The argument put forward here is that we are witnessing the emergence of a concept of English as a lingua franca, which creates a set of attitudes about correctness and in particular "grammatical correctness". The traditional "native-speaker" as final arbiter can only apply to English as a national language. It is the…

In England more is spent on English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) for adults than is spent on literacy and numeracy put together, an estimated 323 million pounds for 2007-2008. This may well be the biggest investment in Europe for national language learning for adults. It is argued that ESOL is central to several social policy streams.…

In Ratanakiri province, northeastern Cambodia, the majority of the local people are native speakers of ethnic minority languages. Primarily subsistence farmers, they use their own language to communicate with others in their villages, and as they work in their rice fields. A baseline survey taken between 1996 and 1998 in five such villages showed…

Firth and Wagner (1997) questioned the dichotomies nonnative versus native speaker, learner versus user, and interlanguage versus target language, which reflect a bias toward innateness, cognition, and form in language acquisition. Research on lingua franca English (LFE) not only affirms this questioning, but reveals what multilingual communities…

Developing the ability to speak in a foreign language is an arduous task. This is because it involves the mastery of different language subsystems, simultaneous focus on comprehension and production, and the impact of a range of social factors. This challenge is further compounded in situations in which learners have limited access to the target…

"The Routledge Applied Linguistics Reader" is an essential collection of readings for students of Applied Linguistics. Divided into five sections: Language Teaching and Learning, Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, Identity and Power and Language Use in Professional Contexts, the "Reader" takes a broad…

This essay attempts to answer some of the basic assumptions made about English as a global language. It is argued that such assumptions, especially those concerning political and economic power, are not sufficient in themselves to explain why English has acquired such global importance. Rather, what has greatly contributed to the possibility for…

The Han sphere, including Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China, adopted Han characters and classical Han writing as the official written language before the 20th century. However, great changes came with the advent of the 20th century. After World War II, Han characters in Vietnam and Korea were officially replaced by the romanised "Chu…

Language choice is often studied as choices made by the state at the level of national language planning or as individual choice of language or variety in language use. There has been little research to directly connect these two aspects of language choice. This paper attempts to incorporate the two aspects and other related phenomena in a…

Thousands of students in California learn English as a second language in schools that utilize exclusively monolingual--English Only--literacy programs. With such programs students do not have the opportunity to use the knowledge of their first language in order to acquire and master their second language. The project of cooperative bi-literacy…

This monograph discusses the language situation in Japan, with an emphasis on language planning and policy. Japan has long considered itself to be a monoethnic and therefore monolingual society, despite the existence of substantial old-comer ethnic minorities, and this--with the instrumental exception of English--has been reflected in its language…

This paper situates languages in the framework of European construction, analyzing problems resulting from the definition of languages' official status in the European Union (EU) juridical system. It explains that the process of European construction is historically defined by means of two distinct features (it is an open process, and at the same…

Among several hundred indigenous languages, Bahasa Indonesia gained pre-eminence as the national language of Indonesia during the country's first 50 years of independence. The fall of Soeharto in 1998 and the subsequent devolution of power to the regions might have been expected to lead to a resurgence in use of local languages but instead it…

English is the associate official language in India and serves as a unifying force in this multilingual country. The teaching of English in K-12 settings focuses on the skills of reading and writing. Listening and speaking skills are not awarded much time, if any, in most classrooms or test settings; only two Boards of Examinations mandate their…

This article describes the French unilingual, also seen as a sociolinguistic ideology, in its varieties, especially since the French Revolution: an ideology based on few representations that are both inner and outer linguistic. The article also discusses the attitude of the unilingual in the collective epilinguistic field of experiment. One…