Culturally Sustaining Practices and Digital Inclusion: International Students’ English Learning in Australian Church Communities

Abstract

This multiple case-study explores the intersection of education justice and digital inclusion through three international students’ experiences of learning English within church communities in Australia. Drawing on an education justice lens foregrounding redistribution, recognition, and representation, as well as spatial perspectives on informal digital language learning, this study examines how faith-based participation and digitally mediated interaction shape language development in everyday life. Narrative and thematic analyses were conducted based on narrative data collected from journal entries and semi-structured interviews. Findings reveal that church involvement created recurring opportunities for English use through volunteering, worship, and small-group interaction. Digital mediation extended community engagement through livestreaming and messaging platforms, supporting vocabulary noticing. Recognition within digital spaces was shaped by how participants’ contributions were taken up by others and by interactional norms such as pace and turn-taking, which structured conditions of visibility and responsiveness. These findings suggest that digital inclusion depends not only on access and participation but on whether participants’ contributions are recognised and sustained within digitally mediated environments. This study offers pedagogical implications for supporting learners’ meaningful participation in the digitally mediated multilingual communities that shape their everyday language development.

1. Introduction

International students studying abroad in English-speaking yet increasingly multilingual societies such as Australia often develop linguistic repertoires through participation in everyday community life beyond formal classroom instruction (Benson et al., 2018; Lo Bianco, 2022). In Australia, sustained migration and international education have contributed to significant linguistic diversity (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021), creating a rich context for examining community-based language learning ecologies (Chik et al., 2019). At the same time, census-based analyses indicate that English functions as the primary language of public and institutional interaction across many migrant communities (Karidakis & Arunachalam, 2016; Shin & Jung, 2018; Forrest et al., 2020). Sociolinguistic research further shows that dominant institutional language practices shape access to participation and social positioning within multilingual societies, influencing how newly arrived migrants and international students navigate everyday communication in Australia (Piller et al., 2024).

Within this broader ecology of community-based everyday language engagement, religious settings serve as spaces where communicative norms, belonging, and participation are organised (Fishman, 2006; Omoniyi, 2012; H. Han, 2018). Studies have shown that such communities serve dual functions: as spaces for heritage language maintenance among diaspora populations (E. K. Park et al., 2021; Joo et al., 2021, 2024) and as venues for structured or informal English language development through church-based programmes and participation (Chao & Kuntz, 2013; Kristjánsson, 2018; H. Han, 2014). However, comparatively less attention has been paid to how educational mobility, spiritual practice, and informal English learning intersect in experiences of international students whose trajectories may differ from migrants or heritage language learners.

Contemporary religious participation is increasingly digitally mediated, with messaging platforms, livestreamed services, and online discussion spaces extending interaction beyond in-person gatherings and reshaping community engagement (Rosowsky, 2019). These hybrid environments share key features with the ‘digital wilds’ explored in informal digital language learning research, referring to digital spaces designed for social and recreational rather than educational purposes in which learners create language learning opportunities (Sauro & Zourou, 2019; J.-S. Lee, 2021; Y.-J. Lee & Roger, 2023; Y. Han & Reinhardt, 2022). This body of work suggests that digital participation varies across individuals, as platforms reconfigure visibility, voice, and learner positioning, shaping whose contributions are acknowledged and sustained. Researchers highlighting educational equity argue that inclusion in digital environments depends not merely on access to technology but on recognition, representation, and meaningful participation within social structures (Fraser, 2008; Keddie, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2017). From this perspective, digital mediation does not always produce inclusion; rather, it reshapes how contributions are validated within interaction. Drawing on an education justice lens foregrounding redistribution, recognition, and representation (Fraser, 2008; Paris & Alim, 2017), and on spatial perspectives of informal digital language learning (Y.-J. Lee, 2026), this multiple case-study investigates how digital mediation intersects with faith-based participation to shape English language learning for three international students within multilingual church communities in Australia.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Multilingual Religious Communities for Language Reproduction and Development

Sociolinguistic research conceptualises religious institutions as organised sites in which communicative norms, authority, and belonging are structured through recurring participation. Fishman (2006) argued that religious domains link linguistic practice to communal continuity, as language choice becomes embedded in collective identity and ritual authority. Safran (2008) also explained that language, ethnicity, and religion remain intertwined in diasporic contexts, positioning religious institutions as sites where linguistic practices gain symbolic and social reinforcement. Omoniyi (2012) extended this perspective by emphasising that multilingual participation within religious communities is regulated through institutional hierarchies that structure speaker roles and language choice. These studies indicate that religious institutions organise how linguistic practices are performed, recognised, and sustained over time.

Studies further illustrate how religious communities stabilise linguistic repertoires through routinised participation. S. M. Park (2011) demonstrated how Korean churches in Montreal, Canada structured intergenerational transmission through embedded literacy practices within sermons (religious messages delivered during worship services), Sunday schooling, and youth programmes, suggesting how institutional routines can sustain language use across generations. Perera (2016) also found that Tamil temples in Australia linked ritual participation to language maintenance beyond the first generation, embedding linguistic practices within religious observance and communal identity. Rosowsky (2019) documented shifts in literacy practices over two decades in mosque schools in the United Kingdom, showing increased linguistic diversity and the expanding role of English in religious instruction.

Studies also show how religious institutions support English language development through community participation. Chao and Kuntz (2013) described church-based English learning programmes in the United States as figured worlds in which immigrant learners negotiated identity, authority, and belonging through English participation. Kristjánsson (2018) examined church-sponsored English initiatives in western Canada, illustrating how spiritual practice and language development were intertwined within community-based programmes. H. Han (2014) further demonstrated that recurring participation in English-medium multicultural churches in Canada expanded access to broader communicative networks. Collectively, these studies indicate that English development can emerge through sustained engagement in faith communities, even when such participation is not explicitly structured as formal class instruction.

2.2. Digitally Mediated Religious Participation and Conditions of Inclusion

Religious participation increasingly unfolds across digitally mediated platforms that extend interaction beyond physical gatherings. Examining bilingual Christian communities in Australia, Wang and Piller (2022) found that WhatsApp groups, livestreamed services, and online prayer networks sustained communal engagement beyond Sunday worship. Their findings suggest that digital mediation reorganises how membership, visibility, and interaction are maintained within faith communities. In a study of Korean migrant churches in Australia, Joo et al. (2024) similarly document how sermons, announcements, and peer communication circulate through digital messaging platforms alongside face-to-face worship. In these contexts, participation operates as recurring interaction across interconnected physical and digital domains rather than as discrete gatherings. While these studies reported on the digital extension of religious participation, how hybrid physical-digital participation shapes English use, visibility of contributions, and recognition in faith-based environments remains underexplored.

Despite a number of studies on religion and language, three gaps remain. First, there is limited work examining informal everyday faith participation within recurring environments of English use that are not explicitly framed as language learning spaces. Second, we know little about how digitally mediated religious interaction reorganises participation itself, including whose contributions become visible, acknowledged, and sustained within hybrid English-use environments. Digital inclusion in faith contexts is often approached in terms of connectivity and access; however, digital participation is in fact shaped by platform affordances and interactional norms that structure visibility and uptake (Y.-J. Lee & Roger, 2023; Y. Han & Reinhardt, 2022). Third, comparatively little attention has been given to international students whose trajectories are shaped by educational mobility. Therefore, this study examines how international students engage in everyday religious participation across both physical and digitally mediated domains, and how such participation shapes their experiences of English use, recognition, and inclusion in multilingual contexts. To address these gaps, the following research questions are identified:

• How do international students experience everyday participation in multilingual church communities in Australia as sites of English use and development?
• How does digitally mediated participation within these communities reshape conditions of access, recognition, and inclusion for these students?

3. Theoretical Framework

This study draws on culturally sustaining practices (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2017), education justice (Fraser, 2008; Keddie, 2012), and spatial perspectives of informal digital language learning (Y.-J. Lee, 2026) to examine how faith-based participation across hybrid physical–digital environments shapes English use, recognition, and inclusion.

3.1. Culturally Sustaining Practices

Extending earlier models of culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2000), culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2017) argues that learners’ languages and cultural practices should be maintained rather than replaced by dominant-language norms. CSP is used here to examine whether church communities’ physical and digitally mediated practices sustain participants’ linguistic repertoires and affirm diverse identities. In digitally mediated contexts, this involves examining how interactional norms, language practices, and technological affordances support or constrain meaningful participation.

3.2. Education Justice

Fraser (2008) conceptualised education justice through three interrelated dimensions: redistribution (equitable access to resources), recognition (acknowledgment and valuation of participants’ identities and practices), and representation (meaningful participation in community structures and decision-making). Applied to educational contexts, this framework moves beyond access-based inclusion models to foreground the structural conditions under which participation becomes consequential (Keddie, 2012). In digitally mediated faith communities, education justice directs attention to whether participation extends beyond access (such as membership in a church or inclusion in a messaging group) to recognition and representation. Thus, inclusion depends not only on connectivity but on how contributions are acknowledged, circulated, and sustained within hybrid interactional spaces. In this study, representation is examined at the level of interactional participation rather than institutional governance, as decision-making authority over community or platform structures falls beyond the scope of the present analysis.

3.3. Spatial Perspectives on Hybrid Participation

Spatial perspectives of informal digital language learning (Y.-J. Lee, 2026) conceptualise language development as emerging through movement across interconnected physical and digital spaces. From this perspective, learning is shaped by how participants traverse spaces of interaction and engage with opportunities for it. Applied to multilingual church communities, a spatial lens foregrounds the interconnectedness of worship services, small groups, volunteering, livestreamed participation, and messaging platforms. These sites constitute the participation structures through which opportunities for language use and recognition are organised. Rather than viewing digital mediation as an extension of physical participation, this perspective examines how hybrid domains form an integrated ecology in which opportunities for English use, visibility, and recognition are unevenly distributed.

Drawing on education justice and spatial perspectives, this study operationalises three analytical dimensions: access, recognition, and inclusion. Access refers to the availability of participation across physical and digital domains. Recognition is operationalised as interactional uptake—that is, whether participants’ contributions and linguistic repertoires are acknowledged, extended, and responded to within ongoing interaction. Inclusion refers to sustained relational integration across hybrid environments. These three dimensions structure the cross-case analysis by examining how digitally mediated participation shapes English use, visibility of contributions, and conditions of belonging within multilingual church communities.

4. Methodology

4.1. Research Design

This multiple-case study employed narrative inquiry to examine three international students’ experiences of English use and learning through church participation across interconnected physical and digitally mediated spaces. Narrative inquiry enables examination of how participants interpret, sequence, and assign meaning to experiences over time and across spaces, positioning learning as lived participation rather than discrete skill acquisition (Barkhuizen et al., 2014). It also facilitates analysis of how participation unfolds across multiple sites and modalities, and how inclusion is negotiated through everyday interaction (Y.-J. Lee & Roger, 2023). Accordingly, this design allowed investigation of how participants perceived their learning environments and how conditions of digitally mediated participation shaped experiences of access, recognition, and inclusion.

4.2. Participants

Purposive sampling was employed to identify information-rich cases that offered strong potential to illuminate the phenomenon under investigation (Creswell & Poth, 2017; Patton, 2015). Selection was guided by alignment with the study’s focus on hybrid physical-digital participation within faith-based communities. Participants demonstrated sustained involvement in church activities and regular engagement in church-affiliated digital communication. The three cases also exhibited meaningful variation in how physical and digitally mediated participation intersected in their language learning experiences. This heterogeneity enabled theoretically driven comparison (Patton, 2015), allowing analysis of how different configurations of worship participation, volunteering, small-group interaction, and digital engagement shaped conditions of access, recognition, and inclusion. Profiles of the three participants are provided in

Table 1. Participants’ background information.

Name	Gender	Country of Origin
Grace	F	Korean
Daniel	M	Colombia
Mei	F	China

.

4.3. Data Collection

Data were collected over a four-week period through two primary sources and supplementary digital materials. First, participants completed weekly journal diaries documenting their church participation and related digital engagement. Prompts were open-ended, encouraging detailed descriptions of specific episodes of English use across physical and digitally mediated contexts. Second, two semi-structured narrative interviews were conducted with each participant—one at the midpoint and one at the end of data collection. Interviews invited participants to elaborate on diary entries, recall particular interactional moments, and reflect on experiences of belonging, recognition, and exclusion. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Additionally, participants were invited to share relevant photos or screenshots of church-affiliated digital interactions, where appropriate and with consent from other identifiable members where required. As these materials involved third-party participants and potentially sensitive community communication, they were not retained as primary data or subjected to independent analysis. Instead, they were used solely as contextual prompts during interviews to clarify interactional details described in participants’ narratives.

4.4. Data Analysis

Following dual narrative methodology (Barkhuizen et al., 2014), analysis proceeded in two stages. First, narrative analysis was conducted to construct individual case stories. Narratives gathered from diary entries and interview transcripts were synthesised into coherent experiential accounts, with specific episodes extracted and chained into continuous individual stories. This process allowed individual variations in learning experience to be foregrounded while maintaining participants’ own framing and meaning-making. Second, thematic analysis was conducted across the three cases to identify cross-case patterns relevant to the study’s research questions. The coding process proceeded through repeated reading of the data, assignment of codes to data extracts, and gradual aggregation of codes into thematic categories. The education justice and CSP frameworks informed interpretive choices throughout, directing attention to dimensions of recognition, access, and cultural sustainability, and specifically to how digitally mediated participation supported or undermined these dimensions for multilingual participants. Codes related to digital affordances, interactional norms, linguistic hierarchy, and community responsiveness were treated as analytically significant because they illuminate the structural conditions through which digital inclusion is produced or withheld. Themes were refined iteratively across multiple readings, with member-checking conducted through brief follow-up correspondence with participants to confirm the accuracy and fairness of case representations. In addition, given that the analysis draws on participants’ narrative accounts rather than transcripts of naturally occurring interaction, this approach does not capture the turn-by-turn organisation of interaction through which recognition is enacted. Nonetheless, the analysis provided insight into how participants interpret and experience inclusion within digitally mediated environments.

5. Findings

Section 5.1 presents individual case stories of each participant’s church-based English learning experience, drawn from narrative analysis. Section 5.2 reports three cross-case analyses based on themes emerging from thematic analysis.

5.1. Individual Cases’ Stories

5.1.1. Grace

Grace initially attended services quietly, relying on bilingual bulletins and watching how others participated. At the beginning, she described learning the “shape” of interaction such as “when to stand, when to sit, and when to greet others”. She explained that she could “understand the mood” of conversations even when she could not follow every sentence. Her participation shifted when she volunteered for the hospitality team, engaging in greeting at the door, offering tea or coffee, and chatting briefly after the service. Early on, Grace relied on a small set of phrases that felt safe and “script-like” such as “how are you going?”, “Tea or coffee?”, or “have a good week”. Over time, those exchanges extended as people began asking follow-up questions like “what are you studying?” and “how are you finding Australia?”. Grace prepared short answer bundles in advance on Saturday night, including two or three expansion lines so she could avoid “ending too fast”. She described practising softeners and response tokens that helped her hold turns such as “to be honest…”, “that makes sense”, and “I’m still getting used to it”.

Worship songs became an additional resource. Grace reported replaying recorded services to practise pronunciation and stress, especially on phrases that felt physically difficult to articulate. She noted that songs provided repeated exposure to the same lines, which helped her notice word boundaries and rhythm. She described copying short lines into her notes and reading them aloud while commuting, focusing on pronunciation before returning later to check meaning.

However, Grace experienced the church WhatsApp group as a high-pressure environment. Messages moved quickly, with humour, abbreviations, and indirect references she could not easily decode. She described reading the same message multiple times because she could understand the words but not the point of the joke. She also reported “drafting” replies and then deleting them, worried her message would sound overly formal or out of place. When she replied, she tended to use short, “low-risk contributions” such as emoji reactions, “haha”, or “so true”, rather than full sentences. For Grace, embodied participation and replaying recorded services gave her time to rehearse language before engaging with others, whereas fast-paced group messaging heightened self-monitoring and made participation feel more exposed.

5.1.2. Daniel

Daniel attended church mostly via livestream due to his work commitments. He described the digital format as flexible and “controllable”, which he could “pause”, “replay”, and search unfamiliar words “without feeling he was interrupting anyone”. He noted pausing the sermon to look up the phrase “bearing one another’s burdens”, which he had not encountered before, then writing it into his phone notes with two example sentences he created himself, including “we need to bear one another’s burdens in group work, especially when someone is struggling.” Later that week, he intentionally used the expression in a college seminar discussion about collaborative responsibility, describing it as a phrase that “fit the topic perfectly”.

Daniel also used platform features to support comprehension. He reported turning on captions when available, replaying short segments to confirm what he heard, and using timestamps to return to key parts of the sermon. When certain terms appeared repeatedly, for example, “accountability”, “forgiveness”, and “integrity”, he treated them as signals of importance and searched them. He then listened again to see how each term was used in context and considered how it might apply in practical situations beyond the sermon. He described this as learning “how words are used in real contexts”.

Despite these affordances, Daniel’s digital participation was sometimes marked by weak recognition. While he regularly posted brief comments in the livestream chat including greetings and agreement tokens such as “amen”, “that really speaks to me”, and “thank you for this message”, he often did not receive responses. He described watching the chat fill with interaction among people who seemed to know each other already, while his own contributions passed without acknowledgement. He compared this to being “in the room but not in the circle”. Daniel’s experience demonstrates that while the livestream format supported vocabulary development and comprehension strategies, his chat participation did not generate reciprocal interaction. His barrier was not understanding the content but achieving social presence in a space where recognition appeared to follow pre-existing relationships.

5.1.3. Mei

Mei attended a bilingual church where worship services were delivered in both English and Mandarin. She described the bilingual arrangement as enabling “full understanding” of complex content. During one sermon on forgiveness, she noted that terms such as “grace” and “repentance” were introduced in English and then explained further in Mandarin with cultural examples, which she said helped her “understand the deeper meaning, not just the surface idea.” She also described engaging in translanguaging during small-group discussions, for example beginning in English, briefly shifting into Mandarin to clarify a culturally specific idea, and then returning to English. She sometimes offered short translations or asked, “does that make sense in English?” when she noticed hesitation, explaining that this fluid movement between languages felt “natural” within the church context. Mei emphasised that Mandarin was treated not as a “private home language” but as a “publicly shared resource” in worship. She said this reduced the pressure of relying solely on English and allowed her to participate more comfortably.

However, during a period when some church activities moved online due to building renovation, Mei observed a noticeable shift in participation. Online group chat and Zoom discussions were conducted primarily in English, and Mandarin contributions were rare. She recalled drafting a response in Mandarin to a discussion question in the group chat but deleting it after noticing that all previous responses had been written in English. She commented that older Mandarin-dominant members “typed less” and often responded with short phrases or emoji reactions. In one Zoom session, when a discussion question was posed in English, she noticed that several Mandarin speakers kept their cameras on but did not contribute verbally. She described this as feeling “different from usual,” noting that the bilingual balance that felt normal in face-to-face worship was not present in the online format. For Mei, face-to-face worship shaped bilingual participation and fluid movement between languages, whereas online interaction reduced opportunities for Mandarin to be used and recognised within the community.

5.2. Cross-Case Experiences

5.2.1. Church Communities as Structured Sites of Sustained Participation

Across the three cases, English development emerged through patterned, role-embedded participation in church activities, not incidental exposure. Participation was organised through recurring interactional sequences that enabled gradual expansion. Grace’s hospitality exchanges required repeated initiation, response, and follow-up within predictable conversational frames. Daniel’s sustained engagement with sermon vocabulary involved identifying recurring lexical clusters and recontextualising them in academic tasks. Mei’s translanguaging in small-group discussion required real-time coordination of languages across interlocutors with different repertoires. These forms of involvement were routinised practices in which linguistic demands were stable enough to allow rehearsal and extension. Development was cumulative as engagement unfolded within institutionalised roles and recurring routines that distributed opportunities for participation over time.

The communities differed in how linguistic repertoires were positioned within these arrangements. In Mei’s church, Mandarin circulated publicly within worship and discussion, allowing her bilingual competence to function as a shared resource. In Grace’s community, English framed collective interaction and defined the language through which contribution was recognised and extended. In Daniel’s case, where participation was predominantly via livestream, English similarly operated as the medium of engagement, although his community involvement was less relationally embedded than Grace’s. Sustainability thus depended on whether linguistic repertoires were incorporated into recurring interactional norms and recognised in collective practice.

These findings suggest that sustained language development in faith-based communities was generated by the organisation of participation. From the CSP framework, linguistic repertoires are embedded in routine interaction and affirmed as collective resources. From a spatial perspective, development reflects patterned movement across interconnected sites of engagement, with roles and routines structuring trajectories through which linguistic resources accumulate and circulate. This traversal across sites was evident in Daniel’s recontextualisation of sermon vocabulary in academic seminars and in Grace’s transfer of phonological patterns rehearsed through recorded services into live hospitality exchanges. From an education justice lens, inclusion depended on access to organised participation structures, including defined roles, relational networks, and recurring exchanges that made contribution visible. Language development became possible where participants could enter, remain within, and move across these structured forms of engagement.

5.2.2. Digital Mediation: Expanded Access and Reconfigured Participation

In all three cases, digital mediation extended church participation, yet participation in digital spaces followed interactional norms distinct from face-to-face engagement. Across the cases, online interaction that required immediate contribution demanded rapid response, informal register, and familiarity among regular participants. Grace’s hesitation in WhatsApp, Mei’s withdrawal of a Mandarin response, and Daniel’s unreciprocated chat contributions indicate that digital exchange required immediate contribution and close alignment with prevailing interactional expectations. Where face-to-face interaction distributed communicative responsibility across gesture, tone, and shared physical presence, digital interaction foregrounded textual fluency and speed.

Daniel’s case also included a different configuration. In his livestream viewing, participation did not require immediate contribution. Pausing, replaying, and captioning enabled regulation of input and selective lexical uptake without real-time exposure to evaluation. Grace’s replay of recorded services was oriented toward phonological rehearsal rather than strategic vocabulary capture. She copied lines to practise pronunciation and rhythm rather than to extract and recontextualise lexical items. Both cases demonstrate the affordance of self-paced digital access, yet the purposes and outcomes of that access differed.

The findings therefore indicate differentiated participation conditions within digital mediation. Interaction requiring immediate response increased exposure to evaluation and tightened contribution demands. Engagement not bound to real-time exchange lowered interactional risk and enabled controlled processing, yet in distinct ways across cases. Digital mediation expanded access but redistributed participation demands.

From a spatial perspective, digital platforms constituted distinct participation sites with their own interactional logics rather than seamless extensions of physical worship. From a CSP framework, multilingual practices evident offline, most clearly in Mei’s bilingual church, did not automatically transfer into digital interaction; sustaining norms were not reproduced in the shift online. From an education justice lens, expanded access to digital space did not ensure meaningful inclusion or representation. While participants exercised agency in how they navigated digital environments such as choosing when to contribute, what to withhold, and how to process input, they did not have a strong voice in shaping the structural conditions of those spaces as the platform choices, language defaults, and interactional expectations were organised by the community. Participation was shaped by how interaction was organised and whether contributions were taken up within that space. Participants did not meaningfully shape the structural norms of these digital environments, indicating limited representational participation within platform-mediated interaction.

5.2.3. Recognition as the Mechanism of Inclusion

Across modalities, recognition mediated the relationship between participation and sustained engagement. In co-present settings, recognition was enacted through uptake; that is, contributions were extended, questions followed responses, and linguistic resources were incorporated into ongoing dialogue. Participants were positioned as interlocutors whose contributions shaped interaction rather than as peripheral observers.

In digital spaces, recognition was uneven. Visibility did not ensure reciprocity. Daniel’s chat contributions appeared regularly in the livestream chat but did not anchor relational exchange; the constraint was not linguistic production but the absence of established social embeddedness within the interactional network. Grace’s self-censorship, drafting and deleting responses she anticipated would misalign with the prevailing register, indicates that recognition was anticipated as contingent on cultural alignment she had not yet secured, constraining participation before it occurred. Mei’s deletion of a Mandarin response after observing that prior contributions were in English illustrates how implicit linguistic patterning can operate as exclusionary pressure even without explicit policy. These represent distinct mechanisms of recognition constraint: relational invisibility, anticipatory withdrawal, and normative displacement.

From an education justice perspective, this pattern clarifies the limits of redistribution. Access to physical or digital space did not itself produce recognition; recognition depended on interactional uptake structured by norms of responsiveness and relational positioning that differed across modalities. From a CSP framework, recognition operated at two related but separable levels: recognition of participation, in which contributions are acknowledged and extended, and recognition of repertoire, in which multilingual resources are incorporated into collective practice. Daniel’s chat presence illustrates minimal recognition of participation without relational uptake, while Mei’s digital experience illustrates the erosion of repertoire recognition as Mandarin receded from online interaction. From a spatial lens, the uneven distribution of recognition across physical and digital sites indicates that the church functioned as interconnected yet differentiated environments in which norms of visibility, responsiveness, and language use varied.

Inclusion was therefore an interactional outcome rather than a stable status of membership. It emerged where structured participation, repertoire incorporation, and interactional uptake aligned, as in Grace’s extended hospitality exchanges and Mei’s offline translanguaging practices. Where digital environments privileged speed and dominant-language fluency without relational scaffolding, participation remained formally open but interactionally limited, as seen in Daniel’s sustained yet unreciprocated chat engagement and Grace’s withdrawal from WhatsApp exchange.

Table 2. Participation conditions across co-present and digitally mediated settings.

Dimension	Face-to-Face Participation	Synchronous Digital (WhatsApp, Zoom, Livestream Chat)	Self-Paced Digital (Recorded Services, Replay)
Tempo	Distributed across embodied interaction; response time supported by co-presence	Rapid and time-sensitive; immediate contribution expected within ongoing exchange	Self-regulated; participants control pace through pausing, replay, and repetition
Visibility	Multimodal; contributions visible through speech, gesture, and shared presence	Textual and public; contributions visible but easily passed over within fast-moving interaction	Limited interactional visibility; participation centred on input processing rather than contribution
Linguistic demands	Contextually scaffolded; meaning supported by shared environment and interactional cues	High alignment required with register, pace, and interactional norms	Reduced real-time demands; supports comprehension and rehearsal without immediate response
Recognition mechanisms	Enacted through interactional uptake, including extended exchanges and follow-up responses	Uneven; contributions may pass without uptake where relational networks or register alignment are not yet established	Recognition not sought or received within interaction; engagement oriented toward individual comprehension and rehearsal

summarises the key conditions of participation across the three modalities identified in the cross-case analysis, contrasting how tempo, visibility, linguistic demands, and recognition mechanisms operate within each setting.

6. Discussion

This study examined how international students’ English development unfolded within multilingual church communities across physical and digital spaces. Situated at the intersection of faith-based participation, informal English learning, and digital mediation, the study addresses its two research questions by demonstrating how everyday church participation shaped English use and development through structured, role-based interaction rather than incidental exposure or programmatic instruction (RQ1); and how digitally mediated participation reshaped conditions of access, recognition, and inclusion by introducing modality-specific interactional logics that redistributed communicative authority and opportunities for contribution and uptake across physical and digital spaces (RQ2).

Extending research on religious institutions as stabilising linguistic domains (Fishman, 2006; Omoniyi, 2012), this study specifies participation structure as a mechanism through which development unfolds within informal faith ecologies. It shows how recurring roles and interactional routines distribute communicative responsibility in ways that support cumulative linguistic trajectories for internationally mobile learners. It suggests that language development unfolded through structurally embedded participation that enabled learners to enter, extend, and recontextualise contribution over time. Contributing to Australia’s multilingual landscape (Piller et al., 2024; Karidakis & Arunachalam, 2016; Benson et al., 2018), the findings suggest that faith communities can function as relational ecological niches sustaining development beyond formal instruction.

Culturally sustaining pedagogy conceptualises linguistic repertoires as resources to be maintained and developed (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2017), and studies of bilingual religious communities document multilingual circulation across domains (Wang & Piller, 2022; Joo et al., 2024). Building on this foundation, the present study refines sustainability as a site-sensitive interactional process. It reveals that multilingual legitimacy varied across co-existing participation sites, shaped by local patterns of uptake and responsiveness. This contribution shifts the focus of a CSP framework from institutional affirmation toward micro-level enactment, conceptualising repertoire sustainability as contingent on the interactional organisation of specific environments within hybrid communities.

This study operationalises recognition as a situated interactional mechanism within informal hybrid participation, extending Fraser’s (2008) redistribution-recognition-representation framework, which has been applied in educational research to analyse structural access and equity (Keddie, 2012). Redistribution was evident through access to communal and digital spaces, yet inclusion depended on patterned uptake within ongoing interaction. This specification relocates justice from macro-structural provision to micro-level communicative processes, demonstrating how recognition mediates belonging in community-based and digitally mediated contexts.

This study identifies intra-ecological differentiation within a single hybrid community, extending spatial approaches to informal digital language learning that conceptualise language learning as movement across interconnected environments (Y.-J. Lee & Roger, 2023; Y.-J. Lee, 2026). Adding to studies emphasising learner agency in navigating digital affordances (Sauro & Zourou, 2019; J.-S. Lee, 2021; Y. Han & Reinhardt, 2022), the present study identifies an additional dimension within hybrid participation in which co-existing sites operate through distinct interactional logics governing tempo, visibility, and legitimacy. These modality-specific logics redistribute communicative authority, shaping how agency can be exercised across spaces. Hybrid participation thus generates internally differentiated engagement structures. This differentiation does not reflect unequal access between groups but modality-specific redistribution of interactional authority within the same institutional ecology.

Taken together, these analyses reposition multilingual faith communities as structured language-learning ecologies where development, sustainability, justice, and hybridity converge through interactional organisation. Language growth emerges through structured participation, while inclusion depends on whether contributions are recognised and taken up within interaction. Hybrid spatial configurations further redistribute visibility and communicative authority across co-existing sites.

More broadly, the study suggests that informal language development in hybrid communities depends on the alignment between participation structure and recognition processes. Development becomes sustainable where interactional routines stabilise contribution and where repertoires are incorporated into ongoing communicative sequences. In other words, language learning in these communities was not primarily about exposure to English or access to digital tools but about whether learners had consistent opportunities to contribute and whether those contributions were noticed and responded to by others. This reframes informal language learning as a relational phenomenon embedded in community organisation, rather than as an individual outcome of exposure or platform use.

7. Implications

The findings have several pedagogical implications for educators and programme designers working with multilingual learners in both formal and co-curricular contexts. First, the study suggests that informal language development is shaped by participation structure. Educators can therefore design learning environments that distribute communicative responsibility through recurring roles and predictable interactional routines. Structured re-entry into participation, rotating facilitation roles, and sustained small-group formats can create the temporal patterning that supports cumulative language growth without relying solely on explicit instruction.

Second, the findings extend culturally sustaining pedagogy into digitally mediated learning spaces. Sustaining practice requires attention not only to curriculum content but to how multilingual repertoires are taken up in interaction. Educators designing hybrid or online components should examine whether multilingual norms established in face-to-face settings are intentionally carried into digital discussions, and whether platform practices enable meaningful contribution from learners at different stages of language development. Third, from an education justice perspective, the study highlights the importance of recognition in classroom and digital participation. Providing access to discussion forums, collaborative tools, or group chats is insufficient if interactional norms privilege speed, fluency, or culturally specific humour. Pedagogical design should therefore incorporate structured response time, explicit facilitation of peer uptake, and mechanisms that ensure learner contributions are acknowledged and extended within ongoing discourse.

Finally, the findings encourage educators to treat digital platforms as pedagogical environments that shape participation conditions. Decisions about platform choice, moderation settings, and communication formats influence whose contributions become visible and valued. Hybrid course design should therefore include deliberate reflection on how technological affordances structure tempo, visibility, and legitimacy in multilingual classrooms.

This study also has limitations in its scope. The identified interactional mechanisms may extend beyond faith-based communities but their applicability depends on how participation and recognition are organised in other contexts. In workplaces, for example, a similar pattern may arise in digital communication platforms where access to participation does not necessarily lead to inclusion if contributions are not acknowledged or taken up within ongoing interaction. In university contexts, the shift from face-to-face to online discussion may likewise reconfigure participation as norms of responsiveness and pace shape whose contributions are recognised and sustained. More broadly, in informal online communities, participation may remain formally open while recognition depends on alignment with established interactional norms. However, church communities are characterised by features such as voluntary affiliation and explicit support for bilingual practices, which may not be present in professional or anonymous digital environments. As such, the extent to which these findings generalise across informal learning spaces remains an open question. Further research across diverse contexts is thus needed to examine the robustness of these interactional patterns. Longitudinal research would clarify how structured participation and recognition accumulate into sustained development over time. In particular, interactional discourse or conversation analysis of actual exchanges would provide a finer-grained account of how recognition is enacted in practice. Including educator and programme-designer perspectives would further help illuminate how interactional conditions are intentionally shaped in hybrid learning environments. Comparative research across institutional and community settings would also deepen understanding of how participation structures interact with technological design to influence multilingual inclusion.