Matched-guise experiments have passed their 40th year as a powerful attitudinal research tool, and they are becoming more relevant and useful as technology is applied to language research. Combining the specificity of conversation analysis with the generalizability of social psychology research, technological innovations allow the measurement of…

The widespread use of a local variety of English, Singapore Colloquial English, or Singlish, has become somewhat of a controversial issue in Singapore especially in the eyes of the Singapore government. For example, in 2002 the Singapore government launched The "Speak Good English Movement" (SGEM) with the objective of promoting the use…

Owing to analyses of large spoken corpora the linguistic knowledge of conversation has grown in recent years exponentially. Up until now little of this knowledge has trickled down to the EFL classroom. One of the reasons, this paper argues, is the failure in the relevant literature to spell out clearly how teaching conversational grammar affects…

This paper reports on an investigation into the international intelligibility of the English of educated Hong Kong speakers whose L1 is Cantonese. Samples of recordings of extended discourse obtained from three female and three male final-year English majors studying at the Hong Kong Institute of Education were played to groups of university…

This paper is concerned with young people's perceptions and reported use of the two language varieties that co-exist in the urban centre of Guangzhou in southern China, Putonghua (P) and Cantonese (C). P is a typical H-variety, promoted by the government and used as a lingua franca throughout China; C is the local L-variety but it also has some…

At one time, academic inquiries into the relationship between socioeconomic class and language acquisition were commonplace, but the past 20 years have seen a decrease in work that focuses on the intersection between class and early language learning. Recently, however, against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the United…

In South Africa, as in many parts of postcolonial Africa, English dominates the political economy and as a result is the medium of instruction chosen by the majority of South African schools, despite the fact that most learners do not have the opportunity to acquire English to the levels necessary for effective engagement with the curriculum.…

This paper examines the transmission patterns of Eastern Brittany's Romance language variety, Gallo, based on quantitative data showing learning patterns of school pupils of the language and their parents in 2003 and 2004. Results confirm the sharp decline in Gallo transmission between generations. Nevertheless, Gallo transmission has not…

The present ethnographic case study investigates how the identities of immigrant minority pupils are constructed in a multicultural classroom in a Flemish primary school. From the analysis of the class teacher's discourse, it emerges that both Flemish native pupils' identities and those of immigrant minority pupils are constructed as homogeneous:…

The international use of English as a lingua franca (ELF)--i.e. between non-native speakers of different nationalities, in situations where no native English speakers are present--has become an important feature of business, diplomacy, education, and personal relationships around the world. Nowhere is this more true than in Northeast Asia, where…

Cued American English (CAE) is a visual variety of English derived from a mode of communication called Cued Speech (CS). CS, or cueing, is a system of communication for use with the deaf, which consists of hand shapes, hand placements, and mouth shapes that signify the phonemic information conventionally conveyed through speech in spoken…

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and…

The variety of English spoken and written by Filipino natives is examined, and its particular usages or "perduring features" are reviewed. Filipino English is shown to be influenced by the structures of native Filipino language(s), and by the historical and cultural contexts in which it is learned. It is argued that Philippine English,…

A method for analyzing acquisition-like patterns in the English consonants used by Spanish-English bilinguals is presented which allows a distinction to be made between individual and group phenomena. An analysis of a bilingual community in southern Texas shows that there is a continuum of use of the standard English consonants not occurring in…

Aspects of Navajo English are examined to illustrate how Native American English differs from standard English of native speakers. Phonological, morphological, and syntactic characteristics of Navajo English are noted. Navajo English also differs from standard English in its approach to time frameworks and tenses. It is suggested that much of the…