One of the tenets of linguistics is that all language forms are equal, communicatively capable, and worthy of respect. Given this premise of equality, what does one make of "Standard English (SE), the dialect elevated above others in the American school system, the dialect that students most likely consider "correct" and…

This paper examines explicitness in English as lingua franca (ELF) spoken interactions. Using a conversation analysis procedure, about 11h of audio-recorded naturally occuring ELF interactions of 79 incoming Erasmus students were analyzed for this purpose. The corpus was compiled by means of 54 speech events, 29 interviews and 25 focus group…

The growth of English worldwide has brought about myriad variations of the language, but many teachers in the United States are still relatively unfamiliar with these World Englishes (WE). Pre-service teachers must be made aware of the legitimacy of WE to become culturally responsive educators. We will describe six different activities designed to…

In today's complex, multicultural world, discourses and language vernaculars are more diverse than ever. Educational institutions often privilege the historically dominant vernacular (such as white middle-class English which is sometimes called "Standard English"). This language bias disadvantages students form working class and…

This handbook has been conceived as a guide for young researchers embarking on the exciting journey of investigating different aspects of plurilingual education. The text can also serve to review ideas previously encountered, and perhaps as a means of interrogating research methodologies in plurilingual contexts for those who already have ample…

Previous research has revealed that although EFL students may claim to prefer British/US accents they often have difficulty identifying them, especially when such accents may differ from "standard" accents presented in ELT materials. In the Gulf, English is widely used as a lingua franca or as a second language by the large expatriate…

Research on the linguistic characteristics of university classroom discourse highlights the salience, in this register, of non-informational and subjective aspects of discourse. This dimension of classroom discourse, however, has not been studied systematically. Taking a corpus-based approach, this study investigates the non-informational…

This study aims at examining Thainess as a writing strategy used in non-literary texts written by non-professional bilingual writers. These writers are advanced language learners who are pursuing their Master's degree in English. Seven English narratives of their language learning experiences were analyzed based on Kachruvian's framework of…

The meaning of some phrasal verbs can be guessed from the meanings of the parts (to sit down = sit + down, run after = run + after) and the meaning of some others have to be learned (to put up (a visitor) = accommodate, to hold up = cause delay or try to rob someone) due to their syntactic and semantic complexities. In this regard, the syntactic…

This paper draws draw on conceptualisations of language as heteroglossic to examine whether and how multilingual practices and plurilingual pedagogies are enacted as instructional strategies in two multilingual English-medium universities in western Canada. Multilingual educational contexts have the potential to comprise 'translanguaging spaces'…

Purpose: This paper introduces Stroud's 'Linguistic Citizenship', a concept committed to democratic participation, to voice, to the heterogeneity of linguistic resources and to the political value of sociolinguistic understanding. Approach: It first outlines Linguistic Citizenship's links with the ethnographic sociolinguistics inspired by Hymes,…

The transformation of higher education has been a pressing concern for policy makers and practitioners. This article provides examples of the transformative potential of assessments designed within the framework of a multi-literacies and heteroglossic pedagogy in an Applied English Language course at a South African university. These assessments,…

This study examines Hong Kong major stakeholders' (secondary students, university students, teachers and professionals) perceptions of language variation, English language teaching (ELT) and language use in their everyday communication via a large-scale questionnaire survey (N = 1893). Based on principal components analysis of the questionnaire…

As universities in the Anglophone world attend to operating on a global stage, linguistic diversity in the sector has intensified. Historically, higher education has adopted language-as-problem orientations to managing linguistic diversity, viewing multilingual repertoires largely as an obstacle. An emerging body of work informed by…

Recent research has shown that speakers are sensitive to non-contrastive phonetic detail present in nonnative speech (e.g. Escudero et al. 2012; Wilson et al. 2014). Difficulties in interpreting and implementing unfamiliar phonetic variation can lead nonnative speakers to modify second language forms by vowel epenthesis and other changes. These…