Culturally sustaining practices and digital inclusion: international students’ English learning in Australian church communities

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.