Volume 5, Issue 1 -

Building on the extensive ELF research that aims to reconceptualise English as a resource that can be appropriated and exploited without allegiance to its historically native speakers, this article explores the issue of English in China by examining New Chinglish that has been created and shared by a new generation of Chinese speakers of English in China and spread through the new media. This new form of English has distinctive Chinese characteristics and serves a variety of communicative, social and political purposes in response to the Post-Multilingualism challenges in China and beyond. I approach New Chinglish from a Translanguaging perspective, a theoretical perspective that is intended to raise fundamental questions about the validity of conventional views of language and communication and to contribute to the understanding of the Post-Multilingualism challenges that we face in the twenty-first century.

This paper reports on several studies whose common theme is the elicitation of the lexical preferences of speakers of English in localized and globalized settings. Findings from analyses of various corpora show that there exists a relatively small set of preferred words that speakers of English rely on regardless of where the interaction takes place, with whom they are interacting, and what the purpose of the interaction is. Results also show that these lexical preferences are consistently prevalent to the extent that it is possible to advance the hypothesis that a relatively stable dominant vocabulary dynamically emerges out of ELF speaker interactions in order to serve certain communicative functions.

The fact that in the last few decades English has become the international language of scientific communication has brought with it an increasing pressure on non-Anglophone academics to disseminate their research internationally in English. Some disciplinary areas, such as Sociology, which have traditionally been dominated by Anglophone writers, are witness to an increasing number of non-native academics publishing in their most prestigious journals, hosted either in the United States or in Great Britain. This may have implications for the way academic texts are being written. This paper focuses on the evolution of the prestigious journal Social Science Research since it was launched in 1972. My research hypothesis is that the fact that an increasing number of non-Anglophone writers are contributing to the journal may be modifying the rhetorical level of the research article abstracts. The analysis carried out in this study identifies processes of evolution in terms of simplification of the conventional rhetorical structure used for abstracts, and hybridization, which in fact involves a higher degree of textual complexity. The new, hybrid, patterns identified here may be the result of processes of contact and evolution, reshaping old forms into new forms that model English conventional patterns in innovative and creative ways. Further enquiry is needed to test the preliminary results yielded by the present study.

In teacher education, students not only construct content knowledge but examine theory through their own experiences to be able to apply it to practice in equitable education. Teacher education prepares students for a certain educational system and usually it is the one in which the students are themselves educated. International higher education programmes in countries where English is not an official language use English as a lingua franca (ELF) for teaching and learning. However, participants come to a communicative situation with their own history, past experiences, knowledge, and their own frames of reference. This article looks at an excerpt from a particular university teaching session in English-medium instruction (EMI) teacher education in Finland where a group of international students from diverse educational, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds negotiate for meaning and common understanding. A discussion about an ethical dilemma related to student assessment is analyzed qualitatively turn-by-turn to show how communicative resources help overcome mis- and non-understanding that stems from, besides linguistic difficulties, understanding contexts in different ways. The achievement of mutual intelligibility and individual learning required the participation of many to allow for the linguistic challenges of understanding less familiar varieties and uses of English, and interpret the cultural and contextual levels behind the utterances.

The long-standing research in World Englishes (WE) and, more recently, in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has greatly contributed to problematizing several areas in connection to English Language Teaching, highlighting in particular the importance of teacher education as a first and fundamental step towards a more “inclusive” and “realistic” approach in ELT. A WE- and ELF-informed teacher education can indeed play a pivotal role in promoting awareness of the sociolinguistic and cultural changes brought about by the pluralization of English on the one hand, and of its function as a lingua franca on the other hand, and contribute to fostering a critical evaluation of ELT approaches, and materials, traditionally based on an Anglo-centric monolithic view of language and culture, taking account of different viewpoints in connection to the current modified reality of English. This paper will illustrate findings from an ongoing research study aimed at investigating trainee teachers’ beliefs concerning ELT pedagogic practices inclusive of the current pluralization of English. The study has been carried out with trainee teachers of English attending pre-service TFA ( Tirocinio Formativo Attivo ) and PAS ( Percorso Abilitante Speciale ) teacher education courses at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Verona, Italy, where part of the English Language course focused on issues related to WE, ELF and their pedagogical implications. By means of questionnaires and interviews, as well as class reflections and materials developed by the trainees as part of the course, the aim was to investigate to what extent a WE- and ELF-aware teacher education can contribute to expanding and/or modifying teachers’ awareness of the above issues in pedagogical terms. Findings related to the participants’ comments and practical proposals for the inclusion of WE- and ELF-informed activities in their teaching practices, as well as their critical reflections about problematic points, particularly in the local context and syllabi, will also be discussed.