World Englishes

This lecture encourages sound studies students to examine how dissonance functions when sound is paired with moving image.

This lecture was originally given in an ESL course titled "Popular Music and English Language Learning" at Temple University Japan Campus in Fall 2014. The students in this class were from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, and Libya, and they were all studying in Tokyo in hopes of entering Temple University Japan's undergraduate program after they gained enough skill to receive a 427 on the TOEFL PBT test. Some of the learning goals of this course were: to explain the historical, cultural, and social context of an individual work in the arts, to use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others, and to integrate multimedia and visual displays during conversations to add interest, clarify information, and strengthen claims.

This lecture took my class approximately 4.5 hours to complete with some additional work outside of class.

This paper is a study of teaching British literature to multilingual/Generation 1.5 students in the United States using linguistic and ESL concepts. By applying linguistic ideas to reading and writing about the literature and culture of England, undergraduates were better able to examine and write about the language and culture of the United States. Students learned about ESL theories, World Englishes, including variations in transgressive language, and the rhetorical force of such language. Students thus gained a greater understanding of the ways sociolinguistic concepts such as register impact academic writing.

The history of pronunciation in English language teaching is a study in extremes. Some approaches ... elevated pronunciation to a pinnacle of importance, while other approaches ... mostly ignored pronunciation. It seems clear that pronunciation deserves neither fate, either to be unfairly elevated to the central skill in language learning or banished to irrelevance.

The term ‘New Englishes’ attempts to cover the large number of varieties of English, far from uniform among themselves in their features and use and different from the historically and culturally established British and American standards. Over the past years, these New Englishes have been more acknowledged in the foreign language class. Linguists have called attention to the importance of increasing the learner’s linguistic awareness by covering topics of “linguistic variation and varieties of many types: national, regional, social, functional, international” (Gnutzmann 167). This paper aims at discussing the advantages and possibilities of teaching native and non-native English varieties in the foreign language class. It presents some data included in a Foreign Language and Translation course which attempted to integrate linguistics and translation by analysing the features of African American Vernacular English, Singapore English, Indian English and Australian English in terms of their phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic levels.

International university education is now a significant and growing part of tertiary education worldwide. In the Asia Pacific region, internationalization is viewed as a lifeline for universities to secure their long-term survival in an increasingly competitive education market. The use of English as a global and academic lingua franca is connected to both international student interaction and institutional outreach.

This thesis reports the findings of a large-scale research project investigating attitudes towards the English language of university students from Japan, Korea and China studying at an international university in Japan. The context for this study is Japan’s most internationalized university, an institution in which greater interest has been engendered by recent governmental and sector efforts to increase the internationalization of all Japanese universities. Previous research has focused on a single population’s attitudes about the study of the English language, utility value of the language, or preferred English variety. My study compares students’ views about these issues with the attitudes of their counterparts studying at non-international, domestic universities in their home countries (China, Korea). More than 800 students from six universities in three countries participated in this research into linguistic attitudes, a study supported qualitatively by focus group-style interviews.

This research found that the internationalization of tertiary education in Japan has affected students’ attitudes towards English language use. At the same time, despite exposure to different varieties of English on a campus where almost half of the students come from overseas, the students from the international university continued to view American English and British English as their preferred performance targets. Chinese and Korean students studying abroad at the international university acknowledged Asian English varieties, but also reported these varieties as causing problems. Internationalized study environments do not appear to change the status of well-established standard varieties as preferred performance models.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of English as an International Language (EIL) and the effects of teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in South Korea within the current landscape of globalization. The paper begins by discussing the relationship of language in terms of the development and maintenance of society and culture before looking at the “worldliness” of English by exploring its neutral, imperialist and democratic functionalities. The author then examines the specific role of EIL and EFL in the context of South Korea before discussing the broader capitalist implications of EIL and EFL education. The paper concludes by acknowledging that though EIL is a site of struggle and a means of sustaining certain economic inequalities, it is also the tool with which to resist such inequalities by providing a common language to create a counter-discourse of opposition.

In this collection of new and previously published work – focusing largely on English – Alan Davies explores what it means to be a native speaker, and how highly proficient non-native speakers (native users) are distinguishable from them. He argues that the former are defined in a maddening kind of circularity that makes the validity of the term questionable.

This research is one of a series of articles on the topic of the etymological components of the basic vocabulary of Urdu language and their density within the language. The Sanskrit, Prakrit Persian and Arabic elements were previously analyzed. Urdu belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. It has its origins in Sanskrit then it developed into the Prakrits and later was influenced by Persian and Arabic due to historical events. During the 1400s a digraphia phenomenon occurred causing the split of Hindi and Urdu. With the British invasion of India, the English language element entered the equation through language contact. Here, we research the lexical elements of English and the historical background. The research, first one of its kind, is based the etymological analysis of one thousand word corpus of the basic vocabulary of Urdu, through which the precise percentage of English vocabulary in Urdu language will be obtained.

The typical intonation of yes/no questions in American English is usually thought to be high-rising. Accounts of yes/no questions also assume that the intonation of these questions is different from that of standard British English, which is thought to use a low-rising intonation. This article challenges this belief and reports on a study that shows that American speakers of English do not distinguish between the high-rising and low-rising intonation, and argues that the supposed difference in intonation between the varieties is not accurate for yes/no questions. Finally, the results indicate that intonation of yes/no questions should be an unimportant issue in English language teaching because intonation on these questions appears to play a minimal role in the success of interactions between speakers from different varieties of English.