In this essay, I explore the genre of live comedy outside its traditional Western setting in popular and academic understanding. I argue that its ever-growing popularity in urban India is reflective of an expanding middle-class's search for an authentic social identity. I demonstrate -- through ethnographic and analytical detail -- how stand-up…

This paper analyses how community, national and ethnic identities are affirmed, negotiated, marginalized as a part of hegemony-making and resistance in the context of English education in Indian universities. We argue and demonstrate that a complex and ambivalent hegemony that has been operational since the colonial times, continues to shape…

Sociological inquiries on parental involvement seldom consider the investments parents make in "themselves" to realise educational advantages in their children's schooling. This gap hides the processes underlying class-making and class-produced privileges. To address this gap, this article investigates middle-class mothers' participation…

The textbooks are believed to be containing true and authentic historical narratives and it also remained the sole tool employed by a state to impart a certain notion of its identity. The qualitative perspective best suited this research, and within it, the qualitative content analysis method was chosen to analyze the content of textbooks. This…

This study investigated the dynamism of English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' professional identity with respect to their commitment and job satisfaction. A mixed-methods design integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches was used. To conduct the quantitative part of the study, 198 EFL teachers were selected from different private…

In the multilingual, multicultural emerging economy of India, the language debate may seem to have settled with the adoption of the Three-Language Formula in the first National Policy of Education 1968. However, 50 years later, does this policy still hold? Has research on language acquisition informed our education policy and classroom practices,…

The focus of this paper is to shed some light on three Indian English language teachers' transformational experiences, following their participation in an action research project, and investigate how these teachers' project experience continued to impact their classroom practices more than two years after the actual project came to an end. The…

One of the challenging issues that has gained much attention, and has in fact sparked much debate, within the emergence and acquisition of World Englishes, is the Native- Non-native accent, especially its relationship with teachers' and learners' identity and selection of an appropriate pedagogic model. This paper investigates the attitudes of 260…

This study analyzes the narrative-based interview data of three Indian women to examine the manner in which they utilize stylization to construct identity-rich, ideological stances related to discriminatory discourses of Hindi and English medium education in the linguistically rich, albeit complex, present-day context of India. Stylization is…

This paper aims to analyze the effect of motivation in the development of English speaking skills on second language acquisition. There are so many excellent teaching methods that vary in effectiveness. Motivation is the driving force for learning another language, and integration of that language into the person's identity. Motivation is the…

This paper examines emerging forms of multilingualism and multiliteracy in rural India (where the term "literacy" is used broadly here to include digital media literacy and marketing literacy as well as literacy in the traditional sense of the knowledge of a writing system). Here forces of globalization and digital communication have…

The research explores forms and function of variant tag questions (VTQs) in the native and non-native Englishes. For the said purpose, patterns of VTQs in Pakistani English are compared with two native (British and New Zealand) and two non-native (Indian and Singaporean) varieties. The components of the "International Corpus of English,"…

The current study examines how and why speakers of English from multilingual contexts in Asia are identifying as native speakers of English. Eighteen participants from different contexts in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, and The Philippines, who self-identified as native speakers of English participated in hour-long interviews…

Through a close analysis of an Indian woman's unsuccessful romance narrative, this article examines how class-based ideologies and prejudices concerning English and vernacular medium education sustain and perpetuate dismissive and disparaging attitudes toward people educated in the vernacular. The analysis utilizes theoretical understandings of…

The writings of Indians in English provide a rich ground to explore the ways in which travellers and migrants from India to England relate to the realities of the place and to their place in it. Language and the literary education that characterised English education in India during colonial times play an important role in the construction of…