Volume 4, Issue 1

The adoption of the Millennium Declaration in 2000 by 189 member-states of the United Nations defined a critical moment for global cooperation as leaders committed themselves to achieve eight specific development objectives known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. As the largest and arguably most ambitious initiative on the international development agenda, the MDGs have become the normative framework for human development, and the MDG language of goals and targets now shapes the global debate about how to define and measure development. Examination of the progress achieved thus far towards the MDGs pinpoints language at the very heart of major fault lines in the development process: those most often left behind are language minorities. Keeping the promise of the MDGs requires a new understanding of the critical role of language in human development. Because there can be no true development with linguistic development, only by putting language at the center of development can we close the gaps and meet key targets of the MDGs and other global agendas such as Education for All (EFA) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). This article issues an urgent call for linguists to make their voices heard.

Discourses on terror have been encrypted in the events of 9/11 in 2001 perhaps more than any single event since the end of the Cold War. Even though these discourses are projected as a global phenomenon, very few studies have analysed how they are framed by non-U.S. actors, especially by al-Qaeda and to some extent al-Shabaab. An analysis of discourses of terror by al-Qaeda is invaluable in determining how the U.S. is represented from the perspectives of the “other.” Using Critical Discourse Analysis as an analytic and interpretive framework, this article analyses al-Qaeda declassified intelligence reports captured by the U.S. in order to establish a view of “terror” from an al-Qaeda insider perspective. The article argues that there is a convergence of ideas and overlap in terms of the discourses of terror between the U.S. and al-Qaeda, which is ironic because of the firm distinction made by the U.S. government between “us” – the civilized nations – and “them” – the barbarian, evil murderers of innocent civilians.

This paper looks at the language of the street from a perspective that draws on linguistics, writing system research and linguistic landscapes. It describes the totality of signs in two inner city streets in Newcastle upon Tyne, one virtually monolingual, one part of Chinatown, in terms of who controls the sign (licensor, owner, author, writer, reader), of serif and sans serif typefaces, and capital letters versus lowercase, and of which languages are used. It classifies the signs into: (i) locating and attracting, such as brassplates, (ii) informing, such as opening hours, (iii) controlling movement and behaviour, such as traffic signs, (iv) service signs, such as manhole covers. Multilingualism in these streets takes the form either of ‘atmospheric’ multilingualism that does not necessarily expect readers to understand the signs or of ‘community’ multilingualism that serves the needs of the Chinese community. Important aspects include: the necessity for all signs to be licensed and owned; the crucial role of the material that signs are made of; the ubiquity of signs in lowercase throughout; the almost total absence of punctuation marks; and the widespread use of serif forms of letters. The language of the street is therefore not a defective version of written language but a distinctive genre with its own grammar and conventions that needs extensive further investigation.

Applied linguistics, with its sub-domains of language planning and policy can make significant contributions to language teaching. In order to explore this issue, the authors focus on the contested arena of language minority instruction in the United States. Attention is given specifically to the state of Arizona, where, recently, its educational policies have captured national and even international attention. Of particular concern is Arizona's implementation of a restrictive language policy for the instruction of English Language Learners (ELLs). The authors present a framework for reviewing the relationship between language policies and teacher preparation. Applying this framework to Arizona's teacher preparation for ELLs, we find that the state sanctioned curriculum transmitted a deficit view of students who speak a language other than English and provided prospective teachers with few alternative approaches for their instruction. In response this outcome, the authors recommend that applied linguistics content needs to be embedded within teacher preparation.

This paper explores the effects of linguistic diversity on equality before the law, by surveying sociolinguistic and applied research that investigates interaction between speakers of different languages in a variety of legal institutions, including genres such as courtroom talk, police interrogations, and asylum interviews. While the institutions have official languages that are used by agents working in them, many people who interact with them speak other languages and have limited or no proficiency in the official language. The paper examines how language choice is determined in such settings, considering factors such as legal statutes, language proficiency assessments, and language ideologies. It then investigates the indexical and pragmatic consequences of language choice for lay participants, whether they speak in the official language (their L2) or in another language (often their L1), but mediated by an interpreter. Demonstrating how interpreter-mediated interaction differs from interaction in the same language, the paper challenges the common assumption that competent interpreting can put a person in the same position as a speaker of the official language would be. Finally, alternative approaches to multilingualism in interaction and entextualization are explored, which address some of the disadvantages that speakers of non-official language face.

It has been largely accepted that face-to-face consecutive interpreting should be studied as a communicative event and an interactive process. Linguistic methods, including conversation analysis, have been used to investigate interactive elements in the discourse, such as turn-taking, adjacency pair, overlapping speech, repair, etc. Researchers acknowledge that participants' verbal behaviours in the turn-by-turn interactions are co-constructed by all participants; however, little has been said about the co-constructive mechanism. This research aimed to provide a better understanding of the generic mechanism of such co-construction, hoping to inform the training for interpreters and medical professionals who work with them. Using conversation analysis, I recorded seven naturally occurring interpreter-mediated GP consultations in the UK. Participants included two GPs, three professional and ad hoc interpreters and seven patients speaking either Urdu, Mirpuri Punjabi or Czech. My analysis elaborates on the inter-determination between the types of information the primary speakers (doctor and patient) produce in the current turn and the consequent actions the interpreter undertakes in the next turn, and also points out that such inter-determination is not definite in that the interpreter's turn design is also influenced by their own characteristics. This analysis emphasises that the interpreter, both professional and ad hoc, is key to the quality of the doctor-patient communication and doctors can alter their own behaviours to optimise the interpreter's turn-design and thus the communication outcome. This research provides an insight into the co-construction of the triadic interactions in interpreted medical consultations. With a better understanding of this mechanism, doctors may be taught to alter their verbal behaviours to optimise the interpreter's performance and thus improve their communication with patients. This interactional framework may also help us understand other critical issues of power, identify, cultural competence, etc.

Many researchers have tried to assess the number of words adults know. A general conclusion which emerges from such studies is that vocabularies of English monolingual adults are very large with considerable variation. This variation is important given that the vocabulary size of schoolchildren in the early years of school is thought to materially affect subsequent educational attainment. The data is difficult to interpret, however, because of the different methodologies which researchers use. The study in this paper uses the frequency-based vocabulary size test from Goulden et al (1990) and investigates the vocabulary knowledge of undergraduates in three British universities. The results suggest that monolingual speaker vocabulary sizes may be much smaller than is generally thought with far less variation than is usually reported. An average figure of about 10,000 English word families emerges for entrants to university. This figure suggests that many students must struggle with the comprehension of university level texts.

More and more students study outside their own countries and by 2020 a rise to 7 million international students is predicted world-wide. The present study investigates the level of language proficiency that is necessary for international students to study successfully at universities in English-speaking countries and how this proficiency can be measured. Standardized tests such as the International English Language Test System (IELTS) or the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) are carefully developed and constantly scrutinized by the research community, and they provide a valid cut-off point for entry to university, but they do not seem to be good predictors of study success on their own. This is mainly due to the fact that most students who enter universities with these tests have similar scores which leave researchers with a truncated sample where correlations between these test scores and study success, e.g. marks obtained after one year, are necessarily low. The present study investigates alternative measures of language proficiency that can predict the study success of international students. In a longitudinal study with 74 international students a battery of language tests was used at the beginning of the academic year to predict the average marks that the students obtained at the end of the academic year. Several multiple regressions show that between 33% and 96% of the marks can be predicted with tests based mainly on vocabulary knowledge. The findings of the present study have implications for decisions on admission criteria and for language support provision in addition to subject specific learning. There may be many factors other than language proficiency that influence study success of international students such as cultural factors, motivation and familiarity with the subject area. However, our findings indicate that language proficiency and especially vocabulary knowledge is the key factor that explains in some cases almost entirely the final marks that the students achieve.

In this paper I provide a review of the historical development of different research paradigms and approaches adopted in studies on classroom code-switching. I also discuss the difficulties and problems faced by this field of studies and share some of my own critical reflections on how this field might move forward in the future, speaking from the position of a researcher who has been engaged in this area of studies for close to three decades.