The rapid increase in English medium instruction (EMI) in higher education has resulted in the need for a greater evidence base documenting EMI in practice spanning a range of settings. Studies of EMI focusing on linguistic issues are beginning to emerge but there are few comparative studies looking at multiple sites, levels and stakeholders. In…

The Swedish educational policy for upper secondary English, which took effect in 2011 and adopts a globalised perspective on language, is explored with respect to how skills and awareness related to local, national, and international roles of English are represented in policy documents. A discourse analytic approach to language policy is used to…

Scholars have consistently theorised that language ideologies can influence the ways in which bilingual speakers in minority language settings identify and engage with the linguistic varieties available to them. Research conducted by the author examined the interplay of language use and ideologies among a purposive sample of adults who started in…

The study of language contact epitomizes the dynamics of language as a system of human communication. The competing linguistic forces at work when speakers of different language varieties come into contact can be narrowed down to two basic concepts--convergence and divergence. Looking at linguistic areas using a macro approach, languages in…

This research work endeavors to examine Kuwait University language students' attitude towards Modern Standard Arabic under the spread of English as a dominant language. It attempts also to examine differences between males and females' attitudes towards English as medium of instruction as opposed to Modern Standard Arabic. The undertaken study…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

This paper deals with policymaking in the higher education sector as an activity which happens on many levels, with many and varying interests involved. As the present thematic issue highlights, language is present in higher education policymaking, whether explicitly or implicitly. This special issue's initial claim is that "Policy is what…

The Center for English as a Lingua Franca (CELF), an initiative of a private university in Tokyo, was founded with serious consideration given to the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of English as a lingua franca (ELF). Such deliberation is not yet prevalent among academics and practitioners who should be most affected by ELF…

Many Pasifika students start their schooling fluent in their own language and with a rich background of knowledge and experiences. However, very quickly they join high numbers of Pasifika students failing within the education system. The reasons are diverse but many link directly to the structural inequities they encounter which cause a disconnect…

Social inclusion policy in Australia has largely ignored key issues of communication for linguistic minorities, across communities and with the mainstream community. In the (now disbanded) Social Inclusion Board's reports (e.g., Social Inclusion Unit, 2009), the emphasis is on the economic aspects of inclusion, while little attention has been paid…

This research investigates the ideological character of the English language in East Asia. It focuses on the prevailing beliefs, values and propositions relating to English as a global language and the spread of English in the non-English East Asian countries, namely China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. By analyzing how English is presented in…

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) scholars have recently drawn on critical race theory (CRT) to critique and understand the propagation of Whiteness as a norm associated with native English speakers. However, the area of language studies, more broadly defined, has yet to develop the same link with CRT. To this end, this…

The present study adopts a multilingual approach to analysing the standardized test results of primary school immigrant children living in the bi-/multilingual context of South Tyrol, Italy. The standardized test results are from the Invalsi test administered across Italy in 2009/2010. In South Tyrol, several languages are spoken on a daily basis…

This paper challenges the widespread view that writing is somehow peripheral to the more serious aspects of university life--doing research and teaching students. It argues that universities are about writing and that specialist forms of academic literacy are at the heart of everything we do: central to constructing knowledge, educating students…

Communication teacher scholars have traditionally focused attention on the power of language in written or spoken narratives as situated in particular contexts. Increasingly, however, scholars are espousing a vision-based epistemology that recognizes the relationship between seeing and knowing, and in doing so foreground the political relationship…