Extended Reality in English for Specific Purposes Teaching and Learning in Tertiary Education

Extended reality (XR) has rapidly moved from the margins of educational experimentation to the centre of many conversations about the future of language learning. In English language teaching more broadly, XR has been associated with immersion, presence, embodiment, and enhanced engagement, and a growing research base has explored its potential to reshape language learning environments (e.g., Parmaxi & Demetriou, 2020; Quintero et al., 2019). This Special Issue is mainly motivated by the key consideration that XR often promises authenticity, but authenticity in ESP is never automatic. Authentic learning, as conceptualized by Herrington et al. (2014), refers to an instructional approach that embeds learning activities within real-world contexts (see also Carter et al., 2011). By doing so, it enables learners to engage with tasks that mirror the complexity and problem-solving demands they encounter in everyday life, thereby fostering more meaningful and transferable learning experiences. In this context, realistic visuals do not necessarily generate realistic communication. A virtual courtroom, a simulated clinic, a construction site scenario, or an immersive business meeting can reproduce the surface of professional life while still offering learners linguistically generic tasks, limited interactional complexity, or simplified genre demands. The challenge, then, is not merely to bring XR into ESP classrooms, but to ask what forms of disciplinary communication XR can support, under what pedagogical conditions, and with what kinds of learning evidence.