Histories of colonization conjointly with the current economic global climate have enabled English to become a dominant global language. The desire for citizens to attain English language proficiency on a nation-wide level is a common pursuit in developing countries, including the island nations of the South Pacific where English competency is…

Judicial discourse can grant or deprive liberty to litigants. It is, therefore, important to ensure fair hearing during trials and even more as courtrooms have become multilingual settings. In the Court of First Instance of Bafoussam, French (one of the official languages of Cameroon) often come into contact with more than 250 national languages.…

This paper presents insights from two interview studies with the aim of shedding light on the learning potential of studying abroad in an area where English is used as a lingua franca. The majority of previous research on study abroad focuses on students' experiences of studying abroad in target-language regions, for example learners of English…

The notion of language proficiency in English Language Teaching (ELT), as an internationalized educational enterprise, has tended to be operationalized in terms of stable lexicogrammar and enduring normative patterns of social use. It will be argued that this 'established' stability has been challenged by the scholarship in several fields of…

The study presented here is the first empirical investigation of the patterns and predictors of the intergenerational transmission of French in Quebec. An online questionnaire was used to gather data from 274 parents from different mother tongue (L1) groups: L1 French, L1 English, L1 French and English, and L1 Other. The results show that L1…

Soon after Kachru (1992) promoted the notion of the World of English(es) through his 'inner-outer-expanding circle' principle, academic audiences started to recognize that the number of English nonnative speakers had noticeably surpassed that of native speakers. Such a phenomenon has encouraged English learners of diverse lingua-cultural…

This study examines the influence of pre-departure proficiency on English as a second language (L2) oral development after a semester studying abroad in two distinct learning contexts. The data analysed were collected from tertiary level students (N = 33) who undertook an ERASMUS exchange semester in a European country where English was either the…

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is a major international benchmarking resource used for curriculum development and assessment. The elaboration of the concept of multilingual mediation in the 2018 Companion Volume of the CEFR is a timely addition to the original publication in 2001. Amongst other things, it…

Africa is a potentially rich continent due to its considerably rich resources endowment. It is believed that if there is a synergy between these resources, that is if these resources are properly harnessed with a clear vision on the part of our leaders, there is the prospect of growth leading to the development of the continent. The basis of any…

A great deal has been written about what English as an International Language (EIL) actually is (e.g. Alsagoff et al., 2012; Matsuda, 2012; McKay and Brown, 2016; Sharifian, 2009), ranging from a view of EIL as the many varieties of English that are spoken today to the use of English by second language speakers of English. Thus, EIL is viewed both…

Recent research calls for a re-structuring of higher education (HE) beyond English medium orientations by acknowledging the plurilingual resources of students and lecturers. In the Netherlands there is a rapid rise in plurilingual lecturers. The central question is to what extent these lecturers make use of their plurilingual resources for…

This article explores the issues of pronunciation and comprehension in the English as a lingua franca (ELF) context of pilot--air traffic controller radiotelephony communication, and how these are handled in the proficiency rating scale globally used to assess pilots and air traffic controllers engaging in international flight and air traffic…

The purpose of the paper is to shed light on potential driving forces that guide principals' decisions on how to implement language policies in their schools in Kazan, Russia. Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan and home for the second biggest ethnic group in Russia, called Tatars, whose native language proficiency is gradually declining. After…

The linguistic interdependence hypothesis (Cummins, 1979, 2000) states that children's second-language (L2) proficiency is, to some extent, a function of their first-language (L1) competence. Previous studies have examined this hypothesis with focus on a unidirectional relation from L1 to L2. In the present study, we examined…

The linguistic interdependence hypothesis (Cummins, 1979, 2000) states that children's second-language (L2) proficiency is, to some extent, a function of their first-language (L1) competence. Previous studies have examined this hypothesis with focus on a unidirectional relation from L1 to L2. In the present study, we examined…