Research on Arabic as a foreign language has centered on studying students' attitudes toward the problems of learning Arabic as a foreign/second language. Because little is currently known about language use within the Arabic classrooms, this study aimed to investigate how students perceive the use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and colloquial…

Across the centuries, the question of the origin of language has captivated the human imagination. Many theories have been proposed to address fundamental questions such as: Where do languages come from? How do they evolve? What are the societal drivers of this change? Historically, one of the biggest challenges in addressing these questions has…

This paper analyses the pronunciation of 24 students in Guangxi, South China, based on their reading a short text. It reports that the occurrence of [w] in place of /v/ is one of the most salient features of their pronunciation. In addition, they tend to use [s] for voiceless TH and [d] for voiced TH, omit dark /l/ in the coda of words such as…

Many educational theoretical approaches to cosmopolitanism tend towards an unconditional appreciation of mobility, diversity and rootlessness. The recent interest of educational philosophy in the rhizome, de-territorialization and diversity contributes to this understanding of cosmopolitanism as movement across a borderless and imperfect world.…

Indonesian Qualification Framework (IQF) is a description of qualification levels for all Indonesian learning outcomes or certificate statements in Indonesian schooling from year 9 to higher education. The IQF holds a legal endorsement in the form of Presidential Decree no. 8/2012. This IQF will specify equivalencies between Indonesian and foreign…

In this piece I explore the concept of 'growth' in English teaching. Starting with John Dixon's 'growth' model, I argue that, by re-imagining his ideas in current contexts, practitioners might re-focus and re-invigorate the priorities of English teaching. Dominant conceptions of 'growth' are explored, along with their influence on teacher working…

The wide use of English has given rise to the World Englishes (WE) paradigm, within which there has been a growing interest in the pedagogical implications of the varieties of English. A frequently documented rationale for the marriage between second language education and WE is that WE users should be aware of the potential problems in WE…

This paper examines explicitness in English as lingua franca (ELF) spoken interactions. Using a conversation analysis procedure, about 11h of audio-recorded naturally occuring ELF interactions of 79 incoming Erasmus students were analyzed for this purpose. The corpus was compiled by means of 54 speech events, 29 interviews and 25 focus group…

The growth of English worldwide has brought about myriad variations of the language, but many teachers in the United States are still relatively unfamiliar with these World Englishes (WE). Pre-service teachers must be made aware of the legitimacy of WE to become culturally responsive educators. We will describe six different activities designed to…

Whether or not we are teachers, all of us must make sense of language. In doing so, we encounter representations of language, implicit or explicit descriptions which shift over time and are always tied to social and political interests. Teachers' work necessarily depends on these descriptions, which are deeply embedded within their…

The aim of this paper is to explore the phonetic nature of vowels in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Although Arabic is a Semitic language, the speech sound system of Arabic is very comprehensive. Data used for this study were elicited from the standard speech of nine informants who are native speakers of Arabic. The researchers used themselves as…

Drawing on data recorded in two city markets, this article analyzes the language practices of workers and customers as they go about their daily business, with a particular focus on the ways in which linguistic resources, everyday tasks, and social spaces are intertwined in producing metrolingua francas. The aim of the article is to come to a…

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that…

Drawing on the literature on culture and intercultural communication, current discussions surrounding English as an international language (EIL), and cultural appropriation of ELT books in local communities, this article reports the findings of a qualitative and qualitative research study with English language teachers from Inner (40 American, 36…

The current study examined the extent to which native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Spontaneous speech samples elicited from 50 Japanese learners of English with various proficiency levels were first rated by 10 Canadian and 10…