What looks like a deficit in language learners is often a deficit in their learning environment. The capabilities are there. The question is whether conditions allow them to become visible. This book sets out how multilingual students arrive at school with sophisticated capabilities developed through navigating multiple languages, modes, and cultural contexts, only to find these qualities systematically underserved by conventional pedagogies and assessments.

How teachers position students is critical. Is affect engaged or stripped away? Does content connect to lived experience? Does learning unfold as fragmented skill-building or sustained meaning-making?Drawing on neuroscience, schema theory, and classroom research spanning early childhood through adulthood, David Nunan and Julie Choi show what happens when learning conditions support the interplay of affect, identity, and lived experience. While their examples often feature multilingual learners, these are principles that apply to all learners whose lives, experiences, or ways of knowing differ from what curricula assume. Creating environments where affect, identity, and lived experience can engage learners is how learning actually works.

David Nunan is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong and President Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at Anaheim University, USA.

Julie Choi is Associate Professor and course lead for the Master of TESOL and Modern Languages Education programs at the University of Melbourne.