English TodayPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1017/s0266078423000123
Zhichang Xu
{"title":"Special feature: introduction","authors":"Zhichang Xu","doi":"10.1017/s0266078423000123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078423000123","url":null,"abstract":"Over the years, scholars in the field of world Englishes and other relevant areas of research and practice refer to ‘Chinese English’, assuming that it exists, by a number of different names, e.g., Chinese English , China English , Chinglish , New Chinglish , Chinese Pidgin English , and Chinese Englishes , to list just a few. There are underlying ideologies and perspectives to these names: e.g., whether Chinese English is conceptualized as a variety of English, an interlanguage, a lingua franca, or a constituent of a multilingual repertoire for intercultural communication involving Chinese speakers of English.","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135348921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
English TodayPub Date : 2023-08-31DOI: 10.1017/s0266078423000251
Abisola Aiyeola
{"title":"Technology-enhanced approximation to Standard English stress shift","authors":"Abisola Aiyeola","doi":"10.1017/s0266078423000251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078423000251","url":null,"abstract":"International intelligibility among World Englishes is indisputably pertinent. Second language contexts, such as Nigeria, often adopt the Received Pronunciation (RP) to achieve intelligibility and serve as the pedagogical and descriptive basis of the language (Carr & Honeybone, 2007). However, studies on spoken Nigerian English (NE) have established that RP is unattainable by Nigerians, English language teachers inclusive (Akinjobi & Aina, 2014; Aina, 2014; Adesanya, 2020a; Agboyinu, 2018; Aiyeola, 2021). Search for an ancillary model of Standard English pronunciation in Nigeria, therefore, becomes a necessity.","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42641265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
English TodayPub Date : 2023-08-31DOI: 10.1017/s026607842300024x
Hohsung Choe, Seongyong Lee
{"title":"Which English to Teach?","authors":"Hohsung Choe, Seongyong Lee","doi":"10.1017/s026607842300024x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s026607842300024x","url":null,"abstract":"The question of which English to teach has been an issue since the late-20th-century advent of the world Englishes (WE) paradigm. In the early 1990s, Quirk and Kachru conducted one of the most significant debates about this controversial issue in applied linguistics. Quirk (1990) argued that only standard native varieties that have no grammar deviations and adhere to mainstream vocabulary usage should be taught in order to counter the contamination of English resulting from tolerance of variations, observing that he was ‘not aware of there being any institutionalized nonnative varieties’ (p. 6). In contrast, Kachru (1991) argued that language variation due to language contact is a common sociolinguistic phenomenon, so Outer Circle varieties are not substandard or deficit languages. Therefore, he contended, traditional notions of standardization are no longer acceptable. He recommended that multiple localized varieties should be taught in Outer Circle contexts because they reflect learners’ linguistic and cultural identity. In relation to Kachru's argument, English as a lingua franca (ELF) has developed as a recent paradigm in TESOL. Kirkpatrick (2012) has argued that a lingua franca approach to English language teaching (ELT) helps prepare learners to use the language successfully in multilingual settings like ASEAN countries, where English functions as a lingua franca. In these settings, the teaching of ELF, in which speakers retain their own grammatical forms, phonological features, and pragmatic norms, needs to be promoted (Kirkpatrick 2011; Kirkpatrick, Subhan & Walkinshaw, 2016).","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47720563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
English TodayPub Date : 2023-08-30DOI: 10.1017/s0266078423000263
A. Buregeya
{"title":"When the definite article is used for possessive determiners in Kenyan English","authors":"A. Buregeya","doi":"10.1017/s0266078423000263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078423000263","url":null,"abstract":"The literature on the use of articles in L2 varieties of English reports both the overuse and the underuse of the definite article. An excellent synoptic discussion of such apparently contradictory results is Sand (2004). Because L2 English varieties have developed in a sociolinguistic environment where they were in contact with indigenous languages, Sand (2004: 284–287) reviews what research findings show about ‘substrate influence on article use’. Two substrate languages she mentions (p. 286) as examples are Hindi (which is expected to have influenced Indian English) and Swahili (which is expected to have influenced Kenyan English). Regarding Indian English she writes: ‘Typically, we find reference to a “lack of articles” in descriptions of contact varieties like Indian English [ . . . ]’ (p. 286). But a few lines later she adds this:\u0000\u0000 However, Sedlatscheck (forthcoming: 105) also finds for his Indian data that, apart from zero articles, the largest number of what he calls ‘article substitutions’ occur in the category of the definite article. Thus, the definite article is used instead of the zero or indefinite article expected according to standard English usage. (p. 286)\u0000 The quotation above suggests that both some overuse and some underuse of the definite article can be observed in Indian English, thus making the possible influence of a substrate language like Hindi (reported not to have articles) not so relevant.","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44845261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
English TodayPub Date : 2023-08-08DOI: 10.1017/s0266078423000135
Guangxian Liu, Chaojun Ma
{"title":"English in a rural linguistic landscape of globalizing China","authors":"Guangxian Liu, Chaojun Ma","doi":"10.1017/s0266078423000135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078423000135","url":null,"abstract":"Usually focusing on linguistic/semiotic signs in culturally and linguistically diverse communities, linguistic landscape (hereafter LL) has appeared as a methodological paradigm for the investigation of the representation and visibility of languages across geographical contexts (Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Scollon & Scollon, 2003). Highlighting the informative and symbolic functions of languages, this paradigm enables the combination of a quantitatively distributive lens with a refined ethnographic perspective to generate insights into the ethnolinguistic vitality of a given territory and the spread of international lingua francas – in most cases English – in localized settings (Backhaus, 2007; Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010; Li, 2015).","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48710140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
English TodayPub Date : 2023-08-07DOI: 10.1017/s0266078423000147
David C. S. Li
{"title":"China English or Chinese English?","authors":"David C. S. Li","doi":"10.1017/s0266078423000147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078423000147","url":null,"abstract":"The distinction between ‘Singapore English’ and ‘Singaporean English’ is interesting. It appears that small places tend to use the bare name of the country, while larger countries use the derived adjective. So we find: Singapore English, Hong Kong English, Brunei English; but American English, German English, Malaysian English. On this basis, we might favour Chinese English over China English, because China is big.","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44388826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
English TodayPub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S0266078423000093
Christiane Meierkord
{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Christiane Meierkord","doi":"10.1017/S0266078423000093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078423000093","url":null,"abstract":"At the time of writing, spring has arrived in the countries of the Northern hemisphere. As every year, it brings nature back to life with lawns turning green, spring flowers raising their heads and the first trees being in full bloom. A country that has cherished the latter more than any other is Japan, where viewing the cherry trees blossom has been turned into a national festival. The delicate pinkish petals fall to earth like snow, and finding the perfect day and spot to celebrate this sight, often with a party, is a tradition originally established by the Japanese emperors in the 9 century (McClellan, 2005). Today, this is supported by websites featuring cherry blossom flowering forecast maps that predict how the bloom will spread throughout the country (for example, Japan Meteorological Corporation, 2023). Of course, Japanese has a word to describe this pastime. Hanami does not only have a pleasant sound – its characters, the kanji, represent this activity beautifully, too: the word is a combination of two characters, one for ‘flower’ (hana花), composed out of strokes for ‘grass’ and ‘change’, and a second from ‘to watch’ (miru見る), which combines ‘eye’ and ‘legs’. Japanese also has words related to hanami that are English, or at least somewhat English. Burūshīto (‘to blue sheet’) refers to the act of reserving a spot on one of the many popular lawns where the Japanese gather in crowds to watch the blossoms by placing a blue sheet early in the day until the group arrives after work. In fact, Japanese has many such pseudo-anglicisms, called wasei-eigo ‘Japan-made English’ in Japanese, that draw on originally English word stock but are difficult, if not impossible, to understand if one relies on English only for their interpretation. Their creation really took off after WW2 (Miller, 1997, Irwin, 2011) and the process is highly productive today. Further examples include wanpīsu (‘one piece’, referring to a woman’s dress), naitā (‘nighter’, a night baseball game) or the better known sararīman (‘salary man’, an office worker). While studies looking into English spoken by multilingual individuals and in multilingual speech communities all around the world have long come to appreciate such creative language use as one form of identity construction, it has also been referred to with somewhat derogatorily connotated expressions, such as Chinglish (for uses of English by speakers of Chinese), Denglish (with speakers of German), Taglish (with speakers of Tagalog). In Uganda, this has even led to the rather unfortunate label Uglish. For the Japanese, however, it appears that just as much as watching nature change they cherish changing English word stock into creative neologisms. At the end of 2022, it was one of these wasei-eigo that dictionary publisher Sanseidō chose as their word of the year. Taipa is a compound made out of two clippings, both of which are also adapted to the Japanese syllabary katakana: tai from time and pa from performance. It descri","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":"39 1","pages":"87 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46017755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
English TodayPub Date : 2023-05-23DOI: 10.1017/s0266078423000081
Olha Bohuslavska, Elena Ciprianová
{"title":"English in the Slovak glocalized urban space","authors":"Olha Bohuslavska, Elena Ciprianová","doi":"10.1017/s0266078423000081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078423000081","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last few decades English has become an integral part of urban signage while taking different forms and performing a variety of functions. Numerous studies of linguistic landscapes, such as Gorter (2006), Huebner (2006), Cenoz and Gorter (2009), Lanza and Woldemariam (2009), Bolton (2012), and Tupas and Rubdy (2015) have demonstrated that the investigation of linguistic landscapes in multilingual settings can increase our understanding of the close relationship between English and globalization. Slovakia being no exception, the widespread use of English is observed on a large amount of public and private signs in the country's urban environment. Since Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, frequently becomes a meeting point for diverse languages and cultures, this study focuses on the phenomenon of glocalization and investigates the ways in which the English utilized in the signage mirrors the interaction between the global and the local. The results based on the corpus of 464 signs collected in the city centre indicate not only the substantial extent to which English penetrates the Slovak urban space but also shed some new light on how English, mainly through carrying its symbolic value, contributes to the construction of social reality and participates in the processes of glocalization.","PeriodicalId":51710,"journal":{"name":"English Today","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48517019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}