In response to reading Peter Duppenthaler's interesting article Gaijin (ET Jul 89), in which he explored the word gaijin and some of the meanings it has for Japanese, I conducted in Japanese a survey among 34 Japanese students studying English in Australia at Sydney English Language Centre.

IBRAHIM K GYASI considers that ‘English in Ghana is very ill’.

A reprint of the main part of the editorial of‘Cross Currents: An International Journal of Language Teaching and Cross-Cultural Communication’, a Publication of the Language Institute of Japan, Vol. XVI, No. 2, 1989. Both ‘Cross-Currents' and ‘English Today’ welcome readers' comments, which could appear in future issues of both periodicals.

Trends in the language that ‘come from below’

What is English like in Malaysia and is it in decline?

The text of the 6th Annual Collins Dictionary Strathclyde Lecture given by Profesor Cox at Strathclyde University, Glasgow, 9th May 1989.

• Like this year's hemline, we may all simply have to endure ‘postmodernism’ until the next season. So perhaps we should face facts and start taking a few notes, to be casually dropped at our next garden party. Language, they tell us, and particularly literary language, doesn't describe the world, but only the meaningless machinery of language itself. Character and story are cultural restraints to the ‘free play’ of self and identity, and as such should be subverted. Authors shouldn't write novels any more, but rather ‘deconstruct the Western metaphysic’… Like many post-moderns, Paul Auster has a theory about the world, but, unfortunately, nothing to go with it. In his new novel, In the Country of Last Things, the narrator who travels across Auster's fragmented, entropic landscape never discovers her lost brother, but only other lost people, vast quantities of dead and disused objects. It is a world in which language neither works nor matters; it simply lies brokenly about (Scott Bradfield, ‘Thoroughly Postmodern’, The Listener, 28 Jul 88).

The nature and prospects of one of Africa's ‘new Englishes’

The venerable and variable usage of Newfoundland

The evolution of the syllabus in teaching English as a foreign language.

A report on the past and present of the major variety in West Africa