According to Bolton (2013), Chinese university students are invariably multilingual, not only acquiring English at school, but increasingly outside of their formal curricula, through the Internet, music, computer games, movies, and television series. Indeed, many of these students are also highly mobile, and in most cases migrate throughout Greater China (and abroad) in order to pursue higher education degrees. Bolton (2012, 2013) also points out that current theorizing about English in Greater China needs to take into account what he calls ‘the language worlds’ of these young people, especially with regard to how they use various languages in various aspects of their lives, increasingly sampling different ‘worlds’, both ‘physical’ as well as ‘imaginary’ (see also Blommaert, 2010). Studies of migration and mobility within Greater China – particularly with regard to how this relates to the use of English in the context of local languages and language varieties – have received very little attention. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a sociolinguistic account of the contemporary use of English in China's higher education, by specifically reporting on a recent large-scale sociolinguistic study that was carried out in Macau and Guangzhou, in southern China. The study reported on in this paper captures the increasing use of English as a medium (or additional medium) of instruction in two universities at these locations. The study also reveals how English is used in the personal lives of ordinary Chinese students.

The previous issue of English Today announced the start of a regular feature on questions of English usage and other relevant issues that are being studied in the research project ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public’ that is being carried out at the University of Leiden Centre for Linguistics. The first question we would like to have feedback on from readers of English Today relates to the acceptability of have went. The topic was inspired by a number of spontaneous comments from people who had contributed to the attitudes survey I reported on in that issue, and in particular in connection with the disputed sentence I could of gone to that party (http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/2012/05/07/attitudes-survey/).

The concept of English as the nativized foreign language – or ENFL, for short – was first proposed in 2003, at the 13th International Conference on British and American Studies, in Timişoara, Romania, in a presentation entitled ‘Rethinking the status of English today: is it still a purely foreign language?’, and subsequently published as Prćić, 2003 and 2004. Identified and described in these papers are new, additional properties of English, which have developed over the past few decades, concurrently with the establishment of English as the first language of world communication and as today's global lingua franca (for accounts of this phenomenon, see Jenkins, 2007; Mauranen & Ranta, 2010; Seidlhofer, 2011). Viewed from the perspective of the Expanding Circle (Kachru, 1985), English can no longer be considered a purely, or prototypically, foreign language, usually characterized by three defining properties: not the first language of a country, not the official language of a country and taught as a subject in schools (cf. Richards & Schmidt, 2002). Three newly emerged defining properties of English, over and above the three customary ones, set it uniquely apart from all other purely foreign languages and they will be briefly summarized below (for more extensive discussions, see Prćić, 2003, 2004, 2011a: Chapter 2, 2011b, 2014).

With the global spread of English, research in World Englishes (WE) has burgeoned in the past two decades. Its concepts have been taken up by researchers in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) to question ‘native-speakerism’ (Holliday, 2005, 2006) in English instruction. However, the implications of this theoretical discussion have so far yet to be realized in EFL classrooms, where teachers and learners alike still largely submit to native-speaker norms. This study therefore aims to examine how discussions of power, politics, and the spread of Englishes might influence students’ perceptions of English and their experiences of learning and using English. The analysis focuses on papers written by students enrolled in a semester-long WE course, and demonstrates the value of bringing WE into English curriculums to help students become critical learners and confident users of English today.

Due to its rise as a global means of communication, the English language has been increasingly used by and between non-native speakers (henceforth NNSs), leading to a growing interest in what has come to be known as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in English language teaching (ELT). As noted by Jenkins (2006: 159), ‘many of those who start out thinking they are learning English as a foreign language end up using it as a lingua franca’. This suggests that ELT materials need to be developed in ways that correspond with the emerging needs of such language learners. However, ‘the prevailing orientation in […] ELT materials still remains undoubtedly towards ENL [English as a Native Language]’ (Jenkins, 2012: 487). It is not yet clear how well ELF perspectives have been integrated into teaching materials to date.

It is June, 2002. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has just stepped on to the stage at the end of a concert in celebration of her Golden Jubilee. Her son and heir, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, approaches her. He inclines his slightly greying head to his monarch. He speaks: ‘Your Majesty…’. He pauses for a fraction of a second, and then continues: ‘Mummy …’. A sharp intake of breath is heard across the land. Why?

The fact that differences in vowel articulation are important in distinguishing accents of English is well established (Wells, 1982; Cruttenden, 2008; Ng, Chen & Sadaka, 2008; Park, 2009a, 2009b). It is also the case that speakers' production of a particular vowel varies for an individual speaker and between speakers of the ‘same’ accent (Rose, 2002; Cruttenden, 2008). In terms of perception, it is evident that L1 speakers, i.e. speakers for whom the language is the first language or one of the first languages acquired, are often able to recognise vowel articulations which deviate from the norm in their accent, even when the difference in vowel production is not significant enough to be mapped onto another L1 phoneme category, i.e. where the use of the alternative vowel quality could potentially change the meaning of the word (Park, 2009a). It should be acknowledged that any such norms are likely to vary in accordance with generational changes to a particular variety. But studies seeking to establish the degree of interrelatedness of vowel production and speakers' perceived ideal realisation have had mixed results. For example, Hoopingarner (2004) found that L1 speakers' production and preferred realisation were relatively similar, while Ainsworth & Paliwal (1984) and Frieda, Walley, Flege & Sloane (2000) failed to demonstrate such a correlation.

A few years ago, I spent one year as Director of Studies (DoS) of a language school on the south coast of England, a first job back in the UK after living abroad for 18 years. The job was fine, but one particular responsibility was occasionally stressful: arranging cover for absent teachers at short notice. Sometimes I was free to teach the class myself and happily did so, but there were times when I had other things to do. Sometimes, several teachers would phone in sick at the same time.

It is worth noting that an increasing number of international students, especially Chinese students, have been flooding into English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States or Australia in pursuit of advanced knowledge and better academic environments. As ESL students are enrolling in writing courses in colleges and universities, teachers are confronted with problems that non-native speakers bring to the class when it comes to their academic writing. The problems are more serious than they appear to be. For one thing, according to Reid (1993: 774), there is a dramatic difference between native students and ESL students in ‘the needs, backgrounds, learning styles, and writing strategies’. For another, the situation becomes worse due to ‘considerable diversity even among ESL students in terms of language and cultural backgrounds, prior education, gender, age, and ESL language proficiency’ (Reid, 1993: 774). Although there is not a single solution which is effective in solving complex ESL issues, teachers would be in a better position to understand their ESL students' writing problems if they were to learn about the distinct nature of L2 writing shaped by linguistic and cultural differences. In this article, the author, who was once a Chinese ESL student in the USA and is now an EFL teacher in China, explores how English writing differs from Chinese writing and how these differences lead to Chinese ESL students' difficulty with English writing. This article is expected to increase ESL practitioners' awareness of the urgency for them to recognize and deal with these differences in order to teach L2 writers effectively, to treat them fairly and thus provide them with equal opportunities to achieve academic and professional success.

Even before one opens this book, a potential reader is impressed by the suggested coverage and by the quality of the authors, two of whom are very well known in the fields of creolistics, education and linguistics. A closer survey confirms the coverage, revealing a listing and categorisation of 1626 (p. xviii) or 1624 (p. xix) texts written over the last fifty years and covering.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are big news in higher education at the moment, with hundreds of the world's leading universities offering free access to lectures and other resources. Many MOOC providers operate through platforms such as edX, a not-for-profit consortium formed by MIT, Harvard and Berkeley, or commercially oriented platforms such as Udacity and Coursera. The last two provide the courses free, but aim to make money by charging for certification, or by making data on MOOC graduates available to recruiters. And the numbers involved are huge: MOOCs can attract tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of enrolments.

The Oxford History of English is an updated version of a work whose first edition appeared in 2006. The content is essentially the same as that of the first edition, with the same fourteen chapters covering a chronology stretching from prehistory (‘Before English’, pp. 9–38) to the present (‘Into the Twenty-first Century’, pp. 488–513). Apart from the addition of some post-2006 publications to the references and suggestions for further reading that accompany the chapters, this updating is most obvious in the last chapter, where David Crystal considers, alongside globalization and changes in educational policy, the influence of electronic communication. The latter, in particular, is an area of rapid change: the appended timeline (pp. 514–29) informs us that Twitter was launched in the same year as the first edition of The Oxford History of English was published, and by the time this second edition appeared it had reached 10 million users in the UK.