findings show that teachers cope with the changes derived from policy differently.

Our issue closes with the section Issues Based on Reflections and Innovations, which includes one article. José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia and Andrés Valencia (Universidad del Valle, Colombia) propose a critical intercultural dialogue that may open a space for effectively integrating Indigenous students’ cultural semiotic resources into higher education curricula. Such resources can be an asset in resisting colonial dynamics within education. The authors highlight the structural barriers Indigenous students face to gain access to higher education and, once there, complete their university formation. The authors invite university stakeholders to join in an intercultural reflective process.

The topics in this issue are wide and varied, and readers can select those contents that best suit their teaching or research interests. This is just a sample of the many issues surrounding the practice of English language teaching, and we hope that the information gathered here may be helpful for teachers in their identity-formation process and in acquiring more tools to critically reflect on language policies.