Peter G. Sercombe

• The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Innovative and alternative approaches to materials development in English for Academic Purposes

This study investigates the perception of body image among indigenous women in Peninsular Malaysia. Using a sample drawn from urban (n=38) and rural (n=21) settings, the study engages participants who are more or less socio-economically acculturated to mainstream society in order to explore different attitudes to body image, and anxiety level about...

This chapter discusses a number of fieldwork challenges leading up to and during an ethnographic study undertaken in southwest China. The purpose of this study was to research the circumstances of privately-run migrant schools (PMSs) as forms of educational provision for internal migrant children and the coping strategies that were observed and/or...

In 1998, the People’s Republic of China implemented an education policy, the “School Consolidation Policy”, which entailed merging small rural schools with larger ones. It has had a massive effect on rural people across China, and as a result of it, over 60% of schools in outlying areas have closed. The policy’s implementation and effects have rece...

Studies of human spatial behavior increasingly rely on a combination of audiovisual and geospatial recordings. So far, however, few analytical environments have offered opportunities for integrated and expedient annotation and analysis of the two. Here we report the first study aimed at integrating geospatial data in an environment developed for ti...

Internationalization of higher education has become a global phenomenon, as reflected by the fact that around four million people are now engaged in study outside their country of origin, a fourfold increase since 1999 (OECD, 2011). The UK is the largest single national destination in Europe and the second largest worldwide, after the USA. Among fu...

When studying English or through the medium of English, some mainland Chinese students adopt non-heritage names. This phenomenon has arisen as a result of language contact in an increasingly interconnected world. Our paper investigates reasons for the adoption of non-heritage names among Chinese students and the kinds of functions that these names...

The Southeast Asian region is home to remarkable political, cultural, ethnic and economic diversity. Much of this can be traced to influences of immigration (especially from India and China), alongside vestiges of colonialism — Dutch, British, French, Portuguese, Spanish and American — that have saturated the different trajectories of nations and n...

The language and language educational policies of all national governments have a bearing on the linguistic ecologies extant within their nations’ borders. With the increasing and alarming rate of decline of minority languages, in recent years, the issues of language and language education policies have come to be examined in greater depth (e.g. Sk...

The Republic of the Union of Myanmar is the largest country in Southeast Asia, and it has a total land area of 677,000 square kilometres.1 Myanmar shares borders with China, Thailand, India, Bangladesh and Laos. It is inhabited by 48.34 million people (World Bank 2011), although Ethnologue (2013) estimates put this number at around 52 million. The...

The growth in the number of ‘international’ students in higher education is a phenomenon of increasing importance to educators, researchers and policymakers worldwide. This multi-methodological study explored factors associated with their adjustment, successful or otherwise. It integrated associations across three domains of enquiry which had hithe...

Rurally situated minority groups in Southeast Asia, especially those with nomadic backgrounds, such as the Penan in Borneo, have received relatively little scholarly attention with regard to language knowledge and use, language education and levels of achievement in formal learning contexts. When individuals from these small, as well as socially, p...

This chapter considers the nomadic Eastern Penan, the most socioeconomically disadvantaged ethnic group in Borneo, and their endangered language. It provides a brief outline of the sociocultural circumstances of the Eastern Penan and discusses challenges of language maintenance. A modest lexicographic project for the language aims to complement the...

This paper focuses on codeswitching (CS) as a strategy employed by teachers in their EFL (English as a foreign language) classrooms in two commercial bushibans or cram schools in Taipei, Taiwan. More specifically, we are concerned with the perceived functions of CS in the EFL classroom context and the extent to which these constitute sources of con...

Higher education in Britain faces new challenges as the composition of students becomes more diverse in terms of cultural, linguistic and educational backgrounds. In connection, a range of professional issues has arisen: the need to understand better the attitudes, motivations and learning needs of these students and consider their implications for...

This paper suggests elements of an agenda for future sociolinguistics among minority groups, by seeing it as a mutual relationship that involves benefits to researcher and researched. We focus on two aspects of the relationship. One is the political, economic and social benefits that can accrue to a minority group as a result of the research. Resea...

This article considers multilingualism among a group of ex-hunter-gatherers, the Penans in Brunei. Settled permanently since 1962, this small community of 55 people in habit the sparsely populated subdistrict of Sukang in southern Brunei, where they are adjacent to two other ethnolinguistic groups. The Penans constitute the smallest ethnic minority...

1.0 INTRODUCTION Language Atlases are means of showing patterns of language and ethnolinguistic distribution associated with particular geographical contexts. This makes them potentially valuable resources for sociolinguists, sociologists, ethnographers, anthropologists and geographers. They can also provide an important resource for cultural histo...

We examined the cosmology and ethnomedical beliefs of the Penan hunter gatherers of Brunei Darussalam on the island of Borneo. Our results suggest that they maintain a medical system that is limited in scope and detail compared to neighboring swidden rice cultivators. The Penan recognize the existence of a nearly infinite array of mostly unnamed, a...