Based on Mahboob and Elyas (World Engl 33(1):128-142, 2014), who identified an expanding circle variety of Englishes, known as 'Saudi English', the present paper addresses the consonantal variations between Formal English and a sub-variety of Saudi English, termed as 'Saudi Hijazi English'. The paper presents the specific consonants of Saudi…

This article presents an acoustic study of the acquisition of vowel formant dynamics in L2 (Southern British) English by Polish learners at two levels of proficiency, along with baseline data from L1 English and L1 Polish. Results from our experiment suggest that the acquisition of English vowels by Polish learners entails a temporal…

Heritage languages (HLs) are acquired in contexts of unbalanced input, or situations in which children receive primary exposure to the family/HL and experience an abrupt shift after the child begins formal schooling. As a consequence, HL speakers normally become more dominant in the environmental language, while the development of the HL is…

This paper attempts to examine in a descriptive way the pioneering model of "World Englishes" proposed by Kachru in the mid-1980s that allocates the presence of English into three concentric circles: The "Inner" Circle, the "Outer" Circle, and the "Expanding" Circle. The Inner Circle presents the countries…

The present study investigates the adoption of Japanese by users from a popular Chinese video-sharing website, bilibili.com. Over a two-month period, 5,808 instances of language use that involve Japanese language features were sampled from 28,579 video comments. It was found that features of Japanese were often utilized -- either entirely in…

Indigenous education increasingly seeks to reclaim the institutions of state assimilation as spaces for the dissemination and support of localized forms of knowledge and language use and the valorization of alternative citizenship identities. In this study, I compare two schools in Ecuador to show how divergent ways of teaching Kichwa promote or…

The study aimed at identifying the core language skills regarded as most significant in the academe and eventually in the workplace among engineering graduates. The study surveyed tertiary students to identify their perception of the skills needed upon graduation, together with the kind of instruction that would improve and progress the said…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

This essay arises out of critical reflections in which I have engaged through my teaching in an Indonesian University. All my students are learning English as a foreign language. They typically struggle with how they are positioned ideologically, especially in relation to the so-called 'native speaker'. My goal as an English educator is to free…

Soon after Kachru (1992) promoted the notion of the World of English(es) through his 'inner-outer-expanding circle' principle, academic audiences started to recognize that the number of English nonnative speakers had noticeably surpassed that of native speakers. Such a phenomenon has encouraged English learners of diverse lingua-cultural…

The ability to encode (spell) is an integral writing skill needed to communicate effectively. The ability to spell, also, enhances decoding as spelling and decoding are reciprocal skills that rely on knowledge of the same subskills. Spelling can also be particularly difficult for students with literacy and phonological-processing difficulties such…

Researchers have made pedagogical suggestions regarding how to incorporate international varieties of English in teacher education, but the amount of research on how novice teachers develop such knowledge and pedagogies and put them into practice is noticeably inadequate. This study presents a two-part case study in order to address this concern.…

The many permutations of spoken English have called for an interrogation into the notions of 'standard English' and 'native accents'. Despite their problematic nature, these terms remain commonly used, and familiarity with 'standard', inner-circle varieties of English is typical among L2 English speakers, differences in education and language…

This dissertation explores Spanish copular verbs, "ser" and "estar" (both 'to be' in English), in pre-adjectival contexts within two Spanish varieties: first-language (L1) Chilean speakers from Santiago (N = 29) and second-language (L2) English-speaking learners studying in Chile (N = 31). Bridging sociolinguistics and second…

Given the increasing number of multilingual learners enrolled in U.S. secondary schools and persistent disparities in access to quality STEM education for these students, teacher education programs must prepare secondary science teachers capable of teaching multilingual learners in equitable ways. There is a consensus in science education…