In South Korea, "Damunwha" students (students from multicultural family backgrounds) have difficulties at school because of others' derogatory perception of them and the different linguistic and cultural settings. In light of this issue, this paper addresses the "Damunwha" students' identities and participation within…

This article analyses how university students in Hong Kong talk about "self" and "other". Three groups of students, Hong Kong Chinese, Mainland Chinese, and Overseas Exchange students, were asked to characterise these three groups in a pre-discussion questionnaire, and subsequently discuss freely what they had written. Selected…

This study aims to contrastively examine Korean and international students' experiences of taking subject courses at a Korean university. Focusing on the viewpoints of the students, rather than central authorities, we attempt to reveal how language use and cultural factors are interpenetrated in the praxis of English-medium instruction (EMI).…

Interlingual subtitling has been extensively investigated for language learning and teaching purposes in the last decade. However, there is a lack of research into the creation of subtitles as a means of intercultural learning. This article is a first empirical attempt to verify the potential of subtitling for intercultural language education. It…

This paper reports on an exploratory study of one specific aspect of intercultural literacy: the activation of intercultural intertexts. Readers of intercultural intertexts fall into two general groups: knowing readers (who know the source text) and unknowing readers (who do not know the source text). This paper aims to explore Taiwanese unknowing…

This paper presents a synthesis of a pioneering study that approaches the sociolinguistic and educational reality of the area of Navia-Eo, a region in the western part of Asturias (Spain). This research aims to provide an insight into the language attitudes and the sociolinguistic awareness of students in the final year of primary education. Using…

For many language learners, studying a foreign language is a compulsory, high-stakes activity. It is perhaps for this reason that positive feelings about language learning are rarely mentioned in the literature on language learning. The focus is predominantly on negative feelings: the anxiety caused by being asked to speak in the foreign language…

This paper will discuss two issues related to Japanese retirees adopting Malaysia as their second home. The first is that of the preferred language choice of the retirees. To collect data for language choice a self-report questionnaire was administered and an interview was conducted. The findings suggest that the majority of the retirees chose…

This study explores the implications of Canada's official bilingual status on young immigrant adults who are presently studying at the undergraduate level at university. More precisely, I examine how these young adults have experienced and judge French as a second official language (FSOL) learning in "English-dominant" regions of Canada. Through a…

This paper explores difficulties students may experience in giving opinions in class, drawing on data gleaned from the administration of questionnaires and interviews to Japanese and British students. The results show that the students from both groups regard highly of giving and exchanging opinions in class; however, there is a marked difference…

This paper reports on an investigation into the reactions of 147 participants of various ethnicities to a language practice in the USA that has been characterized as Mock Spanish, a special register in which Spanish words or phrases are used to evoke humor by indexing an often unflattering image of Spanish speakers. Research questions include…

This article examines variations in beliefs and practices between British English language teaching (ELT) specialists and their Chinese colleagues in a cross-cultural educational development project which used interviews and a questionnaire survey to gather the perceptions and retrospective experiences of Chinese tertiary teachers and expatriate…

This article explores the way tertiary level Chinese students in the UK adapt, in varying degrees, to their new learning and living environment. A questionnaire and interview study that includes both Chinese students and their British teachers attempts to ascertain key issues with a view to helping sojourning students adapt to their environment,…

Bearing in mind the relevance of immigration in Spain, we consider the linguistic idiosyncrasy of the autonomous community of Catalonia in the present study to describe and analyse language attitudes to Catalan and Spanish in a sample of 225 students of immigrant origin living in different parts of the region. We focus on language attitudes in so…

This paper examines the sociopragmatic character of intercultural communication between English Language Assistants (ELAs) and their "mentors" in French primary and secondary schools. With reference to Levinson's notion of "activity type", it argues that judgements by mentors as to what constitutes "allowable contributions" on the part of ELAs are…