For second language learners, the value of the explicit teaching of English grammar has never been questioned. However, in recent times there has been dissent about whether or not to teach English grammar to native speakers. From the late 1960s onwards English grammar teaching in the United Kingdom largely disappeared from the curriculum, and was replaced by teachers focusing on students learning to express themselves. This was in the main not a bad thing, because it made students active participants in their own learning, and they were expected to think critically and express themselves well. The teaching of grammar, with its emphasis on rules, drilling and learning by rote, was seen as conformist, dull and unnecessary, and this view seemed to be confirmed by research into the effectiveness of grammar teaching.

The English language and the Internet, both separately and taken together, are nowadays well-acknowledged as powerful forces which influence and affect the lexico-grammatical characteristics of other languages world-wide. In fact, many authors like Crystal (2004) have pointed out the emergence of the so-called Netspeak, that is, the language used in the Net or World Wide Web; as Crystal himself (2004: 19) puts it, ‘a type of language displaying features that are unique to the Internet […] arising out of its character as a medium which is electronic, global and interactive’. This ‘language’, however, may be differently understood: either as an adaptation of the English language proper to internet requirements and purposes, or as a new and rapidly-changing and developing language as a result of a rapid evolution or adaptation to Internet requirements of almost all world languages, for whom English is a trendsetter. If the second and probably most plausible interpretation is adopted, there are three salient features of ‘Netspeak’: (a) the rapid expansion of all its new linguistic developments thanks to the Internet itself, which may lead to the generalization and widespread acceptance of new words, coinages, or meanings, hundreds of times faster than was the case with the printed media. As said above, (b) the visible influence of English, the most prevalent language on the Internet. Consequently, (c) this new language tends to reduce the ‘distance’ between English and other languages as well as the ignorance of the former by speakers of other languages, since the ‘Netspeak’ version of the latter adopts grammatical, syntactic and lexical features of English. Thus, linguistic differences may even disappear when code-switching and/or borrowing occurs, as whole fragments of English appear in other language contexts. As a consequence of the new situation, an ideal context appears for interlanguage or multilingual word formation to thrive: puns, blends, compounds and word creativity in general find in the web the ideal place to gain rapid acceptance world-wide, as a result of fashion, coincidence, or sheer merit of the new linguistic proposals.

This article focuses on Anglophone writing of a British postcolonial legacy as opposed to writing of a Lusophone, Francophone, Belgian, Dutch, or German legacy. Moreover, this specific phrase of ‘Anglophone writing of a British postcolonial legacy’ is employed in recognition of a move away from the label ‘postcolonial writing’. The article will suggest that recently published texts are engaged in new departures which seemingly appear to be taking us away from the classic ‘postcolonial’ text. Thus, in recognition of these new departures, the terminology used in this article will attempt to better encapsulate the sense of the provenance of the writing and yet at the same time move the terminology ‘forward’, away from the label of the ‘postcolonial’.

The Canary Islands are very well known as an all-year-round tourist resort, thanks to their mild climate. References to the Islands have been many and varied since ancient times. Caught between legends and reality, the Canaries were described as marvellous islands on the limits of the world. They were referred to as ‘the Isles of the Blest’, the Hesperides or the Elysian Fields by the Greek poets of the Golden Age.

As the suicides by a few students at one of South Korea's (hereafter Korea) most prestigious universities drew a great deal of attention from the public, partial blame went to the new institutional policy imposed by the university's top administrator: exclusive use of English as the medium of instruction across the entire curriculum (McDonald, 2011). The fanatical pursuit of English education and the overall status of the English language in Korean society have been well documented in the literature (e.g., Jeon & Lee, 2006; Jeong, 2004; Lee & Shin, 2008; Park, 2009; Seth, 2002). However, little has been written about another controversial trend, English-only instruction, recently introduced at a few selective institutions of higher education in Korea.

This article is about some very short words: the permutations for monosyllables in common use in standard British English having the phonetic pattern: single consonant + short vowel + single consonant. It is similar, therefore, to my article ‘Consonantal beginnings’ (ET80), in which I looked at what pairs of consonantal sounds could be found at the beginnings of English words. The pronunciation is to be taken as that given in the OED for British English.

English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a means of communication in English between speakers who have different first languages. While some definitions (e.g. House, 2003) exclude native speakers of English (NSs) from ELF interactions, others allow NSs to take part in ELF interactions as long as they defer to ELF norms (Jenkins, 2009b). In order for an interaction to be classified as ELF, however, NS contributions are always expected to be minimal (Jenkins, 2009b: 41). ELF is therefore mainly, if not exclusively, used between non-native speakers of English (NNSs).

Among common speculations about the ultimate demise of English as the world's lingua franca (see Jeffrey Gil in ET 105, March 2011, reconsidering Chinese as a possible replacement) Nicholas Ostler (2010) is one more to project ‘the breakdown of English-speaking hegemony’, but his case is more curious than most. After an exhaustive, not to say exhausting, survey of ancient empires and modes of communication, in which Latin as the last lingua franca has but a late bit part, he arrives at an unrelated conclusion: ready machine translation sooner or later rendering a global ‘lingua-franca’ irrelevant (his hyphenation to legitimise an English plural – ‘lingua-francas’). Our springtime island-hopping pilgrimage rather gave the lie to this.