This paper presents a 2007 study that was conducted amongst 147 young anglophone, francophone and allophone Montrealers in order to shed light on their attitudes towards English and French in terms of status and solidarity. The study made use of both a questionnaire and a matched-guise experiment. The findings indicate that while a certain amount…

This article looks at France's Loi Toubon, which mandates the use of French in private companies, to illustrate how macro-level language planning reaches a dead end if it fails to consider local contexts and involve micro-level agents. The motivations, limitations and contradictions of France's language policy in relation to companies are…

In 2012, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) implemented a requirement that all aspiring Canadians who wish to take the citizenship test must have an adequate level of English- or French-language skills, defined as Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) 4. The CLB 4 language policy directly and, we argue, problematically links language abilities…

This book critically examines current ELT practices vis-a-vis the use of English as an international lingua franca. It bridges the gap between theoretical discussion and the practical concerns of teaching English as an international language (EIL), and presents diverse approaches for preparing competent users of English in international contexts.…

Great diversity exists in the way English is being used in the world today. It is now not uncommon to hear a Korean and a Brazilian do business in English, or a Syrian and a Norwegian debating politics in an English-speaking chat room. As opportunities to use English increase and evolve, researchers are left with the difficult challenge of…

Sowden's article raises a number of questions concerning English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and criticizes it as a simplified and culturally neutral means of communication. In this response, I address the issues concerning the conceptualization and use of ELF as well as the implications for ELT. I provide up-to-date evidence of ELF research and show…

Cultural awareness (CA) has emerged over the last few decades as a significant part of conceptualizing the cultural dimension to language teaching. That is, L2 users need to understand L2 communication as a cultural process and to be aware of their own culturally based communicative behaviour and that of others. However, while CA has provided a…

The dichotomous interpretation of the assumed growth and normalisation of English as the lingua franca (ELF) of the international academy is most often polarised into a marginalisation of non-native speakers by the hegemony of native speakers on the one hand and the empowerment and upward mobility created by its potential to afford access to the…

This current piece of writing--placed, in disciplinary terms, between Psychology of learning and Methodology/Didactics--aims mainly at showing, in the light of present and updated authorized works, the unequivocal relation that is existent between the concept of distributed cognitions and task-based learning. The former was coined by Hutchins…

This paper discusses structural and ideological challenges to mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) which has in recent years been gaining ground in many educational contexts around the world. The paper argues, however, that MTB-MLE is set against these challenges - referred to here as inequalities of multilingualism - which prevent…

In the Basque Country, Northern Spain, Basque (Euskera) and Spanish are official languages. In recent decades, Basque language revitalization and the efforts to make this an unmarked language (normalization) have co-existed with the rapid increase in immigration from outside the Basque region, and most recently from outside Spain. Given the…

In the framework of the internationalization and globalization of higher education and competition for international students, the paper examines how language policy in higher education shapes the provision of study programs in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It concludes that study programs in the Baltic states mostly follow the convention of 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 paper reports on a study that examines the attitudes of university students and immigrants to the introduction of Swahili at a tertiary institution in South Africa. Data were obtained from a questionnaire survey and interviews with questions that covered the domains in which Swahili could be most useful, who should learn it and the reasons…

Although there seems to be no doubt that English as a lingua franca paradigm has affected the focus of English language teaching toward the issue of mutual intelligibility, studies involving only non-native English speakers (NNS-NNS interaction) are still in their infancy. Using a sequential analysis, this study examines how Japanese learners of…