With the global spread of English, research in World Englishes (WE) has burgeoned in the past two decades. Its concepts have been taken up by researchers in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) to question ‘native-speakerism’ (Holliday, 2005, 2006) in English instruction. However, the implications of this theoretical discussion have so far yet to be realized in EFL classrooms, where teachers and learners alike still largely submit to native-speaker norms. This study therefore aims to examine how discussions of power, politics, and the spread of Englishes might influence students’ perceptions of English and their experiences of learning and using English. The analysis focuses on papers written by students enrolled in a semester-long WE course, and demonstrates the value of bringing WE into English curriculums to help students become critical learners and confident users of English today.

One of the recent trends in Korean English Language Teaching (ELT) is that Korean parents are sending their children to countries in which English is a second language (ESL). Among these countries, the Philippines is the most preferred country due to its low tuition costs, low cost of living, and a population of well-educated ESL teachers. Every year, approximately 30,000 Korean students study in universities, elementary and secondary schools, and language academies in the Philippines. 10% of this student population consists of student visa holders and 90% are Special Study Permit (SSP) holders. SSPs are issued to international students studying non-degree special courses for a period not exceeding one year, and 90% of Korean students are presumed to enroll on short-term intensive English programs. The exodus of Koreans to the Philippines to learn English is being led by private language academies, which are founded and run by Koreans, solely targeting Korean students. In 2011, the number of such private language academies was estimated to be 280 (Kim, 2011). Furthermore, it was reported that Korean students were spending over 425 million US dollars annually in the Philippines (KEDI, 2012).

Following his article ‘Global English invades Poland’ (ET50, Apr 97, Vol 13.2), the author explores the comparable impact of English on advertising in a second Eastern European nation.

Global English continues its unchecked spread, not only as the second language of choice for more people than any other, but also as an infiltrator whose words creep into the fabric of other languages through such avenues as film, television, popular music, the World Wide Web, advertising and youth culture.

An analysis of the cultural differences in rhetorical styles across the many varieties of English worldwide, particularly as expressed through writing

The utterance It's raining (of great relevance to the Irish!) can have a variety of different meanings according to who says it, to whom one is talking, and where it is said, amongst other things. The fact that language in use (whether in spoken or written mode) is obviously much more than the sum of its constituent parts – the individual sounds that make up words, the combinations of words that create sentences or utterances, the meaning that can be derived from different words and combinations thereof – has been what has driven pragmatics as a discipline, from its origins in the philosophy of language. Initially, what drove the research agenda was the potential of words to perform acts, or speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), and later, the complexities of the relationship between what is said and what is meant, the study of conversational implicatures (Grice, 1975) or ‘how people can understand one another beyond the literal words that are spoken’ (Eelen, 2001: 2). Pragmatics is now an inherently inter-disciplinary approach which has as its central orientation this study of, essentially, how speaker meaning is interpreted in context. Critical to interpretation is the concept of context itself, a complex and multi-layered notion involving cultural setting, speech situation and shared background assumptions (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992). Linguistic choices made by conversational participants can simultaneously encode situational indices of position and time, and interpersonal and cultural indices such as power, status, gender and age. Pragmatic research comprises a diverse range of research strands including how linguistic choices encode politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Watts, 2003), reference and deixis (Levinson, 2004) and the relationship between domain specific discourse, such as workplace or media discourse, and specialised pragmatic characteristics (O'Keeffe, Clancy and Adolphs, 2011). Thus, pragmatics provides, as Christie (2000: 29) maintains, ‘a theoretical framework that can account for the relationship between the cultural setting, the language user, the linguistic choices the user makes, and the factors that underlie those choices’.

A report on German university students learning and working in English.

WHEN A student produces a sentences like “I learn English since ten years” it can be assumed that they haven't had a very good English teacher, that they may not, in fact, be very good in English despite the amount of time they've spent learning the language. However, some of my students may indeed produce a sentence like this. In the English Department of the Freie Universität in Berlin, I teach students who have already studied English for at least ten years by the time they enter university. And in order to study in our department, the students must pass a proficiency-level entrance exam. These students then have English as one of their major subjects, so their knowledge of the language is fairly sophisticated and their contact with the language regular.

A follow-up of Jin-Kyu Park's contribution in ET97 on ‘English Fever’ in South Korea, by examining one of the consequences in Singapore – the destination for thousands of ‘study mothers’ who migrate from South Korea and China to help their young children acquire ‘linguistic capital’ by learning English.

This paper focuses on the existence of around 7000 Chinese (PRC) and 5000 Korean study mothers in 2007 in the Republic of Singapore (Toh, 2008). Known in their respective home countries as ‘wild goose mothers’ (kirogi omma) and ‘study mothers’ (pei du mama), these mothers leave their husbands behind while they accompany their children, some as young as 7 years, to a foreign country in the pursuit of linguistic gold. ‘We have good science and maths at home but we need the English to make it work.’

Heart-felt opposition to the status and spread of English in the world at large and most particularly in China today. It can hardly be denied that England has given the world maritime law, contract law, and an international language. However, whether by accident or design, the effect of these ‘gifts’ over time has, we would argue, been the destruction of many ethnic customs, social structures, and other aspects of culture. There appears to be little or no dissent among linguists regarding the proposition that language and culture are inseparable: what affects one affects the other.

This paper discusses how the global spread of English has affected – deleteriously – many languages and cultures, and currently engages too much time and too many resources in China today. Maritime and contract law may have been less problematic.

This paper explores popular perceptions of language, in particular linguistic prescription. It focuses not on formal acts of censorship such as might be carried out by a language academy, but on the attitudes and activities of ordinary people in, say, letters to newspapers or comments on radio. In these contexts, language users act as self-appointed censors and take it upon themselves to condemn those words and constructions that they feel do not measure up to the standards they perceive should hold sway.

People's concerns about language and the kind of linguistic censorship and puristic activities that accompany them belong to our tabooing behaviour generally. Prescriptive practices are part of the human struggle to control unruly nature – in this case, to define language and to force the reality of ‘the boundless chaos of a living speech’ (as Samuel Johnson put it in his Preface) into neat classificatory systems. As with tabooing practices generally, linguistic purists see a very clear distinction between what is clean and what is dirty – in this case, what is desirable and undesirable in a language. Linguists who challenge these prescriptions are challenging their ‘cherished classifications’. Small wonder there is often such a schism between linguistics and the wider community.

Indonesia is the second most linguistically diverse nation in the world. It has established its reputation as one of the largest markets of English language education. This paper examines the context of multilingualism in Indonesia in relation to the increasingly dominant role of English from my viewpoint as a researcher. I begin the paper by outlining how Indonesia is currently adapting to the role of English as a global language. I then discuss the position of English within the linguistic ecology of the country, highlighting how its promotion in the educational system adversely affects the maintenance of the indigenous and heritage languages. Finally, I point to the need for deliberate action in education that promotes multilingualism. I argue for a redirection in the Indonesian educational system towards multilingual education in order to ensure the preservation of the indigenous and heritage languages while adopting English as a Lingua Franca.

China's rapid development and growing engagement with the rest of the world have prompted much discussion and debate about the Chinese language, especially its prospects for becoming a global language. A report in China Daily (2004), for example, suggests that:

In this paper we will provide a preliminary overview of the Chinese diaspora in South Africa, with particular focus on non-metropolitan, rural contexts.

The migrations of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced a complex array of Chinese communities around the world. While we know a fair amount about the Chinese diasporas in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and also diasporic communities within Asia, Africa's Chinese community remains a vastly understudied aspect of this larger Chinese diaspora (Ma & Cartier, 2003). Yet there have been long-standing ties between Africa and China, going back to the fifteenth century, and presently China is one of Africa's biggest trade partners and investors (Rotberg, 2008).

Given the unprecedented spread of English, native English speakers (NESs) have been estimated to number 508 million by 2050 (Graddol, 1997: 27), while a bold estimation of speakers of English is 2 billion by 2050 (Crystal, 2008: 4–5). The international demographic profile of English presents a scenario whereby the development of English depends on how this language is used by non-native English speakers (NNESs), who are obviously in the majority for English use (e.g. Brumfit, 2001: 116; Crystal, 2008: 6; Graddol, 1997: 10; Mauranen, 2012; Seidlhofer, 2011: 7–8). While the importance of the number of English speakers globally is acknowledged, English in China remains a particularly interesting area for linguists. Not only English is widely learned in China, but also Chinese speakers of English are increasingly involved in intercultural encounters. In Graddol's (1997, 2006) discussion of the future of English, a comprehensive account is put forward about China, a country that has statistical significance for the development of English, given its large population of people who know English and its economic development. As Crystal (2008: 5) notes:

There have been growing concerns in recent years about the status of English in China, the most populous country that boasts the largest number of English speakers and learners (Bolton & Graddol, 2012; Wang, 2015). Such concerns are closely associated with the rising importance of the Chinese language worldwide, which seems to signal that ‘English is no longer so important’ (Wei & Feng, 2015: 59). The Chinese government has become much more active in promoting Chinese as an international language through the establishment of Confucius Institutes worldwide. The concerns about the status of English have also been related to the growing assertiveness of China's nationalism. In September 2013, a former spokesman of the Ministry of Education appealed to the public to emancipate children from English and save the Chinese language (Zheng, 2014). In October 2013, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education announced that the weighting of the English section in the Beijing version of Gaokao, the national university matriculation examination, would be reduced to 100 from 150, starting from 2016. In the meantime, the weighting of Chinese will be increased to 180 (Wei & Feng, 2015). In March 2016, the Beijing Education Examination Authority finalized the decision and set the weighting of Chinese and English in Gaokao to 150 in 2016 (Beijing Education Examination Authority, 2016). In addition to Gaokao, critics have openly challenged whether satisfactory College English Test (CET®) results should be used as a prerequisite for degree conferment in many Chinese universities (Xie, 2014).

In the present paper, I pursue a Construction Grammar (CxG) characterization of English modal auxiliaries (e.g., can-could, must, have (got) to, should, ought to, need to, will-would) that seeks to add to established lexical approaches. It is argued that Construction Grammar (e.g., Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Tomasello, 2003) can successfully account for underlying modality patterns, the understanding of which can lead to distinct gains for both linguistics and second language acquisition research. To that end, some of the tenets of CxG are invoked.

A survey of an ‘organic, evolving and dynamic’ hybrid between writing and speech and language and language

In social and linguistic terms, is England one nation or two?

Tanzania is, like most countries in East Africa, extremely culturally and linguistically diverse. Language counts range from 125 (Lewis, Simons & Fennig, 2016) to 164 living languages mentioned by the ‘Languages of Tanzania project’ (2009). Given this extreme multilingualism, institutional languages had to be chosen on a national level after independence. Kiswahili is the proclaimed national language and lingua franca of the East African region, also spoken in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, and is used as medium of instruction (MoI) in primary education. English, the former colonial language, is the de facto national working language and medium of instruction in secondary and higher education. However, English remains a minority language, spoken by approximately 5% of the population, most of whom are members of a higher social class (Tibategeza, 2010). This leads to English being an international rather than a second language as in other former British colonies (Schmied, 1990, 1991). Rubanza (2002: 45) goes so far as to argue that ‘the society Tanzanians work and live in does not demand the use of English’. That is why it has been claimed that English will never replace the African languages in Tanzania but remain an additional language in certain spheres (Schmied, 1991).

English has been increasingly used in Thailand as a lingua franca; that is, a means of communication between people who do not share a mother tongue nor speak English as a native language. Given the integration of ASEAN nations to form an economic region, the use of English as lingua franca (ELF) in Thailand and other member states of ASEAN will likely continue to increase at a significant rate. Kagnarith, Klein and Middlecamp (2012) observe that the increasing use of English as an inter-regional language of communication probably results from two causes. First, the use of English as ASEAN's working lingua franca has already been in effect. Second, the promotion of English as an international business language is one objective of the plan for the regional integration of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). In fact, the campaign to promote English as an official lingua franca in ASEAN is based on Article 34 of The ASEAN Charter ratified in February 2009: ‘The working language of ASEAN shall be English’.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is ‘a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language’ (Coyle, Hood & Marsh, 2010: 1). It represents a model of bilingual education which, broadly speaking, involves some use of two (or more) languages of instruction in connection with teaching courses other than language per se.