This paper uncovers L1 Chinese speakers' online intercultural communication where they deploy English as a lingua franca and other spatial repertoires to co-construct translanguaging practices with their interlocutors and present three-fold identities--translingual, L1 Chinese, and legitimate users of English, leading to the argument that…

This paper highlights a current phenomenon reported from preschools placed in multilingual areas in Sweden, namely that some preschoolers with mutually different language backgrounds sometimes use English as lingua franca instead of Swedish during play. The data stems from a study of language environments in Swedish preschools situated in both…

This study examines L2 speakers' accent attitudes in relation to their linguistic profile and current practices, recruiting 107 multilingual postgraduate students of 34 different nationalities enrolled in leading research universities in Japan. The participants completed a survey regarding their perceptions of different English varieties in…

Internationally operating professionals in China study business English to develop their language proficiency and transcultural communicative competence. While a variety of business English textbooks are on the market and are used in China, their conceptualizations of culture tend to be nation-based, static, and predictable -- views of culture…

In this chapter we analyzed lecturers' attitudes towards using English in European Higher Education settings. Twenty-eight university teachers were brought together from thirteen universities across six European countries for an online training for teachers in English Medium Instruction (EMI) settings. The lecturers' written exchanges about…

This cross-sectional study attempts to investigate the impacts of linguistic landscape (LL) tasks on EFL teacher candidates' understanding of English in local and global contexts. To this end, three cohorts of student teachers carried out LL fieldwork, uploaded images of English signage to an LL application, Lingscape, and submitted a mini…

Linguistic landscaping (LL) is an emerging field of Sociolinguistics exploring the language in its textual form in public sphere. This paper investigates the visibility and prominence of languages in the public space of Patna, the capital city of Bihar, India. A total of 10 city neighborhoods are chosen for the study. The corpus of the study is…

Background: Pakistan inherits a multilingual heritage. Along with Urdu, 70 different languages are spoken. The 1973 Constitution officially recognizes Urdu as Pakistan's only national language. Purpose: Until today, the adoption and promotion of Urdu as a medium of educational instruction has remained a point of controversy. Existing research…

Following WWII, the English language became the global Lingua Franca, meaning that it is the primary language used to communicate between people who speak different languages. With the development of English as the Lingua Franca, Americans are generally less exposed to foreign languages than most other nationalities. Some researchers believe that…

Employing neoliberal governmentality as a conceptual frame, this paper presents evidence from the mushrooming English language academies from Pakistan to demonstrate that how neoliberal rationality as a normative order of reason governs the minds of learners and teachers without governing. Drawing on the analysis of an open-ended interview…

Despite the existence of many studies on the identity of language learners in the offline settings, few focus on how English language learners in the expanding circle construct their identity through their use of English and their choices over their first language capital as they enjoy variations of multilinguacultural exposes in the digital…

The status of English as a medium of instruction in higher education in Bangladesh has always been a contentious issue since public universities move back and forth for continuing with English as a medium of instruction or not. On the other hand, the introduction of private universities in Bangladesh complicated the issue even more. The medium of…

Pakistan, one of the eight countries comprising South Asia, has more than 212.2 million people, making it the world's fifth most populous country after China, India, USA, and Indonesia. It has also the world's second-largest Muslim population. Eberhard et al. (Ethnologue: languages of the world, SIL International, 2020) report 77 languages used by…

The urgency for education to participate in the plan of action of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SD) poses challenges to language education in university language centers. This paper discusses the potential of Higher Education (HE) language center courses to provide students with the knowledge and skills of inclusive, respectful,…

Many English-medium instruction (EMI) classrooms in non-Anglophone countries adopt a multilingual stance, using English alongside the host country's local language(s). However, the perceptions of such multilingual practices held by students remain under-researched. Given many Asian countries' current drives to internationalize and diversify their…