This study investigated the acquisition of an Egyptian phonological variant by student participants in a study abroad program at The American University in Cairo. Participants completed pre- and post-study abroad Simulated Oral Proficiency Interviews (SOPIs). The SOPI data showed a move toward an Egyptian realization of the phonological variable…

This study investigated English teachers' use of learners' L1 (Arabic) in college classrooms in Kuwait. The purpose of the study was three-fold: (1) to describe the functions for which L1 was employed by the teachers, (2) to explore the affective, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic factors that may have led teachers to use L1 in L2 teaching,…

This study explores the attitudes of raters of English speaking tests towards the global spread of English and the challenges in rating speakers of Indian English in descriptive speaking tasks. The claims put forward by language attitude studies indicate a validity issue in English speaking tests: listeners tend to hold negative attitudes towards…

Teacher education represents an essential step to raise awareness of the sociolinguistic changes brought about by the current pluralization of English and by its lingua franca role. Within the pre-service teacher education programs run at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Verona, Italy, part of the English language…

Voice in mobile texts has received attention lately among scholars in literacy, sociolinguistics, and rhetoric. Some sociolinguists of globalisation have argued that uptake is shaped by the norms of each literacy regime. Though texts of non-western communities will gain positive uptake in local literacy regimes according to their own norms and…

The present contribution focuses on Benigni's auteur film "La vita è bella" (Italy, 1997) as a tool for the development of language competence in L2 English, Spanish and German, as well as of translation skills from Italian into these languages. The project, developed at the CLASS Language Centre at the University for Foreigners of…

Hickey's (1991) article ["Leisure reading in a second language: An experiment with audio tapes." "Language, Culture and Curriculum," 4(2), 119-131. Retrieved from http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2168/10.1080/07908319109525098] reported the benefits of audio-support for L2 reading of real books, showing gains in fluency and motivation among…

Situated at the intersection of sociolinguistic and educational planes, English as a medium-of-instruction debate has always been at the crux of the intense debates, and offers a lens for a systematic investigation of the spread of English in Turkey. As Turkey is moving toward greater integration with the European Union and promoting its…

Teachers have an agentive role as they interpret, evaluate and develop language policies and practices. In the current study we interviewed a bilingual pre-school teacher in Finland during the first year of implementing a new way of working bilingually with a class of monolingual children. Applying nexus analysis, we explored the teacher…

Extending earlier research on the concept of Willingness to Communicate (WTC) (e.g., MacIntyre et al., 1998), this paper tests the WTC concept on a secondary school in Singapore where English is used as a lingua franca. In doing so, a layer of complexity is added to the WTC concept. By focusing on classroom interactions involving one immigrant…

The present article deals with language choice as communicative strategies in the language learning environment of an English-medium content and language integrated learning (CLIL) workshop at an auto mechanics class in a Swedish upper secondary school. The article presents the organisation and functions of language alternations (LAs) which are…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a mobile-assisted dialect awareness programme on the dialect attitudes of pre-service English language teachers in Turkey. The study adopted a pre-test and a post-test design including 58 first-grade pre-service English language teachers in two different classes. The experimental group…

In this article, four second language writing specialists address the following significant questions related to foreign language (FL) writing instruction: (1) How is FL writing different from English as a second language writing? (2) How does the sociolin-guistic role of a given FL influence how writing is employed in the overall curriculum for…

This article will reflect on the risks of a careless application of "safe-talk", a fruitful analytical concept that has been widely used in classroom discourse studies to link chorus-like repetition sequences with certain institutional and social processes related to either post-colonialism or migration. The discussion will draw on a…

The present paper discusses the components of language teachers' awareness, which should differ qualitatively and quantitatively from that of language learners and users. It is argued that especially teachers of English, the European lingua franca, should develop plurilingual awareness to train learners to become multilingual citizens. This…