This study examines Taiwanese English teachers’ perceptions of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in relation to English teaching in classrooms. The definition of ELF is: English used as a lingual medium of communication among people of different linguacultural backgrounds (Jenkins, 2009: 200). Concerning the use of English, Taiwan is regarded as a country of ‘the expanding circle’ (Kachru, 1985, 1992), where English is not an official language, but is learned as a foreign language (EFL) at school and is considered essential for international communication. In Taiwan, English has been traditionally taught as a school subject and learners rarely have opportunities to use English outside the classroom, whereas the design of English pedagogy and curricula in Taiwan, following an EFL approach, is based on native-speaker (NS) norms with the aim of helping learners achieve native-like competence (cf. Suzuki, 2011). Due to the global spread of English, the majority of users of English for international communication are non-native speakers (non-NSs) (Crystal, 1997; Graddol, 1997, 2006); non-NSs of English now outnumber their native-speaker counterparts. In the global context, second language (L2) learners of English will mostly encounter non-NSs, whose ‘Englishes’ might deviate from NS English usage. Traditional EFL approaches to English teaching, which favor NS norms, may not ‘adequately prepare’ L2 learners of English to effectively interact and communicate with speakers ‘from other English-speaking contexts’ (Matsuda & Friedrich, 2011: 332). It has become important that English curricula and instruction are designed to prepare English learners to cope with international communication in which English variations are evident.

Medium of instruction (‘MOI’) issues have long been identified as the most important decisions in the internationalization of higher education (HE) (Hamid, Nguyen & Baldauf, 2013). The adoption of internationally influential languages as MOIs may attract international students who aspire to undertake higher education in these languages, which in turn helps to sustain the status of these languages as internationally influential. Among all these languages, English is certainly the most powerful academic lingua franca and boosted by its use as MOI in globally leading universities worldwide. However, the elevated position of English in international higher education seems not without competition, as many governments in non-English-speaking countries have made efforts to internationalize their higher education by providing parallel higher learning programs both with English and with their native language (usually the official language) for international students. For instance, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), in which it first promoted higher education in the medium of German and later expanded to the medium of English in the 2000s, plays a critical role in attracting and recruiting international students to study in German universities (e.g. Erling & Hilgendorf, 2006).

Linguistic landscape (LL), a concept which first emerged in the field of language planning, refers to ‘[t]he language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings' (Landry & Bourhis, 1997: 25). There are two functions attached to the linguistic landscape of a given territory: an informational function and a symbolic function. The informational function serves to inform people of ‘the linguistic characteristics, territorial limits and language boundaries' of a specific region; whereas the symbolic function serves as an indicator of the status, power relations, and cultural identity of the inhabitants, affecting how individuals feel about their community (Landry & Bourhis, 1997).

In the past two decades, there have been two important events in English as a Foreign Language (hereafter, EFL) teaching in Chinese universities throughout the country. The first event was a gradual growth in student enrolment in universities, and the second was the EFL teaching reform that aimed to introduce Communicative Language Teaching (hereafter, CLT) into the English classroom (Rao, 2010). There is an apparent conflict between the increase in student numbers in each class and the use of CLT in the language classroom, thus resulting in a series of problems for current EFL teaching in Chinese universities. On the one hand, frequent contact with foreigners speaking English nowadays makes it necessary for English teachers to develop students’ communicative competence. On the other hand, some problems such as large classes, high demands on English teachers and a lack of financial resources prevent teachers from getting their students involved in the communicative activities in their teaching process (Rao, 1996; Yu, 2001; Hu, 2002).

Camfranglais is a newly created language, a composite slang used by secondary school pupils in Cameroon, West Africa. It draws its lexicon from French, English, West African Pidgin, various Cameroonian indigenous languages, Latin, and Spanish. Secondary school pupils use it among themselves to exclude outsiders while talking about such matters of adolescent interest as food, drinks, money, sex, and physical looks. There are four sections: language in the Cameroon educational system; Camfranglais defined; an analysis of a sample Camfranglais text; and the semantic domains of Camfranglais. There is a glossary of the terms cited.

A discussion of both the selection and significance of sub-varieties of English in Malaysia. Malaysia is a multi-racial country, with a diversity of languages that includes Bahasa Malaysia (the national language), English (introduced during the colonial period from the late-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries), and a number of Chinese dialects, Indian languages, and other minority languages. Despite this complex linguistic tapestry, English continues to command considerable respect and prestige, and demonstrates an impressive range of intra- and international uses. It is a vehicle of communication within and across diverse linguistic and cultural groups at many levels of interaction, but clusters mainly around particular domains of use. It is important to the educational endeavours of the people and the technological, economic, and political aspirations of the nation.

AS ECONOMICS and trade turn the world into “a global village”, English is playing an increasingly important role in China as a lingua franca for such matters as business, information, international travel, the Internet, cultural entertainment, and the environment, all of which have brought great changes in every aspect of our lives. Native English speakers are regarded as linguistically privileged, but such non-native English-speakers as the Chinese, in order to overcome their disadvantage, are launching campaigns to enable themselves to use English more accurately and fluently. ‘Communicative competence’ has become the chief goal of English language learning and teaching. This essay seeks to analyse the great changes that are taking place educationally in China, especially in ELT, emphasizing the importance of communicative language teaching (CLT), teacher training, reform of the examination system, and raising people's awareness of new challenges in education and life.

In different parts of the English-speaking world various vowel changes have been taking place in recent years, perhaps the most noticeable of which is the vowel lowering in words like DRESS and TRAP. This lowering would seem to have its origins some few decades ago in North America, probably in California and perhaps simultaneously in Canada. The shift, labelled here short front vowel lowering (SFVL), has spread quickly across the anglophone world and is found in locations as far apart as Ireland, South Africa and Australia. In each case where the change has been adopted there has been an adaptation of the change to local circumstances within the borrowing variety. The transmission of the change is also significant as the spread would seem not to be by direct speaker contact.

This review explores the histories and meanings of, and similarities and contrasts among, three labels for English at large: world English, international English, and global English, first as phrases containing the words world, international, and global, then in terms of their history and use, and how a range of dictionaries has dealt (or failed to deal) with them. The first has been used to mean both standard English and all English; the second refers to the multinational use of English (notably in language teaching); and the third both implies vast use and links the language (often negatively) with socio-economic globalization. Since all three are likely to go on being used, they may need to be handled with care.

The global expansion of the use of English throughout the last decade has had significant implications for its instruction around the world. Among the issues that have arisen as a result of this expansion has been the selection of appropriate phonological models in the English language classroom. Specifically this particular issue has hinged on the question of whether it is more appropriate to encourage English language learners to strive towards the goal of a particular native variety of English pronunciation, or to promote an alternative target. This question has provoked much discussion, and has been the subject of occasionally heated debate (e.g. Jenkins, 1998, 2000; Scheuer, 2005, 2008; Seidlhofer & Jenkins, 2003).

The ubiquitous spread of English is vividly observed in local linguistic landscapes and urban spaces around the world, and Turkey is no exception. Emerging as a bona fide line of inquiry at the nexus of sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology, geography and media studies (Sebba, 2010), linguistic landscaping examines the dynamic relationship of English vis-à-vis the local languages, and documents, analyzes and interprets the attributes, patterns, characteristics, meanings and the creative uses of English in such domains as advertising (Kelly-Holmes, 2005; Vettorel, 2013) and shop signs (MacGregor, 2003; Ong, Ghesquière & Serwe, 2013; Schlick, 2002). These studies provide contextualized accounts of language contact situated in local sociolinguistic contexts and contribute to the representation of reflections from various parts of the world (e.g. see Backhaus (2007) and MacGregor (2003) for Japan; McArthur (2000) for Switzerland and Sweden; Griffin (2004) and Ross (1997) for Italy; Schlick (2002) for Austria, Italy and Slovenia; Dimova (2007) for Macedonia; Hasanova (2010) for Uzbekistan; Ong, Ghesquière & Serwe (2013) for Singapore; El-Yasin & Mahadin (1996) for Jordan; Wang (2013) for China; Ben Said (2010) for Tunisia; Schlick (2003) for Slovenia, Austria, Italy, and the UK; Stewart & Fawcett (2004) for Portugal; Thonus (1991) for Brazil; and Baumgardner (2006) for Mexico).

THIS ACCOUNT of the growth of English language teaching in South Korea moves from the grammar-fixated traditions of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries through more recent politically and educationally lively times to an English – and especially American English – ‘fever’. This urge towards English involves much of the nation and many kinds of schools and universities. In particular it constrasts school English with a massive parallel realm of private tuition, and, more recently, the widespread individual use of audio-materials. More recently still it has led to the emergence of a novel private university, the International Graduate School of English, founded and financed by a publisher who has himself been closely involved with the issue of how young Koreans can most effectively learn a language which much of the nation considers vital to the nation's future.

A review of the development and nature of Pakistani English.

Starts with excerpt from John Dougill, English as a decorative language (ET12, 1987). Twenty years on English still decorates Japan. At the end of the 1980s, Japan's bubble economy burst and the country has been rectifying the ills of the past ever since. The drive to improve is a marked feature of the culture, and much has changed in the past twenty years. The number of ‘international Japanese’ has grown, as has the number of competent English speakers. Education has been freed up, English introduced into primary schools, and listening tests established in national exams. Yet the peculiarities of Japanese English (called Janglish or Engrish by some) continue to adorn the country's buildings, goods and items of clothing.

Very recently, the former spokesman of China's Ministry of Education launched a public attack on the national fervor for English learning in his personal blog (Xinhua News, 2013). He forcefully argued that too much time and energy has been spent on learning English as a foreign language, which has seriously jeopardized Chinese citizens’ first-language education, and called for the cancellation of English lessons in the primary school curriculum. Following this, the Beijing municipal commission of education announced its plan to reduce the English section of the National University Entrance Qualifying Exam (or gaokao) from 150 points to 100 points in major cities by 2016 so as to downplay the importance of English in the education system. A further report states that education authorities are also considering scrapping mandatory English lessons before the third grade. Shandong and Jiangsu provinces, as well as Shanghai, may remove English from the gaokao entirely (The Guardian, 2013).

This paper, a spin-off from a larger-scale research project, advances a novel perspective on recent introducers to quotations in interactive communicative settings, with the (current reporting) speaker and addressee(s) co-present: be like, quote, quote unquote, and the air-quotes are all ‘newcomers’ to the quotative system in English; they are constrained in usage to face-to-face contexts, and they foreground through animating the quote, resorting to the various modalities available in such situations: verbal, vocal, and gestural.

An account of consonantal ‘twinning’ in English and other languages.

THIS ESSAY concerns itself with gemination in English, but more specifically, it asks whether English has consonantal gemination (CG), as has been reported by some in the literature. Gemination is usually defined as a phonetic doubling (cf. Latin geminus ‘twin’); however, phonetic length (as opposed to a single or nongeminated segment) is a more accurate designation (see Matthews 1997:141, who cites Italian atto [at[Length mark]o] ‘act’, making reference only to ‘doubling’). It has long been known that English does not have contrastive CG as is recognized, say, from the phonemic difference between Classical and Modern Standard Arabic kasara (‘he broke’) and kassara (‘he smashed’) or darasa (‘he studied’) and darrasa (‘he taught’).

The choice of what materials to use in the language classroom is perhaps one of the most fundamentally important and difficult decisions teachers and those responsible for choosing textbooks are faced with. Authenticity is often seen as a desirable component in the content we select and adapt for our language learners, and it has been shown that authentic materials are more motivating, even for low-level learners (Peacock, 1997). The term authentic is often used to describe materials which were not originally designed for the purpose of language learning, but that were designed to have some purpose within the target language culture, such as a newspaper or novel. An unfortunate consequence of this is that authenticity is still often defined in reference to the target language's ‘native speakers’ or L1 community, particularly in EFL contexts, or what Kachru (1985) would label the Outer Circle communities. In other words, where English is taught as a foreign language, both teachers and students often regard ‘native-speakers’ as being the ideal model and therefore an example of authenticity. For example, Tan (2005) criticises corpora investigations of learner English for holding the view that authentic language use is equivalent to ‘native-speaker’ usages. She goes on to criticise not only corpus research but also textbook publishers for still not taking into account ‘the inextricable link between language and culture’ (2005: 127). In the academic world, culturally embedded notions of authenticity relating to ‘native-speakers’ have been challenged for decades (Smith, 1976). And yet I would argue that in mainstream textbooks and in most EFL language classrooms the native speaker still retains a ‘privileged position’ (Clark & Paran, 2007: 407). As Widdowson (1996: 68) puts it:

Is there a Zimbabwean variety of English? If so, who speaks it? Although Zimbabwe is a multilingual speech community, the Shona language, which is composed of dialects and sub-dialects, enjoys numerical dominance because it is spoken by the majority of the Zimbabweans. On the other hand, English, the official language, enjoys status dominance and it occupies a special position in the lives of many Zimbabweans. There is dispute, however, whether English in Zimbabwe is an interlanguage, and its speakers have adopted the native variety as a model, or whether it is better to observe that there are many varieties of English in Zimbabwe which are pragmatically identifiable as Zimbabwean, and that the vast majority of Zimbabweans appear to speak an English which reflects the linguistic characteristics of Shona.

Although Chinese Americans set up Chinese heritage language schools as early as 1848 to preserve the heritage language and to promote a sense of ethnic identity among their American-born children (Chao, 1997), there is strong evidence that language shift to English is taking place rather rapidly within the Chinese communities across the U.S. Data from the 2006 ACS show that while only 34.1 percent of first generation (i.e. foreign-born) Chinese Americans reported speaking ‘English very well’, the percentages rise dramatically for those who are American-born (i.e. second generation and beyond) or born overseas but arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 (i.e. the 1.5 generation). 70.4 percent of the 1.5 generation and 93.8 percent of the American-born Chinese Americans reported speaking ‘English very well’. Additionally, only about 27.6 percent of the ABCs were estimated to speak their heritage language at home. Taken together, these estimates suggest that the rate of shift from Chinese to English is accelerating. Jia (2008) finds that even for first generation Chinese Americans, their Chinese language skills continue to decline with increasing English immersion. Rapid language shift to English means that many ABCs speak English as one of their native languages, if not the only one. This raises interesting sociolinguistic questions concerning the characteristics of the English spoken by ABCs and how ABCs utilize varieties of English to construct and negotiate differences with respect to each other and vis-à-vis the larger social structure.