"The Routledge Applied Linguistics Reader" is an essential collection of readings for students of Applied Linguistics. Divided into five sections: Language Teaching and Learning, Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, Identity and Power and Language Use in Professional Contexts, the "Reader" takes a broad…

This study investigated how the speech act of refusal is realized in Egyptian Arabic by intermediate and advanced American learners of Arabic as a foreign language. It also compared the performance of the learners to that of native speakers of Egyptian Arabic and native speakers of American English. The study aimed to investigate the relationship…

Today's English language teaching goes beyond the norms of English spoken and taught in native-English-speaking countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, or Australia. Increasingly, a variety of countries have established, formally or informally, a kind of English unique to their own populations, and English language teachers within…

Communication is one of the keywords of the global age. The ever-increasing use of English as a World language has clearly meant that British RP and American Standard English (GA) are no longer seen as the models that learners aspire to. With the global spread of English, three major related questions come to our mind: (a) diversity and…

Supports Cheng's conclusions and points out that changes in Chinese teaching in this country must reflect the rapid changes in written characters in China itself. (CHK)

Revisits the classic debate on whether there can be an artificial creation that behaves and uses language with intelligence and agency. Argues that many moral and spiritual objections to this notion are not grounded either ethically or empirically. (Author/VWL)

World English (WE) belongs to everybody who speaks it, but it is nobody's mother tongue. Although today ever more people accept the idea that there is such a thing as WE, very few of them seem to have realized that the full implications of admitting it are much more far reaching than they had hitherto imagined. It may be that some of these…

English has gradually become the lingua franca of medical publications and conferences across Europe, with scholars from "smaller" languages opting for English because of the greater scientific impact and prestige associated with a wide international audience; at the same time, however, this transition has disrupted well-established textual…

"Talk-in-interaction: Multilingual perspectives" offers original studies of interaction in a range of languages and language varieties, including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, and Vietnamese; monolingual and bilingual interactions; and activities designed for second or foreign language learning. Conducted…

Language attitude studies have tended to assume that informants who listen to and evaluate speech stimuli are able to identify with consistent accuracy the varieties of English in question. However, misidentification could reduce the validity of any results obtained, particularly when it involves the evaluations of non-native English-speaking…

Singapore is unique in that it has not only embraced English as one of its official languages, but has made the language of its colonizers the "de facto" working language of the nation and the sole medium of instruction in all its schools, while assigning its other three official languages, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, an L2 status in the…

Pidginization and creolization are addressed from a language acquisition perspective. The 18 collected papers are organized around four areas of inquiry: (1) simplification in input to pidginization and second language acquisition, (2) simplification in interlanguage, (3) creolization and language acquisition, and (4) decreolization and language…

The foreign learner should be taught standard French, but also something about the principal social variants (plus perhaps one regional--southern French, because of its importance). He should use a restricted standard French at first, moving cautiously toward the appropriate variant, according to circumstances. (Text is in French.) (IFS/WGA)

Tests hypotheses from the model for contact-induced language change as formulated in Thomason and Kaufman (1998) and Thomason (1998). The model correctly predicts the asymmetries between the mutual influences of the Germanic and Romance varieties in Brussels, Belgium and Strasbourg, France, making it a very powerful tool for describing the…

Summarizes a keynote address that tested hypotheses from the model for contact-induced language change as formulated in Thomason and Kaufman (1998) and Thomason (1998). The model correctly predicts the asymmetries between the mutual influences of the Germanic and Romance varieties in Brussels, Belgium and Strasbourg, France, making it a very…