Volume 5, Issue 1

ABSTRACT The study examines perceptions of nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English toward accented speech and its relation with identity from the perspective of English as an international language (EIL). The data were collected from 51 Iranian EFL learners by means of questionnaires and interviews. The findings revealed the participants’ considerable uncertainty concerning the relationship between accent and socioeconomic and educational status as well as their reluctance to display their L1 identity through L1-accented speech. Furthermore, the results indicated that the participants are highly appreciative of NS accent, hold negative stereotypes of NNS accents and judge NNSs unfavorably. They exhibited a marked tendency to sound similar to NSs, regarding them as the best model of English accent to follow. The participants’ negative evaluations of NNSs’ accents of English are evidence of the dominance of Inner Circle speakers’ norms among the Expanding Circle speakers with implications for learning and teaching English as an international language.

ABSTRACT The global spread of English has led to the emergence of non-native varieties of English in the world and this has, as a consequence, prompted many scholars to discuss and acknowledge World Englishes (WEs, i.e., non-native varieties of English) in addition to World English (WE; i.e., English as an international language). The present study set out to assess Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ attitudes toward WE and WEs using a questionnaire, adopted from previous relevant research, and focus-group interviews. The participants consisted of 38 EFL learners. The results revealed the remarkably positive attitudes of the participants toward WE but not toward WEs nor to “Iranian English” (i.e., “Expanding Circle”). The findings therefore indicated that Iranian language learners perceive the Standard English spoken in English speaking countries such as the US and UK (i.e., “Inner Circle”) as the only legitimate reference group.

ABSTRACT Many news publishers have integrated their news on Facebook to attract wider readership. On this popular social networking site, online news readers can contribute their comments to the news post and interact with their fellow readers. This form of user-generated contents has attracted increasing scholarship and raised concerns over the salient conflict and incivility in its language, the low quality of polarized argumentation, and the complex interaction among news commenters. To contribute to the current lack of in-depth qualitative description of such reader-reader interaction, the current study explores the types of communicative moves performed by Facebook users in their news comments, the patterning of those moves, and the attitudinal language used to realize such moves. Based on the two Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) frameworks of speech functions and appraisal for a close analysis of the moves and attitudinal lexis in Facebook news readers’ comments to one news article, the research has shown that exchanges of Facebook news comments developed in different directions with varying levels and complex patterns of support and confrontation between interactants as well as different appraisal language use. Besides substantiating the existing description of online news readers’ interaction, the paper argues that the SFL frameworks of conversation analysis are helpful for understanding CMC but more updated descriptions and a more visual approach to presentation of findings are needed to make the frameworks more relevant for online interactive discourses.