This chapter focuses on the learning and teaching of second language pronunciation. It starts by asking basic questions such as: Why is it so hard to sound like a “native speaker”? and Should second language learners even sound like native speakers? The chapter reviews the components of pronunciation including phoneme, segmentals, and suprasegmentals. It then explores the topics of comprehensibility, intelligibility, and accentedness, in order to consider which are most important for second language communication and learning. It argues that native-like pronunciation should not be the goal of pronunciation instruction; rather, the goal should be comprehensibility (i.e., how well a second language learner is understood by a listener). It reviews other issues related to pronunciation learning such as the distinction between receptive and productive knowledge, the role of identity in maintaining a first-language accent, and the role that biology plays in affecting second language pronunciation mastery. Finally, the chapter explores both explicit and implicit methods of pronunciation instruction.

Chapter 6 extends the discussion of multilingual development to the so-called New Englishes as symbolic systems that developed in the former colonial territories and continued to develop after the collapse of the British Empire in the newly created independent polities. More precisely, the focus here lies on outer circle Englishes in the sense of Kachru (1985). The New Englishes are analyzed from the perspective of their surrounding multilingual ecologies and not, as is more customary, in terms of hermetically delineated national varieties of English. On that account, the chapter focuses on recent – and also more historical – multilingual outcomes of globalization where English plays a prominent role, has been incorporated into the local ecologies, interacts with many other languages, and shows or is beginning to show traces of localization or nativization. Case studies include Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai. The chapter thus brings together the key issues discussed in the preceding chapters – globalization, migration, urban areas, multilingual advantages or effects, cross-linguistic influence, language acquisition and learning, language policies, identities, and attitudes – and pivots them on contexts of particular prominence.

Mercè Bernaus grew up in Spain, in a language imposed by the oppressor, and reminds us that school is a political instrument manipulated by the official language. Emilee Moore, daughter of Italian migrants in Australia, explores the stigma surrounding the indigenous communities in Australia and their right to live and learn in their languages. Together, they explore how gesture, ways of dressing, and dance movements can contribute to learning, in the context of different socio-cultural dynamics and through collaborative and activist approaches that include the whole semiotic repertoire of students.

Chapter 1 situates research genres in today’s rapidly changing technological and social contexts. The aim of the chapter is to set the scene in which research genres enact social actions, particularly through new media environments, andto focus on systems of genres of research that are evolving in response to the multiple accountabilities of scientific knowledge production, dissemination and consumption today. In reviewing some of the consequences of globalisation, this chapter briefly reviews the particular conditions that post-globalisation processes – for example, skilled migration and the boost in researchers’ mobility – have created in academic and research settings. The chapter also briefly describes the effects of such processes on researchers’ socioliterate activity at a time of unprecedented sociocultural and sociolinguistic diversity.

This chapter’s main focus is on fluency research ‘in the wild’, particularly looking at the challenges of developing fluency during immersion in the target language setting, e.g. during Study Abroad. The chapter includes the need for research and practice to move away from standard monolingual native speaker norms, towards use of L2 or multilingual raters as reference norms for evaluating fluency development. We refer to cross-linguistic work on fluency in languages other than English, to see how learners’ and teachers’ expectations can be more realistically framed to fit social contexts and task demands. We include evidence from learner corpora across a variety of languages, which could help develop more robust cross-linguistic theories, methods and evidence of fluency development from a wider multilingual interactional perspective. The final section explores these themes in the context of fluency development through residence abroad, even over short periods such as Study Abroad; evidence is presented from a recent case study of learners of Mandarin Chinese within a more nuanced view of specific task constraints, to highlight the varied nature of fluency development.

The question of putative multilingual advantages is still being hotly debated. Following some initial euphoria, the field is currently characterized by a wave of sobering criticism, as key findings fail to be replicated. Here we offer a summary of the current controversy, followed by a discussion of new evidence drawn from a questionnaire study of 1,454 students and 341 instructors at the University of Hamburg. This study measures self-assessed proficiencies in English among subjects who regularly use English as a lingua franca in the context of tertiary education. We compare self-assessed English proficiencies between monolingually and multilingually raised ELF users in five CEFR domains. The results attest slightly higher scores for multilingually raised ELF users, of statistical significance in some domains, which we interpret in terms of a multilingual advantage. However, we wish to be cautious about generalizing these findings, as they need to be substantiated by tests that objectively measure proficiencies.

This paper explores multilingual language contact in seemingly unrelated settings: translation and English as a lingua franca, also touching on learner language. By delving into similar processes in these settings at three levels – the macro level of a language as a whole, the intermediate level of social interaction and the micro level of cognition – it argues that translation and ELF are sites of multilingual contact resulting in a degree of hybridization in the languages involved, and are thereby important drivers of language change. It is suggested that macro-level similarities in translation and ELF, such as the relative over-representation of high-frequency items and structures and untypical multiword combinations, ensue from interactional and cognitive processes where one fundamental mechanism is priming. Translations engage in cross-linguistic textual priming, while users of ELF interact with other ‘similects’ in complex second-order language contact. Both can contribute crucially to understanding processes of change and contact-induced variation.

In this chapter, I argue that the study of English as a lingua franca (ELF) can be fruitfully framed as the study of sociolinguistic change. In adopting a sociolinguistic change perspective, researchers who take an interest in ELF and change are invited to move beyond a focus on language change and to pursue a more comprehensive and holistic interest in the processes of social and linguistic change that arise from – and give rise to – the contemporary widespread use of English as a lingua franca. I illustrate the argument by providing examples from research into the internationalization of Danish universities since the late 1990s, showing how the introduction of ELF as a language of teaching and learning involves change in multiple dimensions, including language ideology, discursive practices and social norms.

This chapter outlines the various English teacher education policies and the corresponding measures introduced by the South Korean government to emphasize the importance of English to its national competitiveness. It points out that, despite these policies and measures, English teaching in schools has not significantly improved. It observes that in contrast to official rhetoric ostensibly supporting varieties of English, even teachers who speak fluent English set native-speaker English, especially American English, as the norm and feel burdened about teaching in English as they feel they lack English proficiency. In addition, in-service English teachers continue to raise the question of whether Communicative Language Teaching pedagogy developed in the ESL environment is appropriate for South Korea in which English is taught as a foreign language. Many teachers also experience reform fatigue due to frequent changes in policies for political purposes. The chapter concludes that there is an urgent need for research on English education policies and English teacher education policies that will create the environment where new English teachers can put theory into practice.

Chapter 3 discusses and contrasts Asian varieties of English with the use of English as a lingua franca in Asia. Examples from selected varieties of Asian Englishes are presented. These examples will show how Asian varieties of English are typically code-mixed varieties as speakers use their shared linguistic resources as markers of identity. It must be underlined that the great majority of users of Asian varieties of English have learned English as an additional language and are speakers of other languages. Their variety of English will include linguistic features and items from their speakers’ other languages. These Asian varieties of English are then compared and contrasted with the use of English as a lingua franca in Asia, illustrating, for example, how code-mixing from other languages is reduced, as the primary function of the use of a lingua franca is communication across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

The evolution of World Englishes has widely affected and transformed the lives of many people in many countries; it is thus a process of great cultural and political significance. This chapter surveys some social debates and issues which have arisen in this context and attitudes towards new varieties of English, outlining sociocultural contexts and considerations affecting the emergence and acquisition of World Englishes. Topics include the association of English with "elitism", accessible mainly through higher education and thus a class divider, as opposed to its "grassroots growth"; the claim that it is a "killer language" reducing global linguistic diversity; norm orientations (towards a supposed "international English", "English as a Lingua Franca", or endonormative models); the role of new dialects of expressing local identities; the problematic status of the notion of a "native speaker"; the spread of mixed language forms; and pedagogical consequences resulting from all these issues.

This chapter explores ideas about ‘(non-)native’ speakers of English, with particular reference to the professional context of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). The use of ‘(non-)native’ speaker to describe a person’s use of English remains common in a variety of domains, despite much scholarly and professional argument against the term. Given that learners and teachers comprise the educational context of this chapter, I have chosen to focus on the native and non-native speakers themselves, rather than on their (so-called) native and non-native uses of English. In doing so, I hope not to fall into the trap of thinking of people as permanent members of closed categories, but, on the contrary, show how we might raise awareness of the (potentially negative) effects of such thinking on speakers of English, in the TESOL profession.

Given the widespread use of English, this chapter explores two critical issues: (1) what varieties and standards of English are taught and tested in English as second/foreign language (L2) learning contexts and (2) what role is assigned to communication strategies and plurilingual competences in learning, teaching, and assessing English, particularly in lingua franca contexts.

This chapter aims to engage with wider discussions in this volume regarding ontologies of English and how language can be productively conceptualized by English teachers, learners/users, and other stakeholders. As indicated by the title, the work is intended to make a specific contribution towards uncovering complexity in ontologies of language that do not map cleanly onto dichotomies such as ‘monolithic versus plurilithic’ (Hall, 2013), ‘difference versus deficit’, or ‘standards-based versus intelligibility-based’. As also indicated, these ontological discussions are framed by a study carried out in a lingua franca context of pedagogy and usage, where (1) Japanese voluntary workers use English as a Lingua Franca to communicate with local interlocutors in diverse global locations and (2) an English language course is taken by these volunteers prior to their departure from Japan that is specifically designed to facilitate that communication. Further details on this context are provided in the following section before the focus returns to conceptions of English.

Ontological inquiry into the nature of language has been somewhat marginal since the “linguistic turn” in philosophy (cf. Rorty, 1967), i.e. for about seventy-five years. Although the shift of emphasis from the more concrete objects of investigation to their formal properties has since been reversed, this change in zeitgeist did not give rise to a new wave of ontological rethinking. That was perhaps mainly due to the impact of social constructionism, which was just as sceptical of ontology as logical positivism, albeit from a different perspective: Rather than looking for ‘hard’ properties of true reality in formal structure, social constructionists basically aimed at deconstructing all descriptions that claimed to represent true reality. This book is a welcome sign that things may be changing.

Research into global uses of English, and particularly ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), has highlighted the diversity and fluidity of communicative practices in intercultural and transcultural communication through English. Successful intercultural/transcultural communication involves the ability to make use of and negotiate multilingual/plurilingual linguistic resources, a variety of communicative practices and strategies, and movement between global, national, local, and emergent frames of reference. This is a very different conception of competence to that typically utilised in English language teaching (ELT) with its pre-determined ‘code’ consisting of a restricted range of grammatical, lexical, and phonological forms and minimal concern with the sociocultural dimension of communication. The need for a reconceptualisation of language in applied linguistics and more recently ELT has begun to receive serious scholarly attention. However, this needs to be accompanied by a focus on the wider intercultural and transcultural communicative practices in which language is embedded and enmeshed. This entails recognition of the central place of intercultural competence and the awareness that is necessary to manage such complexity, variation, and fluidity in communication. As such, this chapter addresses Hall and Wicaksono’s (this volume) call to interrogate and be “explicit about what we, as applied linguists, think English is – our ontologies of English – and how these ontologies underpin our educational ideologies and professional practices”, with a particular focus on the intercultural and transcultural dimensions to both English use and education policy and practice.

The origin of the term ‘lingua franca’ is unclear. According to Ostler (2010, p. 7), lingua franca “seems to be a retranslation of some Eastern-Mediterranean term for ‘language of the Franks’”. Ostler also notes (2010, p. 4) the “original ‘Lingua Franca’ was once a particular language … the common contact language of the Eastern-Mediterranean in the first half of the second millennium, the pidgin Italian in which Greeks and Turks could talk to Frenchmen and Italians”. He defines a lingua franca as a “contact language used for communication among people who do not share a mother tongue” (2010, p. 36). Seidlhofer points out that the term has Latin roots meaning something like ‘free language’. “It is thus not fanciful to think of ‘Lingua Franca’ as ‘free language’ … a means of intercultural communication not particular to countries and ethnicities, a linguistic resource that is not contained in, or constrained by traditional (and notoriously tendentious) ideas of what constitutes a ‘language’” (2011, p. 81).