Bridging theories into practices in English language and communication classes in higher education

To meet the high demand for English language skills in higher education settings, many universities have packaged language support courses into their curriculum, often offered as a mandatory module, especially for undergraduate students. Despite the widespread presence of such courses, their implementation varies from institution to institution, and country to country. First of all, the content is usually based on a detailed needs analysis of the students, which may lead to the inclusion of digital texts and genres. The writing approaches may be inspired by Genre-Based instruction, Writing in the Disciplines, Systemic Functional Linguistics, etc., and combined with pedagogical approaches such as flipped learning, learning-oriented assessment, Galperin’s theory of Systematic Formation of Mental Actions (SFMA), pedagogical cultural-historical activity theory, etc. Finally, depending on the context, a choice can be made to use multimodal resources and apply translingualism. Given the variations in the manifestation of these courses, we felt the need to put together a volume that not only maps the landscape of these courses, but also creates an avenue for conversation among the community of practitioners and researchers of applied linguistics, and language teaching who design and run these courses. This edited volume is intended to be such an avenue.