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.

While there is a multitude of studies on the influence English has exerted on German, the converse language contact scenario has been comparatively neglected. German borrowings which have recently been assumed into English have as yet received little attention in current research. The present paper intends to shed light on the impact of German on the English vocabulary in the 20th century. The various German words and meanings taken over into English in the last few decades will be divided into manifold subject areas in order to give a rounded picture of the different domains and spheres of life enriched by German in the recent past.

As the English language spreads and functions as an international language, scholars have been investigating some of the ideological issues behind the function and use of English in various contexts, and have pondered the future status of this global language. From early research of World Englishes (WE) the legitimacy of post-colonial Englishes, or ‘New Englishes’, as they have been termed, has emerged in scholars’ discussions (Platt, Weber & Ho, 1984; Kachru, 1985, 1992). Some have argued that the research on WE envisages the varieties of English in the outer circle contexts, such as the varieties of English spoken in Singapore, Nigeria, and India, and that people have used those varieties of English to exhibit their own identities (Kachru, 1992; Kachru & Nelson, 2006). Therefore, WE has created ‘new paradigms and perspectives for linguistic and pedagogical research and for understanding the linguistic creativity in multilingual situations across cultures’ (Kachru, 1985: 30).

Arabic has a long history of contact with languages outside the Middle East (Lapidus, 2015; Beg, 1979). In Asia, the spread of Arabic began with the trade network that connected the Middle East with South Asia, South-East, East Asia and East Africa from the fifth century. It intensified with the rise of Islam from the seventh century onwards (Morgan & Reid, 2010; Azirah & Leitner, 2016). In this paper we investigate the impact of Arabic on today's English in the context of Asian Englishes. More specifically we ask if the contact of Arabic with English in Asia has led to the creation of an Arabic-Islamic layer of English in countries that have a majority or a significant minority of Muslims. Would such a layer add a new dimension to the texture of English and be integrative across national Englishes? Or would it be divisive inside individual countries? In order to explore such issues we created a corpus of Arabic loanwords in Asian Englishes. Such a database will contribute to a better coverage of the impact of Arabic in dictionaries and to the study of English as a (multiple) national, regional and global language.

In Vietnam, the history of the English language and English education has a direct bearing on politics, economy and social affairs (Wright, 2002), and is particularly tied up with the reform policy known as Doi Moi, which was adopted by the sixth National Congress of the Communist Party in 1986. Doi Moi has brought about huge achievements in terms of gross domestic product growth and foreign direct investment attraction (Thanh & Duong, 2009). These achievements have had a profound impact on the development of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Vietnam.

English is used by more than one and a half billion people as a first, second or foreign language for communication purposes (Strevens, 1992). In this context, the purpose of teaching English has shifted from mastery of the grammatical rules to the ability to use the target language for successful communication. Consequently, the communication aspect of teaching and learning English has become the key issue in the domain of second language acquisition (Yashima, 2002: 54). Therefore, the issue of whether the learners will communicate in English when they have the chance to do so and to what extent they are willing to communicate gain importance. These questions have led to the emergence of an important construct in the field of L2 instruction, i.e. willingness to communicate (hereafter, WTC), which is defined as a learner's ‘readiness to enter into discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using a L2’ (MacIntyre et al., 1998: 547). MacIntyre and his associates even proposed that WTC in L2 should be conceptualized as ‘the primary goal’ of language instruction (MacIntyre et al., 1998: 545). This paper explores the important concept of WTC by looking into Pakistani students' WTC in Canada.

Recent work in sociolinguistics has illustrated that language features can become explicitly linked with numerous and multiple social values for certain speakers1. These language features can include pronunciations, words, or phrases, and the kind of associated social values can include social class or geographical region, notions of aesthetics or correctness, or more abstract concepts like ‘authenticity’ or ‘friendliness’. When speaker awareness leads to the linking of language features with social values in this way, the features may have undergone enregisterment, defined by Agha (2003: 231) as ‘processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms’. I will focus here on the explicit association of a geographical location, Yorkshire2, with a distinct set of language features.

With a current figure reaching more than 26 million (Kementrian, 2015), Indonesia is second after China in terms of the number of children learning English as a foreign language in elementary schools. This paper examines the development of elementary English education in Indonesia, and shows that it has been undergoing a great transformation in recent years. The paper begins by providing an overview of policy developments relating to elementary English education in the country. It then discusses current practices in elementary English education in relevant areas, focusing in particular on classroom size and length of instruction, the role and status of teachers, and pedagogical concerns. Finally, the paper analyzes the prospects for elementary English education in the foreseeable future.