Against the backdrop of globalisation, many English language teaching (ELT) curricula emphasise the need to promote awareness of intercultural communication. However, in many settings, the current ELT practices still predominantly focus on Anglophone cultures or interactions with Anglophone speakers, as the teachers and materials may not fully…

Despite substantial scholarship relating to word structure (Anderson, 2018), for English affixes the relationship between productivity, genre, and second language (L2) learning remains unclear. Analysis of the existing literature reveals that deadjectival noun suffixes (i.e., nouns derived from adjectives such as "appropriacy" or…

The scholarly praise for linguistic diversity stands in an interesting contrast to the way diversity in standard and non-standard languages is referred to in language policy discourse. Drawing on recent debates in Switzerland, this article focuses on ideologies on linguistic varieties in the German- and Romansh-speaking areas. The two contexts…

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and World Englishes (WE) have appeared as a reaction to the deep-rooted mentality that American and British English are the only 'proper and acceptable' type of English in terms of teaching and learning. With the world's recent position as a 'global village', English language has become the lingua franca and this…

This paper intends to provide an Optimality-theoretic analysis of word-stress learnability among Moroccan learners of English. Language acquisition, from an Optimality Theory perspective, is a process of reordering the constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. To account for stress…

This study investigated the developmental trajectories of three perceptual domains related to regional dialect competence: the linguistic domain, tested through an intelligibility in noise task; the objective indexical domain, tested through locality judgments and a free classification task; and the subjective indexical domain, tested through…

This paper investigates the phonology of L2 speech and its impact on intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) contexts. Many studies have considered speaker-related characteristics, such as speech styles and pronunciation features, that influence the intelligibility of L2 speech for both nonnative speakers (NNS) and native speakers…

Language variation in a context is influenced by various factors. While there has been some research regarding English language variation, there has not been much research pertaining to Chinese variation (Gao, 2017; Xu, 2015). In the present study, we examined different language usages among different social classes of Tianjin in China in order to…

This corpus-based study aims to identify the interactional and interactive metadiscourse markers in terms of frequency in the abstract and discussion sections of research articles on linguistics, written in English by native, Egyptian, and Saudi researchers. To attain this aim, 60 research articles have been randomly compiled and analyzed…

The present study sought to investigate how non-native English-speaking teachers in Iran recognize the legitimacy of different emerging varieties of English and how they perceive native speaker language norms and the linguistic diversity of present-day English use. Participants included 210 teachers of English from the Persian-speaking context,…

Although writing scholars have increasingly emphasized the need for more equitable approaches to language (difference) in the composition classroom, specific examples of teaching praxis remain sorely needed. In this article, we offer three sets of activities that we have used in our own classes designed for multilingual students. In formulating…

Factors that affect comprehension of accented English (e.g., Harding, 2011) have been well studied, but little research examines how listeners' proficiency affects their sensitivity to second language (L2) accent. The current study investigated the effect of test takers' English proficiency on their comprehension ratings and ability to correctly…

Pakistani English is a variety of English language concerning Sentence structure, Morphology, Phonology, Spelling, and Vocabulary. The one semantic element, which makes the investigation of Pakistani English additionally fascinating is the Vocabulary. Pakistani English uses many loan words from Urdu language and other local dialects, which have…

Learning and Reading Assistant (LARA) is an open source platform that enables conversion of plain texts into an interactive multimedia form designed to support second- and foreign-language (L2) learners. In this workshop, we illustrate the open source aspects using collaborative work carried out during a six-week summer project at the Árni…

Research on nativelike variation in second language (L2) systems indicates that learners studying abroad may adapt to regional norms as they build sociolinguistic competence (e.g., Kanwit & Solon, 2013; Salgado-Robles, 2014). Spanish exhibits variation between the intensifiers "muy" [very] and "bien" [very] across numerous…