The internationalisation of Portuguese higher education implies multicultural challenges arising from the Portuguese language variation. Nevertheless, the perceptions of lecturers about their students are rarely analysed, though influencing learning. This will be the focus of our article, using focus groups. Findings show that lecturers experience…

Although the notion of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has been widely promoted in language classrooms, few empirical studies report how social media, such as Instagram, could be used as a virtual learning platform to engage students in learning how to communicate interculturally. Framed within the global Englishes (GE) concept as the…

This paper considers how, in the process of positioning that is implicit in every interaction, all of us employ multiple and often competing narratives when we talk about cultural identity and our relationships with new cultural environments. In interviews with newly arrived postgraduate students about their experience of travelling to study…

Through recent educational initiatives that incorporate native English speakers (NESs) in achieving English proficiency, Colombia has seen an increase in NESs working as teachers or teaching assistants. This interpretive study uses qualitative methods to understand how NESs stimulate intercultural exchanges and awareness between Colombians and…

Despite the global spread of English, it seems that voices from nonnative English teachers concerning English as an international language (EIL) are under-represented. To address the issue, this study sought to investigate the nonnative teachers' perceptions of idealized native-speaker linguistic and pragmatic norms in the EIL context.…

The apparent gap between positive attitudes and low levels of everyday usage of the language is often cited as one of the greatest challenges facing Irish language revitalisation. In a context of increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in the Republic of Ireland, this article reports on a research project which set out to explore the…

This paper is the outcome of an afterthought that assembles connections between three elements: the ambitions of cultivating cosmopolitan sensitivities that circulate vibrantly in connection with the internationalization of higher education, a course on Global Englishes at a Danish university and the sensation of vulnerability. It discusses the…

This study focuses on the syntactic properties of codeswitching within sentences uttered by bilingual speakers of Spanish and English in the USA or the so-called "Spanglish," by analysing data based on examples cited in the existing literature. To that end, I will examine the definitions of this cultural and linguistic phenomenon, make a…

The widespread use of English has--for better or worse--shaped the social and communicative norms and practices of many people the world over, and the likelihood of this continuing for the foreseeable future raises questions concerning English ownership, linguistic imperialism, language attrition, and mutual intelligibility, to name a few. These…

This case study examined how one instructor navigated between two competing discourses in an intermediate Spanish heritage language (HL) classroom: on the one hand, teaching "Standard Spanish" to help students achieve professional success, and legitimizing home linguistic practices on the other. In addition to expressing both…

"Nativeness" has been recognised for two decades now as a problematic concept within applied linguistics, yet other areas of language analysis have been slow to question it, with some continuing to treat it as a primordial fact of nature. This paper briefly examines the history of the "native speaker" and the shifts in thinking…

Sociolinguists have recently employed the notion of spatiotemporal scales to explain the changing social status of linguistic codes across social and geopolitical domains. Scales enable us to address the portability of semiotic resources in migration with great insight. In addition, unlike romanticized orientations to globalization and…

This paper reports on an investigation into the reactions of 147 participants of various ethnicities to a language practice in the USA that has been characterized as Mock Spanish, a special register in which Spanish words or phrases are used to evoke humor by indexing an often unflattering image of Spanish speakers. Research questions include…