Elatiana Razafimandimbimanana explains how, during her childhood, from Canada, Madagascar and Kenya to France, she experienced multilingualism, which in turn led her to co-construct pluri-artistic practices with students from New Caledonia. Deeply affected by being "impure" in her own linguistic practices, she defines an ideology of purity spread around the world and how she turns to art to empower her plurilingual students.

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.

While the historical emergence and present-day settings of English in Southeast Asia are highly varied, it is possible, nevertheless, to identify a number of key themes that can provide important insights into the changing status and properties of English in this region. In this regard, the chapter begins by selectively focusing on the history of English in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, in order to highlight how (post)colonization influences the ways in which English inserts itself into different countries. The chapter then draws attention to issues that are fundamental to understanding the contemporary development of English, such as neoliberalism, migration, and commodification. Retaining the earlier connection with the focus on (post)colonization, the chapter closes by considering possible strategies of decolonization as different Southeast Asian countries attempt to evolve beyond the constraints of exonormativity and linguistic insecurity.