In recent times ET has received many articles on English in China, and published as many as feasible, but the sheer volume has led to a strangely serious question: How many such articles can we publish without ET becoming English in China Today? Inevitably, therefore, we have been publishing only some of the publishable submissions received. It is therefore ironic to bring out the cover article for this issue, whose subject matter looks Chinese but is about something happening to English outside China. The article is not about English in China or Chinese in a world dominated by English, but describes the work of a Chinese artist in effect playing Sinocentric games with the global language.

THE WORLD-RENOWNED Oxford lexicographer Robert William Burchfield is a hero of mine who, to my great good fortune, became first a colleague then a friend, as he also was to ET.

Radical departures in English in the work of a Chinese calligrapher. Challenging conventional assumptions regarding the use of language, Xu Bing's calligraphic artworks of the early 1990s address the English-speaking world from a space deep within the bedrock of Chinese culture. Ironically extending and querying the continued relevance of the Chinese calligraphic tradition in a post-Mao, post-modern, trans-cultural era, Xu's New English Calligraphy cloaks English words in Chinese form. Exploring the communicative functions of language, these works examine the relation between linguistic intent and subsequent understanding or misunderstanding.

In recent years, there has been a heated discussion as to the quality of English education in mainland China. The central argument has been that, although children begin to learn English at the age of ten, and continue the study throughout their education, when they communicate with English native speakers they have difficulties both in understanding and in making themselves understood. English native speakers may also have difficulty understanding them, for reasons that include direct translation from Chinese into English, especially as regards everyday Chinese administrative and technical terms. This paper analyses this problem in terms of both vocabulary acquisition and translation.

The text is the editor's introduction to The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible to be published in 2004.

THOUGH it is the most important book in the religious life and the culture of the English-speaking world, the King James Bible or Authorised Version of 1611 has never been perfectly printed. This is not to say either that it is badly printed or that absolute perfection can be achieved, but that the text and its presentation can be improved. First, what we now read as the King James Bible contains numerous deliberate and some accidental changes to the text, and these can be revised to make it more faithful to the King James translators' own decisions as to how it should read. Second, the presentation of the text – spelling, punctuation and formatting – interferes with the clarity with which it speaks to the minds and souls of present-day readers. Unnecessary background noise gets in the way. To use another image, there is dust and dirt on the old master, the paint is darkened and cracked: we can still see that the picture is a great one, but not how great it is. This article continues to explore the criteria used behind the publication of this new work.

A report on two prominent dialectal variables in England. Using rather informally collected data, The author looks here at two well-known variables in the English of England: first, whether there is a short or long vowel in words such as grass and bath; second, what regional words people know for streams. The treatment of these variables is consistent over time, and seems to have little to do with social status or carefulness of speech.

Sameness and difference across two nations and languages. In order to begin the discussion regarding a sitcom from American television used in a Brazilian classroom, I believe it is necessary to discuss the situation of the world as we know it at the beginning of the 21st century. Using the theories of the Brazilian sociologist Renato Ortiz (1994) as the basis for this discussion, it is possible to differentiate between the terms global and world-systemic (or mundial). In this view, global refers to the economic and technological processes at work in the modern day world, while world-systemic refers to the domain of culture. The category world is linked to the global, but signifies a world-view, a symbolic universe which is specific to the historic moment in which we live.

An account of a highly distinctive variety of English in India. When the British set up colonies worldwide they brought with them a legacy that included their language, which many of the natives accepted and acculturated: it would after all be unreasonable to expect an imperial language to function in a vacuum with no local nuances. Indeed, gradual acculturation produced a number of varieties of English used as second languages. In their almost 200 years of not-so-peaceful stay on the subcontinent, the British and many Indians used English, fulfilling in at least a linguistic sense Macaulay's dream of an ‘imperishable empire’. In these 200 years, English in India slowly went through a process now labelled Indianization, evolving into the variety (or group of varieties) called Indian English. One subvariety, generally referred to as Butler English, though by no means confined to butlers, is described and discussed here.

A discussion of the variety of labels given to the language in its worldwide role. In his article ‘Is it world or international or global English, and does it matter?’ (ET79, Jul 04), Tom McArthur welcomes further comment on the names of English in a ‘globalizing world’. He examines the histories and meanings of the three most popular labels for English: world, international and global. In addition to discussing his contribution, I would like to draw attention to other, perhaps less familiar names for English that have been proposed as alternatives. This paper seeks both to survey these labels and uncover why there is such a strong compulsion to rename the language. I suggest that these proposals have arisen in response to postcolonial ambiguity about the spread of English and a desire to shape a new ideology for English language teaching (ELT) which more accurately reflects the global nature of the language and its diverse uses and users.

Task-based classroom work in Taiwan that uses a mix of traditional teaching, multimedia, and online video. In this paper, I discuss how poetry can be used as a topic of discussion and the basis for a task-based project for university students who have had little exposure to American poetry. The use of multimedia and online video as tools in the course of this project is also discussed and attention is likewise given to student feedback on a questionnaire administered online. Students' critical reflections and subjective analyses of their performances and their feelings toward the project reveal positive results, allowing me to conclude that the integration of poetry into language-teaching work, if delivered effectively, can hone students' thinking, reading, listening, writing, speaking and analytical skills. It is not only the amount of hard work that matters, but how far the imagination is stretched.

This paper draws attention to some uses of the singular collective nouns congress, council, government, management, parliament, and senate in contemporary English. In particular, it demonstrates how in such uses, the singular collective nouns – like members of the main class of proper nouns – have unique reference, occur without any determiner, take singular pronoun substitutes, and as subject in the sentence have singular concord with the verb. It concludes by providing from contemporary English texts some examples illustrating the uses of the six singular collective nouns discussed.

Some adjectival links across the Channel. Of the countless delights and complexities to be discovered in the relationships among the Indo-European languages, particularly fascinating are the connections between English and French. The two languages start together in proto-Indo-European (if there ever was such a thing), diverge into the Germanic and Latinate branches of the family, come together (north of the channel only) with the merging of French and English after the invasion of William of Normandy in 1066, and have been glued together even more by the influence of the classical languages, particularly Latin, in and after the Renaissance.

Puzzled by Michael Bulley's ‘Consonantal beginnings’, in ET80 (Oct 04) who does admit to some difficulty in discussing initial consonant clusters in English, when he says: ‘The conventions of writing can mislead us about speech.’ While the restoration of the phonetic symbols in the ‘full and proper form’ of the article (ET80) now elucidates some of the puzzles in the previous version (ET79), difficulties remain in maintaining a clear distinction between the sound systems of English and the writing system.

Reflections on the Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary and its mother book, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.