English as a lingua franca: a specific example.

The status of the English language as the lingua franca of the global information society is beyond dispute, but what is not so clear is whether it is capable of fulfilling that role efficiently. In the following article Ross Smith responds to the supporters of Global English by examining the qualities that an ideal international auxiliary language would possess and then discussing the extent to which those qualities are to be found in modern English.

With a current figure reaching more than 26 million (Kementrian, 2015), Indonesia is second after China in terms of the number of children learning English as a foreign language in elementary schools. This paper examines the development of elementary English education in Indonesia, and shows that it has been undergoing a great transformation in recent years. The paper begins by providing an overview of policy developments relating to elementary English education in the country. It then discusses current practices in elementary English education in relevant areas, focusing in particular on classroom size and length of instruction, the role and status of teachers, and pedagogical concerns. Finally, the paper analyzes the prospects for elementary English education in the foreseeable future.

SINCE ITS introduction in the 18th century, English in China has gone through three stages: partial colonization and Chinese Pidgin English (CPE); a Chinese-influenced variety often called Chinglish; and a more recent indigenization that has resulted in a variety known as both Chinese English and, more recently (with a subtle change of emphasis), China English. This paper discusses these stages and calls for more attention to be paid to the nativization of English in China in the 21st century.

Some notes and comments on the English usage of Trinidad and Tobago. The paper argues that for Trinidadians to think in terms of speaking and owning ‘only’ their distinctive Creole, setting aside their long-established indigenous variety of Standard English as if not really their own, is a complex distortion of social and linguistic reality. The reality has emerged from social, cultural, and psychological factors present in the Anglophone Caribbean at large, includes both conventional English and the Creole with which it inter-operates on a daily basis, and is an issue that stands in need of a positive revision that acknowledges the islands' dual inheritance.

The world is shrinking – globalization has been one of the main forces transforming today's life patterns. One of its manifestations, one that has proliferated substantially to what was customary just a few decades ago, is global travel, in various forms and for various purposes – and one of the most important ones of these purposes is tourism. The opportunity and the infrastructure to travel to interesting places pretty much anywhere fairly easily and at affordable prices has been bringing people to all corners of the world. Admittedly, the word ‘affordable’ in this sentence refers predominantly to people from developed, industrialized, wealthy countries, so socially this is a skewed and selective process. But the fact as such remains, and it has important ramifications for and adds new facets to the forms and functions of global English.

As the suicides by a few students at one of South Korea's (hereafter Korea) most prestigious universities drew a great deal of attention from the public, partial blame went to the new institutional policy imposed by the university's top administrator: exclusive use of English as the medium of instruction across the entire curriculum (McDonald, 2011). The fanatical pursuit of English education and the overall status of the English language in Korean society have been well documented in the literature (e.g., Jeon & Lee, 2006; Jeong, 2004; Lee & Shin, 2008; Park, 2009; Seth, 2002). However, little has been written about another controversial trend, English-only instruction, recently introduced at a few selective institutions of higher education in Korea.

China has since 2000 started marketing itself as a hub for international education, and there has been a push by the government to attract a large number of foreign students to the country's universities. Sharma (2011) reported that there were around 260,000 foreign students studying in China's universities, and that the aim of the Ministry of Education was to attract around 500,000 foreign students by 2020. However, as China is a so-called ‘emerging destination’ for foreign students, perhaps not surprisingly, the vast majority - around two-thirds - of its foreign student population is currently from the Asia region (Study in China, 2012). Although the largest number of foreign students in China study Chinese language programs, an increasing number are attracted by such programs as engineering and medicine. These courses are also being promoted as English-medium programs, with whole degree programs offered from undergraduate to postgraduate levels in English. Little research has been carried out on how these programs are being conducted, the reception of these programs by foreign students in China, and the impact this is having on China's universities. The attraction of international students to China's higher education institutions would no doubt alter the dynamics of language use on these university campuses. This article reports on the reception and use of English by foreign university students in one such international degree program: international undergraduate students studying for a degree in Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) in the School of Medicine of one of China's leading universities. This case study provides an example of how English-medium instruction programs are currently being used to attract foreign students to China's universities, partly in order for these universities to promote themselves as ‘international’ institutions (see also Botha, 2014; and Bolton and Botha, 2015).

According to Bolton (2013), Chinese university students are invariably multilingual, not only acquiring English at school, but increasingly outside of their formal curricula, through the Internet, music, computer games, movies, and television series. Indeed, many of these students are also highly mobile, and in most cases migrate throughout Greater China (and abroad) in order to pursue higher education degrees. Bolton (2012, 2013) also points out that current theorizing about English in Greater China needs to take into account what he calls ‘the language worlds’ of these young people, especially with regard to how they use various languages in various aspects of their lives, increasingly sampling different ‘worlds’, both ‘physical’ as well as ‘imaginary’ (see also Blommaert, 2010). Studies of migration and mobility within Greater China – particularly with regard to how this relates to the use of English in the context of local languages and language varieties – have received very little attention. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a sociolinguistic account of the contemporary use of English in China's higher education, by specifically reporting on a recent large-scale sociolinguistic study that was carried out in Macau and Guangzhou, in southern China. The study reported on in this paper captures the increasing use of English as a medium (or additional medium) of instruction in two universities at these locations. The study also reveals how English is used in the personal lives of ordinary Chinese students.

With the acceleration of globalization, universities in East Asia are increasingly under pressure to compete internationally, and ‘internationalization’ of tertiary education in the region has topped the education reform agenda of each government (Mok & James, 2005). In an effort to join the league of world-class universities and attract international students, East Asian universities have expanded the number of English-medium lectures (EMLs) offered as part of their internationalization strategy, and no country has embraced the move more than Korea (Newsweek, February 26, 2007). As of 2010, all the classes at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) are conducted in English only and 93 percent of classes at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), the nation's two best science and engineering universities, with rates of EML averaging around 10 to 30 percent among the top 7 universities in Korea as of the first half of 2008 (Chosun Ilbo, March 10, 2008). Reforms of Korean universities characterized by the introduction of EMLs have been praised by many local as well as top international media such as the New York Times and the Science Magazine. Often lost amid the hype, however, are the challenges facing local students in learning complex material in English, a language which most have learned only as a foreign language and to limited levels of proficiency. This article compares opinions expressed in the mainstream media with those from university presses run by student organizations that have been most active in expanding English-medium programs by analyzing articles related to EMLs. The aim of this comparative research is to find out if there are any observable differences in views presented by these two types of print media, in an attempt to shed light on the move to EMLs in this exclusively monolingual country.

A discussion of the fashionable concept ‘International English’ and its signs in so many non-Anglophone cities

A report on ICLE (the International Corpus of Learner English), a project that collects written work from, and analyses the usage of, advanced adult EFL learners

A discussion of the kinds of English emerging in the world at large and in the European Union. In recent years, the world's Anglophone media, in the company of a range of other observers, have routinely been calling English ‘the world's lingua franca’. As a result, the phrase is now something of a cliché. We're all ‘global’ now, and need to use the first truly universal language, whether we are business people, politicians, teachers, tourists, or terrorists.

A case study of foreign and especially English influence on the language of shop signs and shop windows in three European cities.

PEOPLE have always worried about language purity: ‘No greater harm can be done to a nation than taking away its national character and the idiosyncrasies of its language’ (Immanuel Kant, over 200 years ago). ‘Kein Denglisch in deutschen Wörterbüchern’ is a citation of the German Verein zur Wahrung der deutschen Sprache e.V. (‘Association for the Protection of the German Language’)1, founded in 1997. Theirs is a struggle to keep German free of too much foreign-language influence: most notably English.

To be engaged in the economic, political and technological processes of globalization, higher education institutions around the world have included internationalization as part of their long-term mission, and China is no exception. The number of international students on campus is a well-recognized index of the universities’ internationalized status. According to the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the People's Republic of China, in 2016 there were 442,773 international students studying in China, 209,966 of whom were enrolled in degree programmes in Chinese higher education institutions, and 63,867 (47.42%) studied as postgraduate students (MOE, 2017).

THIS ARTICLE discusses present trends in the use of English in Finland, paying attention to the specific sociohistorical character of the country with its long history of Finnish-Swedish bilingualism. It has been argued that the other Nordic countries are developing from EFL to ESL countries; is Finland heading the same way? If so, at what stage is the process? We shall first give a brief overview of the theoretical background and of the historical development of the language situation in Finland. The present state of the use of English is outlined next, with the focus on education and on areas where the danger of domain loss is most imminent. At the end we discuss the ongoing changes in terms of the identity-forming function of language and the present diffusion in which the national language does not necessarily play a traditional role.

An account of the teaching of EFL to university non-English majors in the 1990s

This article reflects on the spread of English in South Africa, especially in the wake of the large-scale changes following the collapse of apartheid in the early 1990s. These changes allowed freer mixing of young South Africans of all backgrounds than had been hitherto possible in a segregated society. In particular, schools formerly reserved for Whites, opened their doors to initially small, then increasing numbers of pupils from other race groups: viz. Black, Coloured and Indian (this group is sometimes described as black in the general sense, in lower case, or non-whites in former apartheid-speak). The term Coloured in South Africa denotes communities of multiple ancestry, whose background encompasses the now obsolescent indigenous Khoe-San languages of the country as well as Bantu, European and Asian languages.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Chinese English in the contemporary age is the growing practice of code-mixing on China's Internet. This study uses participant observation to explore the ‘mixing’ practices of Chinese netizens in online social networking communities, by focusing on code-mixing in domains of government administration, pop culture and social interaction. The results of the study suggest that a mixed-code variety of Chinese English is gaining popularity in China's homegrown social networks. For the young generation in mainland China, ‘mixing’ has become part of their everyday communication practices as they build multicultural identities, transform the traditional social relationships and practice their social responsibilities, using new communication technologies as well as their linguistic and cultural repertoires.

The concept of linguistic landscape (LL) covers all of the linguistic objects that mark the public space, i.e. any written sign one observes from road signs to advertising billboards, to the names of shops, streets or schools (Landry & Bourhis, 1997). Because it both shapes and is shaped by social and cultural associations (Ben-Rafael, 2009; Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010: 6–23), the LL has proved an important area for investigating the dynamics of major aspects of social life (e.g. Backhaus, 2006; Huebner, 2006; Curtin, 2009; Lado, 2011; Papen, 2012). One strand of this research is particularly concerned with the role of LL in relation to ethnolinguistic vitality that ‘makes a group likely to behave as a distinctive and active collective entity in intergroup relations’ (Giles, Bourhis & Taylor, 1977: 308). The higher the vitality an ethnolinguistic group enjoys, the more it will be able to use language so as to survive and thrive as a collective entity.