Language is subject to a variety of pressures. Recent work has documented that many aspects of language structure have properties that appear to be shaped by biases for the efficient communication of semantic meaning. Other work has investigated the role of social pressures, whereby linguistic variants can acquire positive or negative evaluation…

We live in the age of globalization where diverse cultures and nations mix and mingle. A lot of us live in a multicultural society in which macro- and microethnoses coexist. Cultures enrich each other, collaborate…and sometimes clash. Misunderstandings happen when people speak the same language, but do not share the same cultural codes. Edward…

One of the consequences of the growing number of English-taught programmes offered by European universities is the top-down request that lecturers switch from their L1 to English, for teaching, while the administrative staff is required to communicate with international students. To help the academic staff cope with the change, some universities…

This article discusses why pedagogical discourse analysis (PDA) can be seen as the departure point to teach through discourse and how language teachers can efficaciously use it in order to bring discourse analysis into the language classroom. To make PDA feasible in language teaching, it requires to be coordinated with actual discourse-based…

Speaking difficulty encountered by the students in every level is one of the major issues in the teaching of EFL. Many researchers reported that the factors are ranged from linguistic domain to psychology. Many experts wrote textbooks and articles to discuss this issue in hoping that the teaching of English speaking in particular can achieve…

This study was designed to examine the differences between two world Englishes in an effort to add to the body of knowledge relative to world Englishes and cross-cultural communication. Specifically, select grammatical differences between a group of Filipino English language teachers and a Standard American English were examined. Differences…

This paper is meant to illuminate the possibility of how world Englishes within an international setting could become similar to the confusion encountered in the Bible record of the Tower of Babel. Presented here is the trend of world Englishes as a part of an English as an international language paradigm. The discussion then proceeds to address…

This study investigates the syntactic errors in speaking among an Arab L2 post-graduate student in an academic speaking context. Specifically, the objectives are to describe the syntax error patterns committed by the student while engaging in speaking and to explore the contributing factors that may affect the errors. To address these objectives,…

Whereas the speech act of refusal is universal across language, the politeness value and the types of linguistic forms used to perform it vary across language and culture. The majority of the comparative pragmatic research findings were derived from one single source of data (i.e., either production data or perception data). Few attempts have been…

The complexity of the problems concerning the teaching of English to Puerto Ricans in the United States has rarely been fully appreciated. The author discusses some factors involved: (1) Learners may be admitted to school at any age and placed in advanced grades with their age peers; (2) Some older learners may be functionally illiterate in their…

This study investigated the relationship between grammatical errors and communication breakdown by examining native speakers' ability to correct grammatical errors. The assumption was that communication breakdown exists to a certain degree if a native speaker cannot correct the error or if the correction distorts the information intended to be…