There is a tendency to think of World Englishes in the noun form; as products rather than as processes (implying that one receives both ready-made, controlling the development of neither). Conceptualising World Englishes as processes in which one can participate as an agent raises the question of what skills are needed in their active construction. The author will argue that since culture resid...

This paper discusses what intercultural English learning/teaching (IELT) is in English as a world Englishes (WEes) and how IELT can contribute to the development of proficiency/competence among WEes and can be fitted into actual WEes classrooms. This is to claim that IELT be a pivotal contextual factor facilitating success in proficiency/competence among all varieties of Englishes in today’s gl...

The meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be transparently worked out from the meanings of its constituent words due to its figurative and unpredictable nature. Consequently, the syntactic composition and the structural paradigm of an idiomatic expression are supposed to be the same in every context. However, this is not the case in the institutionalized second language varieties of English...

Our work on the origins of New Zealand English (Cordon et ai, forthcoming) has shown that this newest of all of the major native speaker varieties of English is the result of dialect contact and new-dialect formation. Rather obviously, the dialects which were involved in the initial contact were dialects of English which had been brought from different parts of the British Isles. In terms of po...

English Today / Volume 24 / Issue 02 / June 2008, pp 3 12 DOI: 10.1017/S026607840800014X, Published online: 05 November 2008 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S026607840800014X How to cite this article: Kingsley Bolton (2008). English in Asia, Asian Englishes, and the issue of prociency. English Today, 24, pp 3-12 doi:10.1017/S026607840800014X Request Permissions : C...

In the beginning was the Word. Often quoted, these opening words from the Gospel according to John nonetheless show that the relationship between language and religion goes beyond intimacy to identity. Whether this is taken as a specific moment in the theorization of one religion, the culmination of a particular line of thinking, or a more general truth about how humans grasp the essence of the...