In this article, we cast a critical eye over a culturally dominant ideology--"native-speakerism." This ideology postulates that those deemed to be native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) are preferable over non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs), both as legitimate language models of English and as effective practitioners of…

'Internationalisation' in Japanese higher education (HE) is largely imagined in terms of English language acquisition. Native speakers of English are therefore desirable HE employees. However, 'native-speakerism' also reflects hierarchical notions of English language forms. In Japan, US and Anglo forms of English are privileged over others, which…

The global prevalence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) across diverse linguacultural communities within the three circles invites an in-depth analysis of its phonological and lexicogrammatical features, especially among non-native English speakers. This qualitative study investigated these features among 30 Thai students from English and…

This qualitative study investigates the language socialization experiences and identity construction of a group of Chinese students when they interact with their international peers, in a transnational university in China. This study is informed by the recent critical ethnographic sociolinguistics studies (e.g. Blommaert 2010), language…

Academic writing, particularly writing research articles, is an indispensable part of every major in higher education. Hyland (2004) argued that a valuable means of exploring academic writing, and comparing the rhetorical features and preferences of different discourse communities, is through the metadiscourse analysis of the text. The present…

Chinese is now a global language because of the global flow of Chinese people throughout the world. This development provides an important intellectual basis for engaging in the transnational exchange of Chinese theoretical knowledge. The argument developed here is that learning from international (and migrant) research students from China is a…

The Grammar Gang blog has now passed its fourth anniversary as a borderless, non-proprietary language and learning online classroom. It gives wing to the aspirations of academic staff from four universities to explore language and learning across hemispheres. The Blog's recent birthday provides a timely opportunity to explore how this…

Little research in economic education has dealt with MBA programs. The authors investigated student performance in a microeconomics/managerial economics course taught in a one-year MBA program at the German International School of Management and Administration in Hanover, Germany, during the 2002-5 academic years. After controlling for other…

This article reports on a research project on proofreading, prompted by its proliferation in contemporary higher education. The article is framed by an academic literacies perspective and develops the concept of "writtenness", which draws attention to both the underlying culturally and socially constructed values relating to the…

Over the centuries, first Latin and then French, German, and Russian have receded in perceived importance as languages of science. Other powerful languages with extensive internal scientific discourse, such as Japanese and Chinese, have always been largely excluded. The dominance of English has elevated the reputation of English-language…

Is it possible to teach someone to be an entrepreneur? Is innovation something that can be assessed and taught in a classroom? Teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship answers these and other questions by focusing on a teaching experiment in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, wherein classes of English-speaking Singaporeans and…

This study compares quantitative and qualitative results for task-based second language (L2) grammar instruction conducted as whole-class, teacher-led discourse (TLD) versus small-group, learner-led discourse (LLD). Participants included 78 English-speaking adults from six university classes of beginning L2 Spanish, with two assigned to each…

To investigate the relationship between speech and meaning, a word recognition study was conducted that required 20 beginning learners of Chinese to pronounce and later identify in English 46 Chinese words. The correlational analysis indicated a significant relationship between being able to pronounce and being able to identify Chinese words.…

In this pilot study looking at interlanguage prosody, normal, and contrastively focused constructions in English were collected from four English-as-a-first-language speakers and four Japanese-as-a-first-language speakers. These productions were then played to six native English speakers to see how well they could identify the stress placement of…

Overlapping samples of 191, 142, and 87 undergraduates rated pairs of sentences for the frequency and acceptability of the syntactic constructions represented to investigate the feasibility of using such ratings in the study of syntactic forms. The results indicated that subjects are consistent in their judgments of both the frequency and…