This author, a lecturer in the Education Program at the University of Washington (Bothell), relates an experience that dated back to an invitation to give a talk at the Gwangju International Center (GIC) in Korea in the Summer of 2011. Min spoke about culturally-embedded writing practices across nations and presented some practical strategies that…

Using English as a global communicating tool makes Taiwanese people have to speak in English in diverse international situations. However, consonants and vowels in English are not all effortless for them to articulate. This phonological reduction study explores concepts about phonological (articulating system) approximation. From Taiwanese folks'…

This case study aims to reveal how conceptualization of native speakership was constructed and reinforced in a South Korean university classroom of English as a foreign language (EFL). In addition, it examines how this conceptualization positions native speakers, a non-native EFL teacher, and learners, and what learning opportunities were provided…

This study reports on findings of an investigation into Chinese students' attitudes towards varieties of English before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. One hundred and eight college students in mainland China evaluated six English speeches by two American English speakers, two British English speakers, and two Chinese English speakers for social…

Because it has been established that there is a local variety of English that has blossomed in the Philippines, there are crucial debates specifically on what pedagogical standard must be used in teaching English in Philippine schools. In spite of the growing number of researches on Philippine English (PE) and the publication of its own…

This is a corpus-based investigation of "also" and "too" in 11 registers of Indian English. The corpus used for this study is a combination of a Corpus of Contemporary Indian English (CCIE), and certain sections of ICE-India. The study: (1) determines the proportions of "also" and "too" with respect to each…

The primary aim of this dissertation was to investigate the relationship between speech perception and speech production difficulties among Japanese second language (L2) learners of English, in their learning complex syllable structures. Japanese L2 learners and American English controls were tested in a categorical ABX discrimination task of…

Function (i.e., grammatical) words very frequently lack word-level stress and display phonetic reduction relative to content (i.e., lexical) words. However, word-class (function vs . content) may not be the only factor that affects phonetic realization of function words; prosodic and syntactic context can also play a significant role in…

The purpose of this paper is to examine cross-cultural differences in gesture frequency and the extent to which exposure to two cultures would affect the gesture frequency of bilinguals when speaking in both languages. The Chinese-speaking monolinguals from China, English-speaking monolinguals from America, and Chinese-English bilinguals from…

Besides language competence, international students must develop a systematic approach to processing information and follow up with co-construction of the knowledge acquired. Critical thinking is a crucial principle commonly required in North American universities for evaluating academic texts. This practice may present certain difficulties for…

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the discursive process of the negotiation and construction of teacher identity in a US-based Master of Arts for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (MATESOL) program. This study explores how both native-English-speaking (NES) and non-native-English-speaking (NNES) student teachers'…

This interlanguage pragmatics study of linguistic expressions of affect focuses on how Japanese learners of English may express themselves in an affect-laden speech act of indirect complaint. The English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' data are compared with the baseline data of native speakers of Japanese (JJ) and American English (AA). The…

The shifts underway in contemporary social conditions call for a new alignment between the specializations constituting English Studies: namely, literature, applied linguistics, and rhetoric and composition. Postcolonial social movements have generated new language, textual, and literary practices. These developments bring to the fore practices…

This book is an in-depth examination of education and media under occupation. The contributors to this volume engage dialogue to explore these domains and their roles and functioning under occupation while keeping an eye toward resolution, using the on-going conflict between Palestine and Israel as the focus. The uniqueness of this collection is…

Purpose: K. Nishi and D. Kewley-Port (2007) trained Japanese listeners to perceive 9 American English monophthongs and showed that a protocol using all 9 vowels (fullset) produced better results than the one using only the 3 more difficult vowels (subset). The present study extended the target population to Koreans and examined whether protocols…