Globalisation is increasingly affecting universities worldwide. In African contexts, language policies exhibit an inheritance situation in which countries continue to implement policies which favour colonial languages in education. This paper investigates the Malawian higher education context and the ways in which staff engage with…

While there is a growing body of scholarship on the neoliberal content of global English textbooks, the ways in which these commercial materials come to life in teaching and learning practices are still under researched. Drawing on a critical ethnographic account of two English courses for unemployed students in a private language school in…

Language textbooks have been--and still are--the centre of attention of substantial research in the field of applied linguistics, language education and instruction, and language studies, among others. This paper synthesizes results and findings from the current Special Issue 'The language textbook: representation, interaction and learning''. In…

Unlike other groups of international students, Chinese speakers' use of English names while studying in English is an established norm. Relatively little discussion of the practice has taken place within recent literature, and less attention still has been paid to the minority of Chinese-speaking students who do not adopt English names. The choice…

Population displacements have occurred in tremendous amounts in the last few decades due to the collapse in civil order of the neighbouring countries of Turkey. This situation not only created a need for researchers to deal with the social, psychological and economical aspects of this forced mobility, but also with the acculturation process of the…

While research exists on the effectiveness of pedagogical methods in relation to the development of Chinese students' critical thinking (CT), there has been little research on Chinese students' experiences around CT in relation to their own contexts. This paper reports on the findings of a study that investigated the experiences of the use of CT…

L2 acquisition is a complicated process in which many parameters intertwine. Reported strategy use in L2 learning has been extensively researched in relation to factors that are likely to determine it, such as positive attitudes towards English as a foreign language (EFL) learning. In this paper, we investigated another potential determinant of…

A previous study (Ke, I. 2012. From EFL to English as an international and scientific language: analysing Taiwan's high-school English textbooks in the period 1952-2009. "Language, Culture and Curriculum," 25(2), 173-187) on the trend of English textbooks in Taiwanese high schools showed that the proportion of the lessons embedded in…

This contribution gives an account of the results of an action research in which a task-based plurilingual programme was implemented with postgraduate students of Foreign Languages and International Business. Using a mixed-methods approach, combining questionnaire, interview and observation data, we sought to explore the degree to which the…

This paper reports on an exploratory inquiry into the perceptions of a group of second language (L2) learners of English with regard to their identities in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication contexts. Drawing upon data gathered from two rounds of in-depth interviews with nine participants from a Hong Kong university, the study found…

With the recent rise of sociocultural theory in second-language acquisition, attempts have been made to understand L2 learners' uses of different resources in writing, based on their cultural, historical, and institutional contexts. In line with L2 writing research within the sociocultural paradigm, this study investigates the writing strategies…

Since the last few decades of the twentieth century, increased independence and autonomy of local schools through the implementation of school-based management (SBM) have become widespread in Western education. SBM is designed to operate within a more general framework of decentralisation of the educational authority. This research set out to…

This paper explores the influence of Korean ethnic churches on the maintenance of heritage language (HL) and culture among Korean-Canadian students. The ethnographic and qualitative study on which it is based involved participant observation over a 4-month period, group discussions, interviews, and a questionnaire. Participants were 15 immigrant…

This article is based on results from a baseline study for an intended intervention project in bilingual-intercultural education in the Municipality of San Miguel Ixtahuacan, in the Department of San Marcos, Guatemala. To a great extent the article deals with issues of bilingual education from the perspective of social justice. It analyses the…

Discusses the latest developments of an empirical project about the mental processes of students with both mono-cultural and bi-cultural socialization in foreign language literature courses. (Author/VWL)