This article explores the links between citizenship and race in second-language education through an examination of the ways in which citizenship is linked to English language proficiency within a key Canadian federal adult English as a Second Language assessment document, the "Canadian Language Benchmarks" ("CLB"). It uses…

While current conceptualisations of the inextricable connection between language and culture in English language education are largely informed by complex sociocultural theories that view culture as constructed in and through social practices among people, classroom practices continue to be influenced by mainstream discourses of culture that…

Previous research has revealed that although EFL students may claim to prefer British/US accents they often have difficulty identifying them, especially when such accents may differ from "standard" accents presented in ELT materials. In the Gulf, English is widely used as a lingua franca or as a second language by the large expatriate…

The current study was undertaken with the purpose of developing and validating a willingness to communicate (WTC) questionnaire for instructional language teaching and learning contexts. Six instructional WTC (IWTC) components were identified after (1) undertaking a comprehensive review of the literature on second language (L2) WTC and other…

The objective of this paper is to trace the actual demand on enrolments over time, as much as the history of wavering public and academic sentiment towards teaching and speaking Spanish in this country during the last century. Secondarily, we examine the question of the value of mother tongue fluency or the acquisition, mastery and usage of the…

The present study is a nationwide survey of language identity among English language learners in Iran. The participants who completed the survey in this research included 1851 English language learners from different parts of the country who belonged to different genders, age groups and English language proficiency levels. The main instrument was…

Foreign language anxiety (FLA) has been found to exist in tertiary students learning foreign languages in many countries; however, limited research has explored how it develops. This study investigated how anxiety developed in students of English as a foreign language (EFL), focusing on changes in their feelings about EFL learning as they learned,…

The present study explores how scholars working in the field of applied linguistics, language policy and language education might best contest and negotiate the increasingly economics-driven language polices enacted at the institutional levels of schools and workplaces. The study focuses on Japan as an interesting case of incongruence between…

This study investigates how the attitudes of 60 Korean university students towards five varieties of English are affected by the identification of the speaker's nationality and ethnicity. The study employed both a verbal guise technique and questions eliciting overt beliefs and preferences related to learning English. While the majority of…

Seventy-eight native English speakers rated the foreign-accented speech (FAS) of 24 international students enrolled in an Intensive English programme at a public university in Texas on degree of accent, comprehensibility and communicative ability. Variables considered to potentially impact listeners' ratings were the sex of the speaker, the…

This study investigated contemporary Japanese college students' attitudes towards Japan English (JE) and American English (AE) through a verbal guise test (VGT) as well as a questionnaire. Forty-four Japanese college students listened to four Japanese and four North Americans reading a text in English, rated them in terms of…

The present study analyses the Family Language Policy (FLP) in regards language literacy development of children in Ethiopian immigrant families. Bridging the gap between linguistic literacy at home and at school hinders a smooth societal integration and a normative literacy development. This study describes the home literacy patterns shaped by…

Adopting mixed methods of data collection and analysis, the current study models the "perceived value of compulsory English language education" in a sample of 138 undergraduate non-language majors of Japanese nationality at a national university in Japan. During the orientation period of a compulsory 15-week English language programme, the 138…

Drawing on interview data from five Danish research sites, the article asks what processes of internationalisation mean for the way universities organise and are organised by language. Following an initial reflection on the nature of a global knowledge market, the discussion centres on the idea of "linguistic organisation", as this has been…

The need to recognise English language teaching (ELT) as a site for the interplay of cultural politics and competing discourses has been acknowledged in ELT literature. Writing as an English teacher in Japan, and not unfamiliar over the years with the confluencing of discourses whether relating to neoliberalism, globalisation or other forces…