IBRAHIM K GYASI considers that ‘English in Ghana is very ill’.

Perhaps there is no better illustration of Bourdieu's view that language can be converted to political or economic power (1991) than the success of the New Oriental School, which started as an English teaching organization, with the motto ‘Language is power’, mainly to prepare Chinese students for the TOFEL and the GRE tests. They have been so successful that they have now expanded into a full-scale educational institution, with English as its key component. Also, many people in China have prospered through English, including the world-famous teacher Li Yang, who achieved phenomenal success with his ‘Crazy English’ method, whose approach pushes a language-as-power message. In addition, the prosperity of the publishing houses selling English materials, the huge number of the teachers, and the enormous English-learning population in China all seem to contribute to the belief that English can enrich anyone who can find a way to capitalize on the language. However, despite the booming success of various English training agencies, it is ironic that English departments at Chinese universities now face an unprecedented crisis for survival. One major reason for this is that the recent craze for English in China has been accompanied by a parallel and steep decline of interest in the study of English as a ‘major’ at university level. In this article, I will address the problems that English departments in universities have in their response to the practical turn in English studies, with reference to the teaching of writing to English majors in particular.

In Japan, the ability to speak and understand English is widely regarded as essential for communication in a ‘globalized’ world. At the same time, however, many Japanese are reluctant to communicate in English because they perceive themselves (and are often perceived by others) to be poor speakers of English, despite the fact that they will have studied English for at least six years in junior and senior high school. In response to this, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has recently revised the national syllabus for English teaching. The revised syllabus places more emphasis on developing oral communication skills, and proposes a much greater use of communicative language teaching (CLT) methodology in order to bring this about. This paper describes the present situation of CLT in Japan based on questionnaire data obtained from 48 Japanese university students, and proposes that a more effective and practical approach to CLT and English teaching more generally may be obtained by adopting a ‘World Englishes’ point of view.

The emergence of Student Pidgin in Ghana is estimated to have started fairly recently: between 1965 and the early 1970s (Huber, 1999; Dako, 2002). Male students in high prestige senior secondary schools and universities have been credited with leading in the development of Student Pidgin. The use of Student Pidgin has since been spreading among some girls and is currently found in an increasing number of contexts, including the home. The fact that students use Student Pidgin seems unexpected, considering the fact that they are competent speakers of Standard English.2 In this context, the question to consider is what underlies this behavior? This has been the subject of recurrent debate. Educational authorities typically feel that Student Pidgin reflects the fact that the standard of English in Ghanaian senior secondary schools and universities has fallen. An example of this comes from a speech given by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere, on 28 October 2002:

An investigation into the current status of English teaching and learning in Macedonia. The focus of this study will be on the spread of English there, within the domain of foreign language education, and it is guided by the following research questions:

1. What is the most dominant foreign language taught and learned in R. Macedonia?

2. How is English teaching implemented in the Macedonian educational system?

3. What are some of the current resources for the teaching and learning of English?

In the article, I discuss the implementation of English in the public and private schools and universities, alongside instruction in such other languages as French, German, and Russian.

“Dictionary of Modern English Usage, short forms Modern English Usage, MEU. The best-known usage manual of the 20C, compiled by H. W. Fowler and published by Oxford University Press in 1926 […]. This work in particular has made the name Fowler as well known among those interested in usage and the language as Johnson and Webster, a point of reference for both those who venerate and those who regret what he has had to say.” (Burchfield, 1992a: 311)

If the quotation above is anything to go by, it tells us two things, namely that Fowler's Modern English Usage [MEU] is regarded as the best-known usage manual of the 20th century and that opinions about Fowler are highly controversial. Works like the Fowler Brothers' (1906) The King's English [KE] and Henry W. Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) [MEU-1] can be regarded as role models for usage handbooks in Britain. The immense success and popularity, especially of the latter work, with new editions in 1965 (revised by Sir Ernest Gowers) [MEU-2] and in 1996 (further revised by Robert Burchfield) [MEU-3], calls for an explanation. In order to reveal the relationship between authority and success, the present article places MEU and its predecessor KE in their socio-historical contexts and then gives a detailed account of the success story of MEU. It analyses the book's reception in its three editions and its treatment in English-language histories and introductory textbooks to the English language.

Mixed local feelings about the use of local words in the English of Ghana. A Ghanaianism is a vocabulary item peculiar to Ghana. It may be an English item that has undergone a local semantic shift, an item of local origin used consistently in English, or a hybrid of the two. In addition, the term Ghanaian English as used here refers, not to a variety whose features have been more or less fully recognised and described, but broadly to the English used by Ghanaians who have had at least some formal education and are able to use English in some registers. Drawing on a collection of Ghanaianisms compiled over the last 10 years, this paper looks first at some of the prevailing problems in attempting to define the transference phenomena widely identified as code-switching (CS) on the one hand and lexical borrowing (LB) on the other, then at how Ghanaians deal with the phenomenon of borrowing into English at the text level.

Foreign words which have been borrowed into the Japanese language, especially in the last few centuries, are commonly labelled as 外来語, gairaigo, meaning words (語, go) coming in (来, rai) from outside (外, gai). This umbrella term encompasses lexical items from numerous foreign languages, including Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, German, and English. As they undergo the borrowing process into the Japanese linguistic system, the words are likely to undergo modification, particularly in terms of their phonology, orthography, semantics, and syntax. The overwhelming majority of gairaigo have their roots in the English language; estimates put their number at around 10% of the Japanese lexicon (Daulton, 2008; Stanlaw, 2004). They include borrowings in the daily Japanese vocabulary (ニュース, nyūsu, news); ones used primarily in specialist fields, (コーパス, kōpasu, corpus), and others recorded in dictionaries but that play very little part in actual language usage (インディビデュアル, indibijyuaru, individual).

How a language once considered base and worthless now seems set to dominate the new Europe

LITTLE BRITAIN is a television comedy show in the UK. Recurring characters appear in its episodes enacting situations that can be said to satirize British society. It was first aired by the BBC in February 2003. Little Britain has quickly amassed a loyal following and has grown significantly in popularity. It has won a number of prestigious comedy awards including ‘Best Comedy Performance’ and ‘Comedy Programme or Series Award’ at the BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards, 2005). The humour in Little Britain has therefore been successful. Moreover, it is not based purely on visual comedy, being originally launched on BBC Radio 4 then transferred to television. Its humour originates in the language used. Schema theory, a useful tool for analysing much situational comedy, can shed light on the construction and interpretation of humour in Little Britain

The English language is a global lingua franca that has itself been experiencing rapid change. This change can be attributed mainly to easy access to the internet worldwide and the popular use of social media. Frequent and common online communication amongst multilingual speakers mediated in English has naturally generated a diverse semiotic repertoire. As a result, new words are constantly and rapidly evolving on online platforms across language boundaries where there is little linguistic authority in place. The forms of many new words in English are becoming more hybridised and complex than ever before and the origins of these words are often difficult to trace because of their simultaneous and multitrajectory pathways.

Attitudes toward the global spread of English have been one of the major issues in research on the development of world Englishes. Because language attitudes construct an invisible language policy that influences the use of English in a local speech community (Curdt–Christiansen, 2009), many studies addressing the spread of English into non-English contexts have focused on the attitudes of diverse English users toward their local variety and other varieties of English (Ahn, 2014; He & Li, 2009; Wang & Gao, 2015). However, among the core components of language attitudes, that is, the cognitive component (i.e., belief system), affective component (i.e., attitudinal system), and behavioural component (i.e., behavioural intention), little research attention has been paid to the behavioural component other than by Ahn (2014), even though non-native speakers’ actual use of their local English is the process by which English spreads into non-English-speaking communities. Thus it is necessary to explore the factors influencing the speakers’ behaviours while using the local variety of English. In addition, previous research has not identified the mechanism by which the speakers’ beliefs and attitudes have influence their actual behavioural intentions in relation to their attitudes toward their own English. For example, Ahn (2014) reported that whereas Korean English teachers expressed positive attitudes toward Korean English, they were hesitant in their behavioural intentions to use it as a teaching model. However, this study did not deeply address associations among beliefs, attitudes, and actual behaviours in relation to the use of Korean English. In response to this gap, the present study provides an integrated framework for investigating the spread of English into local speech communities by modelling diverse factors of individual speakers’ decision-making processes in adopting the local variety of English.

Do both the public and the scholarly uses of the phrases ‘native language’ and ‘native speaker’ need to be revised or even superseded?

Can we learn from what happened to Latin, in terms of its native speakers and foreign users? Comparisons are often made between the role of Latin during and after the Roman Empire and the role of English in the present. These can often be illuminating, particularly for the student of the sociolinguistics of the Late Latin-speaking world, where a generous application of the uniformitarian principle allows us to avoid now some of the misunderstandings that were common in the past: for example, the realization that linguistic change is inevitable and in itself neither good nor bad, and that language-internal variation is not pathological, and need not necessarily in itself lead to fragmentation, has been salutary. As a result, the modern view of the development of Latin into Romance, and of Romance into the separate Romance languages, is almost certainly more plausible now than it used to be. We have a more nuanced account to present, even though there is a great deal we do not and perhaps cannot know, including in particular an inability to be sure about the dating of developments which we can be sure occurred at some point.

An account from Jordan of an ‘elitist’ phenomenon that is spreading elsewhere in Asia.

This study explores the reasons and conditions which have recently led a substantial number of families to hire private tutors of English for their sons and/or daughters studying science and technology through English in Jordanian state universities.

ACCORDING to Schmied (1991a:52), ‘there is some evidence that language learners in general use simplification strategies at an early stage and try to reproduce memorized phrases from the target language later, irrespective of the linguistic and pragmatic context.’ The English prepositional system is well known for its complexity and language learners might well be inclined to simplify in order to reduce such complexities. Indeed, there is evidence from the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-EA) of such a process of simplification in the use of prepositions in the English of Kenya. As a result, some prepositions might well disappear from use in this second-language variety of English.

Non-native users of English now outnumber the home-grown variety. How has this come about and what are its possible consequences? Why are millions of people now learning English as their ‘other tongue’? And what does it mean in the Eighties to be a foreign user of the English language?

A consideration of the prospects and potential of corpus-and-concordance lexicography (third article of three)

A report on the distinctive ‘dialect’ of the British Royal family