Greater China is used in this article to refer to mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Macao. While a holistic approach is adopted to present and compare the rapid spread of English and development in English language education in these geographically close, and sociopolitically, culturally and economically interrelated but hugely…

This paper investigates the effect of listener attitudes on the ability to understand a foreign (non-Australian) accent. The research focuses on individual listener characteristics, such as attitude and frequency of contact with accented speakers, rather than speech production. Data was collected through a web-based survey and analysis employed…

The authors of "Phrase-final prepositions in Quebec French: An empirical study of contact, code-switching and resistance to convergence", Poplack, Zentz & Dion (2011, this issue), henceforth cited as PZD, make a strong case for showing that, in spite of surface similarities, preposition stranding in Canadian French relative clauses…

Although the modern multicultural European metropolis has brought previously disparate groups into close contact, little research has focused on the effect of these shifting demographic patterns on language attitudes and ideologies. This is probably due to the sensitive nature of issues relating to immigration which may evoke contexts of…

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenon of morphological variability in the production of Italian determiners, descriptive adjectives, and direct object pronouns by adult English learners of Italian to determine whether morphological errors are the result of computational or representational difficulties. Second language acquisitionists do…

This paper aims at discovering the nature and extent of deviation in the articulation of consonants in Pakistani English due to the impact of mother tongue. A detailed experiment has been carried out with the help of Praat to analyze the acoustic properties of /?/ and /ð/ sounds spoken by Pakistani speakers. The research reveals that Pakistani…

This article argues for the necessity of phonetic analysis in signed language linguistics and presents a case study of one analytical system being used in a preliminary attempt to identify natural classes and investigate variation in ASL handshapes. Robbin Battison (1978) first described what is now a widely accepted list of basic handshapes,…

Purpose: Older school-aged children and adolescents with persistent language and literacy impairments vary in their individual profiles of linguistic strengths and weaknesses. Given the multidimensional nature and complexity of language, designing an assessment protocol capable of uncovering linguistic variation is challenging. A process of…

Repeated assessments of literacy skills have shown that Aboriginal students do not achieve at the same level as their non-Aboriginal peers. Many Aboriginal students speak Aboriginal English, a dialect different from the Standard Australian English used in schools. Research shows that it is crucial for educators in bidialectal contexts to be aware…

The field of literacy studies has seen decades of calls for scholarship and instruction that address issues of dialect diversity, identity, and power but few empirical studies that document students' engagement in classroom activities designed to address these issues. The goal of this article is to describe how three bidialectal African American…

This article reports on a study of second language (L2) French learners' self-generated use of gesture to think through and resolve a metalinguistic awareness-raising task during small-group work with an expert mediator. Although the use of gesture in L2 communication and pedagogy has recently received increasing attention, little research has…

The concept of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has recently caused a great deal of controversy, much of it based on a misunderstanding of ELF. In this presentation, I shall first provide a brief history of lingua francas and then compare and contrast two major Asian lingua francas--Bahasa Indonesia and Putonghua--in order to show how different…

Drawing from a larger qualitative study, this article examines the narratives of bilingual Latina/o teacher candidates in South Texas. The findings reveal that bilingual teacher candidates are linguistically subordinated by the marginalized status of Spanish in the United States and by deficit perspectives of Spanish of the Southwest. Their…

The dissertation study aims to contribute mainly to the field of loanword phonology in general and particularly to Indonesian and its phonology that are rarely studied to date. The study investigates what consonantal and syllabic repair strategies are employed by Indonesian in adapting Arabic and Dutch loanwords, whether these adaptation…

The rise of English as an international language (EIL) has brought to light the needs of those who speak it as an additional language. This has in turn radically reshaped the role of culture in the EIL classroom, which may now aim at developing critical transcultural awareness. By reporting on a joint initiative undertaken by three schools in two…