ABSTRACT
The chapter addresses a beneficial shift in linguistic education from that centered around pragmatic and cognitive aspects toward an enriched orientation dominated by affective and axiological facets, rendering teaching and learning a more comprehensive and better-diagnosed process. It discusses the linguistically pedagogical “silver lining” of the pandemic, consisting of the two disciplines coming closer together, interchanging concepts and tools, and eliminating the violation of four educational domains associated with the period before the pandemic. It draws on research carried out in compliance with the so-called classroometric approach and on four sets of highly contextualized findings, which jointly point to the salience of humanizing linguistic education, the need for increased empathy and authenticity, and the educational role of language altogether. Accordingly, the chapter gathers several linguistic and pedagogical concepts that better serve contemporary bilingual teacher education (and general education, too). The chapter juxtaposes features of what can be referred to as pre-pandemic education against those belonging to the post-pandemic paradigm (although the virus itself is not viewed as the crucial factor but serves well to mark the timeline when new tendencies can be observed on a global scale). It closes with a set of implications of the shift in question and a pool of initiatives that have been undertaken in line with the recent developments in bilingual education and its teachers.
