There is vast potential for digital screens to support early bilingualism. For the most part, however, young children require human mediation with what is generated by screens in order for language and pre-literacy learning to occur. What does that mediation look like when multimodal elements are designed to support children's language and culture…

Issues of national language are very complex in Africa because of the multi-lingual situation on the continent. The situation is even more severe when a country attempts to choose one of the indigenous languages as its national language. Most African nations have peacefully chosen foreign languages as their official languages but there is always a…

This qualitative study investigates the gap between curricular intentions, teacher perspectives, and practices in a primary school bilingual program in central Mozambique. It aims to provide new data regarding bilingual education program implementation in an understudied and underrepresented country in the literature. Drawing on original interview…

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and World Englishes (WE) have appeared as a reaction to the deep-rooted mentality that American and British English are the only 'proper and acceptable' type of English in terms of teaching and learning. With the world's recent position as a 'global village', English language has become the lingua franca and this…

Demand for English-taught courses (ETCs) is growing exponentially in non-English speaking universities. These courses require new teaching competences of lecturers, most obviously English language proficiency and intercultural skills. Given the high workloads academics are currently burdened with, it can be expected that this form of teaching is…

This article analyses how two official languages of Belarus, Russian and Belarusian, are represented on the homepages of two national news websites through the analysis of media discourse within headlines and leads of news stories, and focusing on aspects of multimodality of websites. In view of the equal legal status of these languages, this…

This paper investigates the phonology of L2 speech and its impact on intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) contexts. Many studies have considered speaker-related characteristics, such as speech styles and pronunciation features, that influence the intelligibility of L2 speech for both nonnative speakers (NNS) and native speakers…

Virtual exchange projects have become an effective pedagogical method to support students' development of intercultural language competence. High-immersion experiences in Virtual Reality (VR) may offer an environment which is conducive to developing such competence. This paper reports on a pilot study carried out with two groups of university…

English as an international language (EIL) is considered by applied linguists to be a new paradigm for research, practice and English language teaching (ELT). However, it appears that English language teachers have little voice in these discussions, and the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom has remained largely unaffected by EIL,…

The language de jure in Jamaica is Jamaican English (JE); however, the language de facto of most nationals is Jamaican Creole (JC). As such, there are many students who enter the tertiary level without fully acquiring JE. As a CARICOM nation, it is mandatory that foreign languages are taught beginning at the primary level of education. Although…

Although Singapore, a linguistically and ethnically diverse city-state, uses four official languages, namely Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, and English, which are supposed to enjoy equal status, there appears to be a pecking order to these languages. English seems to be the dominant language when taking into consideration the bilingual education policy,…

The complex and varied sociolinguistic reality of World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has important implications for English Language Teaching (ELT). Besides questioning the validity of the 'native speaker model', the complexity of Global Englishes raises several issues, both at a theoretical and at an applied level, particularly…

The study explores language maintenance and shift patterns from a family language policy perspective in Azerbaijani-Farsi bilingual families in the City of Zanjan, Iran. The city is the capital of Zanjan province which is surrounded by Azerbaijani, Kurdish, and Farsi speaking provinces giving it a specific demographic make-up to explore language…

Phillipson, R. (2012, "Linguistic Imperialism Alive and Kicking." "The Guardian," March 13. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/mar/13/linguistic-imperialism-english-language-teaching) warned that 'linguistic imperialism is alive and kicking'. Although the validity of the linguistic imperialism construct may be…

The present study aims to analyse the phatic exchanges performed by a class of nine intercultural Master's students during a collaborative assignment which demanded online discussion using English as a lingua franca (ELF). Prior studies on the use of phatic communication in computer-mediated communication have concentrated on social networking…