Emerging Englishes: China English in Academic Writing
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This paper reports the findings of a multifaceted investigation into the communicative needs of using English as a business lingua franca (or BELF) in three types of companies in Mainland China: state-owned, privately-owned, and multinational companies. The findings were derived from online questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with Chinese business professionals. The findings suggest that English has played an increasingly important role in the workplace communication in Mainland China, especially in multinational companies. Using English has become a business convention in multinational companies, although the extent of its use differs depending on various contextual factors, primary among which are a professional’s duties and English proficiency. The findings also illustrate that culture plays a role as important as language in BELF communication at work. For example, social interaction, due to both cultural and linguistic reasons, has long been an issue concerning and challenging Chinese business professionals. Cultural differences may not be an insurmountable barrier, but the lack of cultural sensitivity and knowledge can cause a disruption in communication or lower the chance of promotion in a company
Kachru’s “Three Circles” model distinguishes between English as a native language (ENL), English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL). While this categorical tripartite distinction has been challenged, its wide influence and application in different research paradigms has resulted in the highly contradictory practice that linguistically very similar forms may be considered errors in EFL contexts (= acquisitional deficiency), but innovations (= creative language use) in ESL contexts. Although the dividing line between error and innovation is fuzzy (How much ‘deviation’ from a norm is acceptable?), current practice appears to deny EFL learners’ the status of creative, innovative users. This chapter presents a critical evaluation of the concepts of error and innovation and discusses the pedagogical implications of this contradictory practice in the light of an emerging paradigm shift in English Language Teaching.KeywordsWorld EnglishesLearner EnglishErrorInnovationTeacher education
This paper attempts to examine in a descriptive way the pioneering model of “World Englishes” proposed by Kachru in the mid-1980s that allocates the presence of English into three concentric circles: The Inner Circle, the Outer Circle, and the Expanding Circle. The Inner Circle presents the countries where English is used as a native language and as a first language among people. These countries include the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Outer Circle includes countries that have old historical British colonial relations and where English is commonly used in social life or the government sectors. Most of the countries that belong to this circle are former colonies of the British Empire, such as India, Malaysia, Singapore, Ghana, Kenya, and others. The usage of English in these countries is similar to what is known as English as a second language. The third circle, The Expanding Circle, includes countries that introduce English as a foreign language in schools and universities, mostly for communicating in English with the Inner and Outer Circles. Such countries include Turkey, Saudi Arabia, The Emirates, Japan, China, Korea, and others. Since its first introduction in 1985, Kachru's Three Concentric Circles Model of English Language has occasioned a great debate. Many linguists considered it one of the most influential models for understanding the use of English in different countries. Some, on the other hand, including Kachru himself, criticized the model for its oversimplification and the unclear membership to the circles. In addition to an overview of criticism on Kachru's model based on different studies, this paper tries to locate the place of ELT in Kuwait among the three circles.
Inductive/deductive hybrid thematic analysis offers significant opportunities for researchers, but its application within integrative mixed methods research has yet to be fully explored. Firstly, this article contributes by demonstrating the compatibility of inductive/deductive hybrid thematic analysis with quantitative work in a mixed methods approach to research. Secondly, the article then innovates by highlighting the value of this approach within a critical realist meta-theoretical perspective. Here, the critical realist concepts of abduction and retroduction are crucial, both in terms of facilitating the convergence of methods and in the generation of new theory. This article will be of relevance to researchers interested in integrating inductive/deductive hybrid thematic analysis with quantitative methods within a coherent and enabling philosophical paradigm.
In this attitudinal-based study, British EFL teachers report on their regional accents, both in terms of their own attitudes, and the reported attitudes of their EFL students. Drawing on interviews with 20, mostly, Northern EFL teachers, there are three broad findings. First, the participating teachers reported that EFL students sometimes found their accents difficult to understand, but appreciated, and often celebrated, their 'difference' nonetheless. Second, student attitudes contrast with that of one particular senior staff member, who instructed a teacher to adopt more 'standard' Southern pronunciation. Finally, the teachers themselves expressed pride in their accents, and explained that outside of a perceived need to modify their accents to be better understood, otherwise exercised agency and resisted suggestions that their accents needed to change. Overall, the students' reported positive engagement, and teachers' pride in their regional accents are key implications of our findings. Crown
This paper argues that there are central features of Chinese English regardless of a speaker's Chinese first language (L1) or dialect. The current state of research on Chinese English is reviewed, outlining phonological, lexical, syntactical, prosodic, and discourse and pragmatic features of Chinese English. These features are categorized according to their pervasiveness based on different L1 backgrounds, to show that there are core features of Chinese English. The argument is limited by the low number of quantitative studies and the absence of large-scale quantitative studies.
Due to the spread of the English language in various domains and the fact that English is used as a global language, researchers and educators have started to rethink the models and aims of English language teaching in different settings. From the World Englishes (WE) perspective, this study investigated the attitudes of Chinese university students toward the localized variety of "China English," as well as the students' identity construction and negotiation during their English language learning journey. Data were collected through a questionnaire completed by 190 respondents and interviews conducted with 20 participants. The findings revealed the students’ positive attitudes toward China English and non-conformity to English as a native language (ENL). This further reflected the communicative function of English and the students’ interest in forming a Chinese cultural identity. However, the students also showed self-contradictory attitudes toward China English, as most did not want to be clearly identified as Chinese when using English. The data revealed some important reasons for this attitudinal conflict, including the belief that ENL is the standard form of English, as well as the students’ desire to develop an identity as competent second language learners of English. The findings suggest the importance of increasing awareness of the global spread of English and reforming English curricula and assessment in contexts where local varieties of English are emerging.
This article focuses on the stigmatisation of East Asian students within Western universities. This is necessary because East Asian students are often overlooked in existing literature about racism in Western academia. It is argued that East Asian students may be generalised as undesirable students in ways that resonate with more broadly held prejudices about East Asian people. To illustrate this, academic publications about East Asian students are critiqued. This involves identifying, analysing and deconstructing the stereotypes of East Asian students which inadvertently totalise them as homogenous, inadequate and deficient. More specifically, it is argued that East Asian students are often unfairly depicted as: a) lacking critical thinking skills; b) being prone to plagiarism; and c) harming the educational environment. This article introduces the notion of ‘the myth of academic tolerance’ and calls upon academics and universities to actively resist the stigmatisation of East Asian students.
This study investigates the developmental trajectory of L2 English progressive construction with a focus on frequency, verb-construction contingency and semantic prototypicality. Comparisons were made on the use of the progressive construction in argumentative essays written by Chinese learners at three different proficiency levels and English native speakers. Data of frequency and verb type distribution indicate that L2 learners’ progressive repertoire showed an increase in productivity and variability and a spread from a fixed type to a wider range of verbs. Contingency data demonstrate that, when associating verbs with the progressive, learners’ preference shifted from prototypical progressive verbs which denote specific and dynamic meanings to more marginal members represented by generic verbs. In addition, semantic prototypicality overweighs generality in driving the development of the progressive, which presents an interesting contrast with findings in the verb-argument construction learning literature where semantically general verbs were first predominantly used in the construction.
Amidst the increasing calls for the decolonisation of universities, this article interrogates the representation of East Asian students in Western academia. It is argued that East Asian students are often imagined in Orientalist ways, as can be evidenced by evaluating the depiction of East Asian students in academic publications. More specifically, it is suggested that common perceptions of East Asian students as lacking in critical thinking may unwittingly reinforce stereotypes that are rooted in historic narratives which depict East Asians as inferior to (white) Westerners. This article also explores the way in which East Asian academics and students may also subscribe to these Orientalist perceptions. Finally, this article offers a refutation of the stereotype that East Asian students struggle with critical thinking and it suggests that being more reflexive about the way that we imagine ethnic minority students should be a key component of our efforts to decolonise the university.
China is a country with the largest number of English language learners (more than
400 million) and these learners invest a great amount of time, money, and effort in
learning the language, but their learning effectiveness is hardly satisfactory. Against
this background, more research is needed to study the use and development of
English in mainland China (hereafter China), and this book is such an effort. By
focusing on the ideal pedagogic model of university English, this book explores
university teachers’ and students’ perceptions toward China English in the context
of world Englishes, as well as their views toward introducing China English as part
of the teaching model and the possibility of including China English and world
Englishes into the existing curriculum. This book also extends its focus from the
educational arena to the professional use of English in China’s workplace. These
two areas are closely related to each other as the use of English in the professional
world will partly be influenced by and exerts considerable influence on English
language teaching. Specifically, the following issues concerning the use of English
by working professionals in China are explored: (1) the language choice at the
workplace, (2) the frequency of the use of English, (3) the importance of
Chinese/English and the changes in the importance, (4) the use of English by types
of organization, ownership of company and industries, and (5) the relationships
between participants’ frequency of English use and self-rated English ability and
the importance of English.
The author employed three methods including questionnaire surveys, match-guise
technique, and interviews (group and individual) to investigate the perceptions and
views as conceived by non-English majors and their Chinese teachers of English, and
the professionals who use English at their workplace as well.
Taken together, the data obtained from the three research methods yield (to a
greater or lesser extent) informative findings suggesting that standardized Englishes
are still perceived by university students in China as the most desirable models of
English. This is believed to have significant implications for the teaching of university
English in China. The book suggests that China English should be well
codified and promoted before being adopted as the pedagogic model so that China’s
English learners may develop a stronger sense of ownership of the language and
vii
have more integrative learning motivation. In addition, it proposes that the curriculum
design of university English should include an introduction to the
well-defined characteristics of China English and world Englishes. Last but by no
means least, the book demonstrates that English has been used more widely and
frequently in the professional world than before and has become increasingly
important in China, and so university English should be taught more productively
as a tool of communication and further personal development rather than merely a
subject for examinations.
Morpho-Syntactic Patterns in Spoken Korean English presents fundamental research on the use of English by South Korean speakers. Despite the extraordinary and vibrant status of the English language in South Korean society (demonstrated, for example, by the notion of English Fever), research on the forms of English in the South Korean context has been sadly neglected in the study of World Englishes. This monograph is the first to provide a rich and contextualized description of the Korean English morpho-syntactic repertoire. It draws on the specifically compiled Spoken Korean English (SPOKE) corpus to shed light on Korean uses of plural marking, articles, pronouns, prepositions, and verbs in spoken English, and demonstrates that English is indeed the language of those who use it. This volume will be highly relevant for researchers interested in Expanding Circle Englishes, Asian Englishes, spoken language corpora, and morpho-syntactic variation.
In this paper, we present a novel computational approach to the analysis of accent variation. The case study is dialect leveling in the North of England, manifested as reduction of accent variation across the North and emergence of General Northern English (GNE), a pan-regional standard accent associated with middle-class speakers. We investigated this instance of dialect leveling using random forest classification, with audio data from a crowd-sourced corpus of 105 urban, mostly highly-educated speakers from five northern UK cities: Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Sheffield. We trained random forest models to identify individual northern cities from a sample of other northern accents, based on first two formant measurements of full vowel systems. We tested the models using unseen data. We relied on undersampling, bagging (bootstrap aggregation) and leave-one-out cross-validation to address some challenges associated with the data set, such as unbalanced data and relatively small sample size. The accuracy of classification provides us with a measure of relative similarity between different pairs of cities, while calculating conditional feature importance allows us to identify which input features (which vowels and which formants) have the largest influence in the prediction. We do find a considerable degree of leveling, especially between Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, although some differences persist. The features that contribute to these differences most systematically are typically not the ones discussed in previous dialect descriptions. We propose that the most systematic regional features are also not salient, and as such, they serve as sociolinguistic regional indicators. We supplement the random forest results with a more traditional variationist description of by-city vowel systems, and we use both sources of evidence to inform a description of the vowels of General Northern English.
Drawing on a review of international higher education (IHE) policies, priorities, and literature from the USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK over the course of a 16-year period (2000–2016), this article identifies a strong scholarly and policy preoccupation with the urgency of the global knowledge economy and cognate discourses of ‘Asia Pacific century’, an emerging economic and geopolitical configuration that is considered threatening to the historic and ideological Western superiority in IHE relations. As such, the export commodification and transnationalization of higher education of the last decade is conceptualized as Western responses to an increasingly Asia-driven global economic order. This, we suggest, is an analytical lens which approaches time—as in knowledge economic time—and space—as in the West and Asia—in rather absolute, contained, and hierarchized terms, overlooking how both the West’s coming to terms with postcolonial Asia, and the postcolonial Asian states’ desire for Western knowledge and modernity re-cast broader transnational inequities established by colonial practices. In contrast, the concept of ‘spacetime entanglement’ is proposed to develop a necessary analysis as well as a critique of the transnationalization of capitalist colonial relations via discourses and practices of contemporary IHE.
The world of higher education is changing and the world in which higher education plays a significant role is changing. The international dimension of higher education is becoming increasingly important, complex, and confusing. It is therefore timely to reexamine and update the conceptual frameworks underpinning the notion of inter-nationalization in light of today’s changes and challenges. The purpose of this article is to study internationalization at both the institutional and national/sector level. Both levels are important. The national/sector level has an important influence on the international dimension through policy, funding, programs, and regulatory frameworks. Yet it is usually at the institutional level that the real process of internationalization is taking place. This article analyses the meaning, definition, rationales, and approaches of internationalization using a bottom-up (institutional) approach and a top-down (national/sector) approach and examines the dynamic relationship between these two levels. Key policy issues and questions for the future direction of internationalization are identified.
Evaluating the intercoder reliability (ICR) of a coding frame is frequently recommended as good practice in qualitative analysis. ICR is a somewhat controversial topic in the qualitative research community, with some arguing that it is an inappropriate or unnecessary step within the goals of qualitative analysis. Yet ICR assessment can yield numerous benefits for qualitative studies, which include improving the systematicity, communicability, and transparency of the coding process; promoting reflexivity and dialogue within research teams; and helping convince diverse audiences of the trustworthiness of the analysis. Few guidelines exist to help researchers negotiate the assessment of ICR in qualitative analysis. The current article explains what ICR is, reviews common arguments for and against its incorporation in qualitative analysis and offers guidance on the practical elements of performing an ICR assessment.
Black Americans and Mexican Americans have faced continued cultural stereotypes, as well as more punitive outcomes, within the judicial system. Very little research has explored whether minority defendants with stereotypical accents face additional discrimination. The current study investigated the role of race and accent bias on juror decisions for Black, Mexican American, or White defendants in a negligence case. Results indicated that while Black and Mexican American defendants were found more negligent than White defendants, Black defendants were judged more negatively than White and Mexican American defendants, especially when the Black defendant had a stereotypical accent. The results offer important legal considerations that attorneys must make when deciding whether or not to recommend that the defendant testify.
Issues surrounding English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and its use by English as an additional language (EAL) students in higher education have become increasingly significant in recent years, fueled both by increased international student mobility and increased linguistic and cultural diversity within and outside of the student body. As well as posing language-related challenges, the transfer of EAL students to an English-speaking foreign university also demands the negotiation of new university expectations, channeled through a new cultural environment. While Academic Literacies research has identified that concepts such as power, identity, and culture play a role in academic writing, students’ own perceptions remain relatively unexplored. Consequently, this study analyzes the ways in which EAL students articulate their relationship with academic writing at a tertiary institution in Ireland. Data for this study were gathered through questionnaires and interviews and analyzed through discourse analysis through a critical lens. The findings suggest that while participants generally positively reflect on their ability to negotiate academic writing through the English language, there is nonetheless a high level of conflict between dominant linguistic norms and the students’ expression of their identity and culture.
The internationalisation of UK universities has resulted in increasing numbers of international students, particularly at postgraduate level. Features such as internationalisation of the curriculum and global citizenship have largely ignored language, while research into international students’ experiences has revealed challenges at both the individual and the institutional level. With ‘international students’ used synonymously with ‘non-native English speakers’, issues reported are often language-related, and emphasis is placed on helping international students to meet language requirements. At the same time, scholarship in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has drawn attention to ways in which non-native English speakers use English, but has largely focussed on non-Anglophone environments.
This project employed documentary analysis and interviews to investigate language policies in one UK university and the effects of these on international students’ perceptions of their English. Eighteen participants on postgraduate taught programmes each took part in two semi-structured interviews. Both document and interview data were analysed using a combination of qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis. The results show little consistency in language policies. While entry requirements demand demonstration of native-like English, this was not necessarily valued in assessment, and not always seen as relevant for oral interaction. Few lecturers appeared to adjust their own English, and none facilitated communication among students. On some modules, Chinese students were over-represented, resulting in little diversity and making interaction in English all but redundant. In-programme English provision was variable in its approach and perceived usefulness.
A range of factors interacted to affect perceptions. Participants’ beliefs about English, and their prior English learning and use, were significant, as were their experiences of using English socially. Thus, the effects of policy varied. For some, entry policy seemed to reinforce their orientation to English as a Native Language, and for many, oral interactions were significant, both in assessed group work and socially. The findings have implications for recruitment, language policy and pedagogy. Increased student diversity would be beneficial on some programmes. Policies regarding entry requirements and assessment could be reviewed in the light of ELF scholarship. Finally, intercultural communication training for all students, international and home, as well as for lecturers, should be implemented.<br/
This article examines how internationalization is defined by three leading higher education professional associations: NAFSA, the International Association of Universities, and the European Association of International Education. We examine key publications to understand which activities, topics, and constituencies are included in conceptualizations of internationalization and, conversely, which are absent. We find that all three rely on similar definitions that emphasize international students, student and scholarly mobility, and curricular change. We argue that current definitions are largely de-politicized and de-historicized, while internationalization is often assumed to mean more and better coverage of the globe. Little attention is given to the ethics of international engagement, particularly across unequal relations of power. We conclude with numerous questions for administrators and faculty engaged in internationalization that seek to deepen conversations about this work. In particular, we emphasize the importance of identifying enduring patterns of global inequality, recognizing ethical responsibilities, and enabling alternative possibilities.
A new interdisciplinary approach to understanding the role of accent in relation to intergenerational social mobility is introduced here. Sociological analyses that attend to accent often focus on broader regional distinctions or construct limiting dichotomies of accents, rather than capturing the full variety and range of accents, often found at smaller geographic levels. Drawing on the case of the teaching profession and using qualitative data collected as part of a study of teachers, we illustrate how integrating sociolinguistics into a sociological analysis of social mobility would allow us to combine the micro-geography of class, mobility, and speech to a more granular level. The analytical tools provided by sociolinguistics, outlined here, could push forward work on understanding prospects for, and experiences of, social mobility.
The spread of English as the world lingua franca has
evoked the rethinking of the significance of native-speaker (NS)
norms and models in teaching English, and as a result, the target
of pronunciation teaching and learning has shifted from imitating
native accents to achieving speech intelligibility. The Lingua
Franca Core (LFC) proposal introduced a list of phonological
features in English that are, arguably, the minimum required to
achieve intelligibility and argued that mispronouncing these
features is expected to cause a breakdown in communication
among non-native speakers. As a consequence of this, it has been
suggested that LFC be prioritized in teaching and learning English
pronunciation. In response to the LFC proposal, researchers have
become polarized; while some have found LFC a promising
approach, others have argued against its appropriateness as a
target of pronunciation teaching and learning. This paper evaluates
the controversial position of the LFC proposal in the literature,
focusing on three main dimensions: the LFC’s potential to result
in intelligible communication, its teachability and its scope of
function as an alternative target to the NS models (Received
Pronunciation and General American), and the influence of
different attitudes on the success of implementing the LFC.
In June 1962, there was a writers’ gathering at Makerere, impressively styled: “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression.” Despite this sonorous and rather solemn title, it turned out to be a very lively affair and a very exciting and useful experience for many of us. But there was something which we tried to do and failed—that was to define “African literature” satisfactorily.
Was it literature produced in Africa or about Africa? Could African literature be on any subject, or must it have an African theme? Should it embrace the whole continent or south of the Sahara, or just black Africa? And then the question of language. Should it be in indigenous African languages or should it include Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, and so on?
The book contains 8 chapters consisting of articles published earlier in journals and books between 1998 and 2009. It also includes four book reviews published in journals. It also includes an 'introductory encyclopaedia entry' on Linguistic Imperialism.
In the context of English’s apparent worldwide spread, this book brings together the fields of postcolonial studies and world Englishes, arguing that this is a necessary and long overdue connection. Although postcolonial studies appears to have its origins in literary studies, and accordingly in the study of language, in fact there have been few connections with fields in linguistics that are clearly relevant to postcolonial approaches to English in particular. The book chiefly makes connections with the growing field of World Englishes studies, considering points of contact, differences in emphasis, and fundamental disagreements. It proposes that postcolonial studies can be renewed through engaging with World Englishes studies, but also that postcolonial studies as a discipline can offer powerful frameworks for World Englishes studies itself. The book examines the existing and potential connections between the fields through examples such as postcolonial dictionaries, postcolonial composition, the language of global citizenship, and the interface between World Literatures and World Englishes. It concludes that World Englishes, by contrast with a monolithic Global English, contribute to a vision of communication that resists globalization’s demand for accessibility and transparency.
The success of IS change implementation on the operational level is surrounded by challenges that mainly concern cross‐departmental management and people issues involved in the implementation process. Different organizational departments are entrained to different temporal structures that shape the temporal context of business and IT (B‐IT) communication. Through reflexive thematic analysis, and semi‐structured interviews with 32 business and IT professionals from 7 banking and 2 telecom corporations in North Macedonia, we identify the key time dimensions and temporal events affecting B‐IT communication. We propose a new construct, temporal B‐IT social alignment, and we define it as B‐IT‐SU (shared understanding) of cross‐departmental temporal structuring that enables and constrains the B‐IT communication in the process of translating business demands into IT requirements on the operational level. Findings show that establishing strong structural linkage through interface actors mitigates only some of the challenges in IS implementation resulting from different temporal aspects. Furthermore, we found that the identified time dimensions as well as entrainment to different temporal structures and events have a significant impact on achieving B‐IT‐SU and B‐IT‐SA (shared agreement). We advance the view of B‐IT social alignment, and we synthesize lessons that can be learned from this study that have practical implications.
In this article, I discuss a critical understanding of students’ intercultural experience at a UK university. I critique the potential issues of: a) using essentialist categorisations to understand students’ intercultural experience, and b) imposing epistemic injustice to students by undervaluing their epistemic agency in intercultural experience. Based upon the paintings of five students, I problematise the essentialist categorisations reproduced in the students’ meaning-making about their intercultural experience, which could reinforce prejudice, neo-racism, otherisation, and segregation. The students were, however, able to negotiate with such an issue of essentialism through a non-static and back-and-forth process in their painting. They also demonstrated an active epistemic agency in navigating the complexities of their intercultural experience. Therefore, I suggest intercultural research to adopt a non-essentialist and epistemically-just lens to understand students’ intercultural experience in the increasingly fluid world.
The original publication can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8187-8
This book offers new understanding of the implications of pluralism and of transnational movements to higher education and the construct of a “native speaker” within contemporary globalization processes. Theoretically, it calls for a revisioned English as an International Language (EIL) pedagogy and a wider acceptance of EIL and of World Englishes. It challenges the postsecondary education sector to change the discourse around language proficiency to one that engages the “pluralism of English.” As for the applied significance, the book contributes to the work on neo-racism which means racism goes beyond color to stereotypic foreign cultures, nationalities, and exotic accents based on cultural distinctions instead of merely skin differences. The book contributes to higher education policy and practice, pushing a revisioning of ESL in conceptual and pedagogical ways, such as designing more culturally oriented curriculum, implementing culturally responsive pedagogy, and valuing the teaching proficiency more than the language proficiency.
The English language is changing every day and it is us – the individual speakers and writers – that drive those changes in small ways by choosing to use certain strings of words over others. This book discusses and describes some of the choices made by speakers from South Korea by examining the similarities and differences between two Korean communities: one in England and one in South Korea. The book has two overall aims. Firstly, it is intended to begin a discussion about phraseology and Lexical Priming and how these theoretical concepts relate and play out in the context of a New English. Secondly, it provides a model of how a language variety can be explored by detailed analysis of short strings. It delves into a range of areas from World Englishes to phraseology and formulaic language and would be suitable for students, teachers and researchers in all these areas.
This case study explores the challenges that Master’s students encounter when learning to write in academic English as part of a UK postgraduate course, after having achieved the required IELTS entry score. Interviews with six Chinese and Japanese learners at different stages of the Master’s study revealed more sophisticated writing difficulties than they had previously experienced. Although students were largely managing their written work overall, there were recurring challenges with critical thinking, the transition to full academic compositions, using reading to inform academic writing, presenting evidence and conveying a clear written message over demonstrating lexical or grammatical range as required in IELTS writing. Furthermore, candidates on non-standard courses (e.g. film or finance) found their assignments to be quite unfamiliar; the use of one academic test for all disciplines may be disadvantageous to some. In summary, although IELTS had provided an important first step to help students develop basic writing skills, meeting university assessment expectations necessitated considerable further progress. The required support to achieve this may be somewhat underdeveloped in the existing model of international postgraduate study, for the participants in this paper. This research follows as part of a larger project, which focussed on IELTS test preparation in China and Japan (Clark 2018).
Higher education literature has often documented the barriers to participation in study abroad for students of color. However, the majority of study abroad research to date employs a deficit frame; focusing on why students of color do not participate, rather than what enables students of color to rise above barriers. Using an anti-deficit orientation, this study analyzed survey responses of a sample of students of color who studied abroad, in order to highlight the self-reported motivational and influential factors present in their decision-making process. Building on previous applications of the integrated college choice model (Salisbury et al., 2011), and informed by Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth model, this article presents a new conceptual framework for understanding how students of color use forms of capital to enable them to study abroad. Implications and practical suggestions for future research and study abroad administration are described in light of the study’s findings.
This book explores the concept of the ‘hidden curriculum’ within doctoral education. It highlights the unofficial channels of genuine learning typically acquired by doctoral students independent of the physical and metaphorical walls of academia. The doctorate is a huge and complex undertaking which requires a range of support beyond academic foundations. The exchange between official and hidden curricula is therefore key, not just for achieving the qualification, but to also achieve transformative growth. This book offers a framework for a ‘doctoral learning ecology model’ to scaffold learning and sustain wellbeing by leveraging both formal and hidden curricula. This illuminating book will be of interest and value to doctoral researchers, supervisors, and mentors.
Fair access to employment is vital for improving social mobility in Britain today. As language is not explicitly protected by the Equality Act 2010, accent can become a proxy for other forms of discrimination at key junctures for social mobility such as recruiting to elite professions. The Accent Bias in Britain project (www.accentbiasbritain.org) aims to assess prevailing attitudes to accents in Britain and to assess the extent to which accent-based prejudice affects elite professions. In this article, we focus specifically on methodological innovations of this project, rather than detailed results. We describe our approach to four challenges in the study of accent bias: how to assess whether accent preferences actively interfere with the perception of expertise in candidates' utterances; how to more precisely identify sources of bias in individuals; new technologies for real-time rating to establish whether specific 'shibboleths' trigger shifts in evaluation ; and how to assess the efficacy of interventions for combating implicit bias. Affiliation
This paper draws on ‘diaspora at home’, a concept that encapsulates the unique dynamics between Hong Kong and mainland China, as an analytical tool to explore the cross-border experiences of 23 Hong Kong students at 11 universities in mainland China. It empirically ascertains how the made and imposed claims and identifications of these Hong Kong students resulted in inclusion and exclusion as their interactions with their mainland peers and institutions deepened. Specifically, it highlights how their ‘diaspora at home’ status offered exclusive access to privileged higher education opportunities, preferential treatments and opportunities for upward social mobility. Meanwhile, such a status also resulted in an overwhelming sense of political liability as they unwittingly became ‘political tokens’ and suspected political subjects amid the increasingly tense political atmosphere between mainland China and Hong Kong. This paper pinpoints the relevance of class and politics in understanding how diasporic groups engage with higher education.
This study investigates from a sociolinguistic perspective how Taiwanese copywriters nativize English in Chinese‐based advertising copy in Taiwanese magazines in response to the growing impact of globalization over a decade. Two corpuses of magazine ads are used for quantitative and qualitative analyses: 649 ads from a 1999 English‐mixing magazine ads corpus and 1,505 ads from a 2009 corpus. The analysis demonstrates a clear trend of Taiwanese copywriters showing growing bilingual ingenuity by coining English phrases and sentences via recruiting verbatim translation based on Chinese grammar. The results of this study shed light on how nativization of English has been reinforced through copywriters’ linguistic innovation and exploitation of grammatical and collocational deviations in an era of increasing globalization.
The past decade has witnessed the rise of ethno-nationalist sentiments around the world, around the claims that globalization is an ideology that has undermined the sovereignty of nation-states and created conditions that have produced wide-ranging social inequalities. And yet there seems little prospect of turning back from the facts of global interconnectivity. In this paper, I suggest that it is in this contradictory space that the work of educators is now located. Such a space has given rise to a range of perplexing ethical challenges that are not only political but also pedagogic. Politically, these challenges relate to the need to forge ethical communities that can generate collective action in the face of growing levels of global interconnectivity, on the one hand, and the popular appeal of nationalism, on the other. Pedagogically, these challenges demand approaches that assist students to make a better sense of the contradictory world in which they now live and learn, and develop a practice of ethics that foregrounds difference, complexity, contingency and uncertainty.