This article presents an overview of the perceived importance and accelerated spread of English language education, both formal and informal, in three East Asian countries (i.e. China, Japan and South Korea) against the backdrop of globalisation and emergent ideological, sociocultural and educational trends. It begins with a review of the recent…

This essay explores some of the areas in which language teaching and intercultural education overlap. We position language teaching as embedded within sociocultural practices and shaped by attitudes toward bilingualism and native vs. nonnative speaker status. Specifically, we question language practices that exclude or downplay the benefits of…

The Research Centre for Languages and Cultures (RCLC) at the University of South Australia hosts an annual symposium on current issues related to languages and language education. The hallmark of the RCLC symposia is that they intend to raise critical, current issues in the languages field for wider debate, include presenting cutting edge research…

This paper reports on the problems faced by students in the second language classroom. It focuses on their integration of social and cultural aspects in language learning, because every language is an amalgamation of both. The author adds that the learner of a second language finds difficulty in learning the culture of the first language and it…

This article investigates the language attitudes, language practices and identity construction of a group of ethnic minority students in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Drawing on data from focus group and individual interviews, this research shows that the ethnic minority students negotiate and contest their heritage identity by utilizing their…

Classroom code switching in foreign language teaching is still a controversial issue whose status as a tool of both despair and desire continues to be hotly debated. As the teaching of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is, by definition, concerned with the learning of a foreign language, one would expect the value of code switching…

The purpose of this article is to explore Korean English learners' identity and pedagogical implications of the findings. After a brief explanation about why the manners of examining English learners' identity can be diverse according to their sociocultural context, as an agency of Korean English learners' identity representation, their…

For a growing number of people around the world, the ability to speak English has become an important skill and an integral part of their lives, similar to the ability to use a computer. This, in turn, means that English is unquestionably no longer exclusively associated with the identities of nations traditionally referred to as…

This paper explores a period of advocacy on behalf of Spanish language education in the United States from 1914 to 1945. It interrogates claims made by policy actors about the centrality of Spanish language education to US geopolitical and economic interests in Latin America. I make two arguments: first, that realization of US economic and…

The adoption of the English language paradigm and the subsequent implementation of bilingual policies worldwide are generating new linguistic hierarchies. These have an effect on the linguistic diversity at the sub-national level and on individuals' linguistic human rights. This article reports the results of a case study on an individual's…

In 2002, English-medium degree programmes (EMDPs) became a permanent feature of German higher education (HE). While this action marked an important step towards government-supported institutionalisation of English in Germany, no formal strategy or guidelines governing the role of English in HE have been developed. To date, research in this area in…

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role and place of Hebrew within the Australian Jewish day schools' curriculum and to analyse the cultural factors, which contribute to the challenges Hebrew teachers face. Our findings show that there is a need to locate Modern Hebrew more centrally within the schools' organizational structure. A…

This article begins by critiquing the long-established acronym CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning). We then go on to report on a small-scale study which examines how student non-native speakers of English use a range of digital devices beyond the classroom in both their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. We look also at the extent to…

This article explores, through interview data with 125 respondents in Canada, whether the study of foreign languages can be considered as important as the study of the "core" STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine) subjects in school and university curricula. Five categories of interviewees, including those…

Using both quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Taiwan's high-school English textbooks, this study aimed to investigate the projected roles of English in Taiwan's high-school English textbooks over the past 50 years. A total of 1072 lessons from 14 textbook versions dating from 1952 to 2009 were analysed. The results show that the…