The present paper provides a small–scale exploratory analysis of L2 English pronunciation and accent aims among secondary school students in Germany – with a focus on the bath and lot vowels, rhoticity, and T–flapping. The eight learners investigated in the current study show blended use of Standard Southern British English (StSBrE) and Standard American (StAmE) phonological variants with relatively high degrees of variation between learners. StSBrE–oriented productions were dominant overall. Agreement of accent aim and L2 pronunciation was largely feature–dependent and limited overall but varied between learners.

This article provides a Construction Grammar (CxG) analysis of the Complex Modifier Construction (CMC) in English and an investigation of its productivity in World Englishes with a particular focus on African and South-East Asian Englishes. By examining data from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE), we seek to establish whether the productivity of the construction correlates with the developmental phase of the variety of English in Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes, or whether language contact, and particularly the typological profiles of the local substrate languages (head-initial versus head-final syntax), affects productivity. We find that evolutionary progress is indeed a relevant factor insofar as the most advanced ‘Inner Circle’ varieties are concerned, but we also observe substantially lower productivity in the African varieties of English when compared to the South-East Asian Englishes represented in the corpus. As the main substrate languages in the African countries under study have head-initial syntax and those in the South-East Asian countries head-final syntax, we conclude that the productivity of complex premodifiers is affected by the multilingual situation in these regions and propose that language contact should be considered more closely as an explanatory factor in future studies of constructional productivity in World Englishes.

Bollywood films, the highly commercial films by Indian producers for Indian audiences, have always been Hindi-dominant, and despite the increased incorporation of English over time, the speech of urban elite main characters remains Hindi matrix. This is at odds with the code-switching patterns of urban elites in other Indian media, such as chat shows, and spoken conversation, where switching among such speakers is often English dominant. Young urban elites may use English in isolation; their Bollywood equivalents sometimes do so also, but always with standard syntax. In this article we show how for Bollywood films, English without code-switching typically occurs in the speech of anglicised minorities such as Goan Catholics; furthermore, their English is indexed by the morphosyntactic features of Indian English. This contrasts with usage outside film, where Indian English features have been shown to be broadly distributed. This conservatism of Bollywood speech reflects conflicting attitudes towards an endonormative variety of English within India.

This paper surveys studies that explore the experiences of multilingual English teachers (MET) teaching English to learners from the Eastern part of Asia (China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand). By MET, I refer to teachers who speak English as one of their multilingual repertoires and teach English to students from different linguistic backgrounds than their own (Galloway 2014). Studies have recently shown that Outer Circle has been establishing a role in providing English education to Expanding Circle learners. Moreover, it is also becoming common for teachers from Expanding Circle to cross national borders in order to teach English in another Expanding Circle country. This paper reviews studies specifically addressing those teachers and identifies three contact zones: (a) study abroad programs in Asian Outer Circle; (b) EFL classrooms; and (c) digital space. As there are some distinctive characteristics pertaining to different contact zones, I first briefly review the previous studies by each zone, followed by a synthesis of the research findings with a focus on how environment influences teachers' experiences based on the lens of intersectionality and situated power dynamics. Then, I conclude the review by discussing the problematic nature of treating this unique teacher population as pseudo-native speakers from a pedagogical perspective.

This study explores the effects of World Englishes teaching practice in improving EFL learners’ self-confidence in English-speaking performance (SCIESP) with a mixed methodology design comprising both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Data were gathered through a survey with the Self-Confidence in English-speaking Performance Questionnaire, students’ reflective notes, and focus group interviews. Two teaching classes with no significant difference in self-confidence were randomly chosen as the experimental class (EC) and control class (CC). The two classes shared the same teaching implication except that the EC had four lectures on World Englishes while the CC got four lectures on English History. After one semester the research team surveyed students’ SCIESP again. The result showed a remarkable improvement in students’ SCIESP in EC than in CC. It was found that World Englishes teaching contributed significantly to increasing students’ SCIESP.

The aim of this study was to examine spoken Namibian English by investigating how multilingual Namibian speakers produce vowel durations in pre-lenis and pre-fortis positions, and how those vowel durations compare to British English vowel durations in the same words. In British English and most other English varieties, vowel duration is affected by the voicing of the following consonant, so that vowels preceding phonologically voiced consonants are longer (pre-lenis lengthening) and vowels preceding phonologically voiceless consonants are shorter (pre-fortis clipping). The production data was collected using orthographic stimuli that were monosyllabic English words with voiced and voiceless final consonants after the target vowels. The data were collected from 14 multilingual Namibian English speakers. The vowel durations produced by the speakers in pre-lenis and pre-fortis position were first compared to each other and then to those produced by nine British English speakers in an earlier study. The results showed that the pre-lenis vowels were clearly longer than the pre-fortis vowels, and there were no differences between Namibian and British English vowel durations in most of the tested words. The results offer new insights into the realization of vowel duration in pre-lenis and pre-fortis positions in Namibian English.

This article conducts an exploratory multidimensional (MD) analysis of four interactive online registers, namely newspaper comments, tweets, web forums and text messages, originating from four South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and two Inner Circle (Kachru 1985) English-speaking countries (UK and USA). A principal component analysis (PCA) has been performed on the interactive registers using linguistic features tagged by a modified version of the MFTE tagger (Le Foll 2021a). The dimensions resulting from the PCA show that nominal, literate and informational features are generally more common in the South Asian data – which represent varieties belonging to the Outer Circle (Kachru 1985). Additionally, different features are used for expressing persuasion or opinion compared to the two reference varieties.

The present article analyzes the use of preposition stranding (the world which we live in) and pied-piping (the world in which we live) in finite WH-relative clauses in twelve varieties of English. In the light of previous studies, it assumes that the strength of processing constraints and formality effects that drive speakers’ constructional choices should correlate with Dynamic Model stages (Schneider 2007). However, drawing on data from the International Corpus of English (ICE) and using mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, the study shows that processing factors affect speakers of all Dynamic Model stages in a very similar way. At the same time, clear differences between variety stages are observed with respect to formality and topic, which strongly affect Phases IV and V but not Phase III. These results are interpreted from a Usage-based Construction Grammar perspective.