Transitional justice (TJ) scenarios are where a society is moving from war to peace or from authoritarianism to democracy. A key goal of TJ is to balance atoning for past abuses of human rights with creating the conditions for social and political stability in the future, and this requires avoiding forms of "victor's justice" whereby one…

The COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled the latest surge of anti-Asian hate. Raising Taiwanese university students' awareness about the dangers of racism has never been more important. This study draws on a class activity about media discourse, particularly on the representations of xenophobia and other forms of intolerance toward Asians during the…

As English is a lingua franca that has developed along many different pathways with the result that numerous varieties continue to evolve, effective communication requires mutual adjustment and understanding. A considerable body of research on English diversity is focussed on attitudes towards the sociolinguistic reality of English and…

Drawing on critical pedagogy, this study challenges the hegemony of Standard English (SE) to promote inclusive approaches which recognise and tolerate the variation of World Englishes to prepare students for intercultural encounters with interlocutors speaking different varieties of English. To enhance students' ethno-sensitivity and receptive…

It has been argued for many years that a new standard of Mandarin is developing within Taiwan, distinct from the official form based on the Beijing pronunciation, as well as the nonstandard vernacular, Taiwan-guoyu. The parameters by which this new standard, Taiwanese Mandarin, may be recognized, however, and the extent to which it exists in…

First language (L1) attrition research focuses on syntactic and morphological deterioration in environments where L1 "attriters" rarely have contact with their L1, such as immigrants. There is no study that investigates L1 attrition in tones and in contexts where L1 can still be often heard. This study examines this attrition type in…

This study surveys the history of English language and the roles of English language education in Asian context. Through the historical survey on English dispersal in Asian countries, the first section of this study traces the dispersal of English from the 18th century and the development of English in Asian countries. The second section of this…

This article examines the ways in which a multimodal text--a YouTube video on globalization and business--was mediated in two English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms, and how these mediations shaped the instructor's and her students' meaning-making in specific ways. I first explore the complex multimodal discourses involved with this…

This study presents a broad overview of diasporic biliteracy developments in immigrant women after examining observation data in one Taiwanese community. Methodologies include a mixture of narrative inquiry with some ethnographic methods. Fifteen Asian women in diaspora, two Burmese, one Cambodian, one Filipino, four Indonesians, three Thai and…

Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, the rapid liberalization and democratization of Taiwan has led to the transformation of its political structure from a single-party system to a full-fledged two-party system. Along with this political opposition are the two contrastive concepts, the North and the South. Located in this background, this…

The problem: Many previous studies have pointed out that EFL learners tend to face communication breakdowns with native speakers because their traditional classroom and textbooks are not able to provide learners with sufficient pragmatically appropriate input (Bardovi-Harlig, 1996; Rose, 1994, 1997). On the contrary, they are exposed to rich input…

Researches have showed that joke telling is a type of verbal behavior associated with the field of sociolinguistics (e.g., Al-Khatib, 1999). This study aims to report Taiwanese jokes and their sociological functions that people in Taiwan attempt to communicate in jokes. Besides, this study will report what the typical topics and characteristics…

The study reported in the present article was a process-product investigation of foreign language classroom practice and its effects on learners' development of sociolinguistic competence, which, though important for appropriateness of language use, has long been neglected in L2 teaching. Based on classroom observation, the study examined the…

This qualitative study presents sociolinguistic characteristics of peer-talk of 44 children in a Mandarin-English-speaking preschool in Taiwan where English was taught as a foreign language (EFL). Key findings: teacher-dominated talk influences children's peer-talk; EFL and code-switching emerge in spontaneous peer-talk; children actively engage…