Describes the experience of preparing Venezuelan English-as-a-Foreign-Language students at lower intermediate level to perform a Trinidadian dialect play before an international audience during a short course. The exercise was used to teach local culture in relation to the native culture of the students and also to teach functional and grammatical…

Explores the effect of age of the intended addressee on the written performance of Japanese university students. Twenty-six female students each wrote letters to three people they knew from a recent study abroad program: one significantly older than themselves, one significantly younger, and one approximately the same age. Analysis of the…

A study investigated how four anglophone Caribbean students enrolled in an American college perceive their own language and writing in standard English, the morphosyntactic and semantic features that emerge when they write in standard English, and the extent to which discourse features revealed in their writing are attributable to Creole…

A study investigated the importance of three elements of intonation (tone units, key, prominence) in three readers of English radio news. Results indicate intonation is used to present the structure of information as the speaker intends it to be interpreted. Intonation functions can be categorized simply under a few discourse functions easily…

This study compared the effect of two language sampling elicitation contexts, free play and picture descriptions, on variability in the use of African American English (AAE) with 65 normally developing African American children (ages 4 to 6) from lower socioeconomic status homes. Picture descriptions elicited more AAE usage overall, a larger set…

Examines the constraints on the realization of "/t/" in New Zealander English. On the basis of an examination of the speech of two similar speakers from that country, a series of allophonic rules is provided. The article shows that the distribution of allophones for these speakers is not the same as for other speakers who have been…

This article examines the relationship between group and individual patterns of variation in one area of the grammar: verbal morphology. The results of studies of the acquisition of English and Hungarian verbal morphology by Chinese learners show that individual patterns of variation closely match group patterns on several dimensions. Multivariate…

This paper offers a historical and sociolinguistic interrogation of Taiwanese to demonstrate the significance of language continuum in relation to identity formation. To this end, Taiwanese is discussed as a particular variety of language. Literacy practices in the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945) are contrasted with the precolonial and…

The purposes of the study were (a) to identify perceptions about representative English-language accents from prospective and practicing providers of business-related language services residing in Argentina and (b) to examine the differences in their perceptions of these English-language accents. The respondents ranked the accents in this order:…

The concurrent trends of globalisation and "indigenisation" affecting the English language (varieties) around the world pose some interesting questions for language planning and reform issues (e.g. Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 1994; Crystal, 1997). With this project we examine the impact of these competing trends on "corpus…

The linguistic classification of English speakers from outer-circle countries, such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore, is often ambiguous because the Englishes they speak are considered different from interlanguages yet are not considered native varieties. This study investigates whether outer-circle speakers can be viewed as equivalent to…

LibQUAL+[TM] data to date have not been subjected to the modern measurement theory called polytomous item response theory (IRT). The data interpreted here were collected from 42,090 participants who completed the "American English" version of the 22 core LibQUAL+[TM] items, and 12,552 participants from Australia and Europe who…

This study explores educational and sociocultural advice home country teachers offer non-home country teachers instructing English. It reviews various professional literature including documents (e.g. news releases), websites, and various literature (books, journals, journal articles) pertaining to the preparation of teachers who plan to teach…

This overview delineates the direction of pedagogical developments since the 25th anniversary issue of "TESOL Quarterly." Three tendencies characterize our professional practice: (a) a continuation along the earlier lines of progression (i.e., in opening up the classroom to learning opportunities, integrating skills, and teaching for specific…

The most outstanding characteristic of language in education policy for South Asia (SA) is its multilingualism. All through recorded history the seven countries that constitute SA have been multilingual. For at least the first two decades of their existence as sovereign states the large nation states of SA failed to take into account this…