The ethnographic research presented in this paper consists of two parts developed chronologically. The first part is based on a study (Corona, V., Nussbaum, L., & Unamuno, V. [2012]. The emergence of new linguistic repertoires among Barcelona's youth of Latin American origin. "International Journal of Bilingual Education and…

We know little about what raters rely on when participating in accentedness perception tasks as their qualitative comments are rarely scrutinised. At the same time, we know that (assumed) social information influences listener behaviour. This study investigates rater attitudes to and stereotypes about speakers of different varieties of English,…

Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of Mainland students crossing the border to pursue tertiary studies in Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. In contrast to those who have chosen to study in foreign countries, such as United States, United Kingdom or Germany, the Mainland group are studying…

This 14-month study examined the phone-based composing practice of three adolescents. Given the centrality of mobile phones to youth culture, the researcher sought to create a description of the participants' composing practices with these devices. Focal participants were users of Twitter and Instagram, two social media platforms that are usually…

This article serves as an introduction to a collection of four articles on multilingual practices in speech and writing, exploring both contemporary and historical sources. It not only introduces the articles but also discusses the scope and definitions of code-switching, attitudes towards multilingual interaction and, most pertinently, the…

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…

In this article, the authors (re)think writing as an ethical endeavor to explore and to cultivate more inclusive orientations for writing research and teaching. Situated in posthumanist scholarship on intra-activity, trans-corporeality, and translingual assemblages, they provide data-theory encounters that resist the privileging of alphabetic…

The study employs a case study approach to examine the impact of educational backgrounds on nine Hong Kong tertiary students' English and Cantonese language practices and identifications as native speakers of English and Cantonese. The study employed both survey and interview data to probe the participants' English and Cantonese language use at…

Recent research demonstrates that operating effectively across boundaries is more complex than traditional essentialist models in cross-cultural studies suggest. The authors present a teaching model that leverages this research and moves away from static comparative models of intercultural interaction. Using self-reflexive and analytical…

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…

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…