How Many Millions? The Statistics of English Today

English Today ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Crystal
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
The World

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth – the first, that is, from 1558 to 1603 – the number of English speakers in the world is thought to have been between 5 and 7 million. At the beginning of the reign of the second Queen Elizabeth in 1952, the figure had increased almost fiftyfold. In 1962, Randolph Quirk estimated in The Use of English that 250 millions had English as a mother tongue, with a further 100 million using it as a second or foreign language.

scholarly journals An Analysis of Madurese Dialect in the English Conversation by the Members of Bata-Bata English Centre (BBEC)

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-121
Author(s):  
Imroatul Mufidah ◽  
Eva Nikmatul Rabbianty
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
World Englishes ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Study Results ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Language ◽  
Different Parts

The concept of world Englishes refers to English as a global language that means communication in numerous dialects and the movement towards an international standard for English. Varieties of English are used in various sociolinguistic contexts in different parts of the world, also in Indonesia. Since English plays as a foreign language, sometimes Indonesians still use their dialect. This study was mainly purposed to describe Madurese dialect in the English conversation made by Bata-Bata English Centre (BBEC). Mainly, this research is aimed to (1) Describe the patterns of Madurese dialect in English conversation by the members of the Bata-Bata English Centre (BBEC). (2) Know the factors that affect the pattern of Madurese dialect in the English conversation by the Bata-Bata English Centre (BBEC). This research belongs to qualitative research which investigates the group of BBEC about Madurese dialect in their English conversation. The researcher observed the students' learning process, interviewed them and took notes, recordings, and pictures. The study results were that the researcher found the patterns of Madurese dialect occur in the English conversation in three features: pronunciation which caused sound changing, a grammatical pattern that caused incorrect grammar; and inappropriate vocabulary. Second, the researcher found that three factors affected how their dialect in the English conversation. The first is lack of speech, Madurese language influences second, and the last factor is never listening to native English speakers. Madurese language that plays as their mother tongue influences their dialect in the English conversation

scholarly journals NATIVESPEAKERISM AND WORLD ENGLISHES: TEACHERS PERCEPTION TOWARDS NON-NATIVE ENGLISH VARIETIES

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Maraden Silalahi
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
World Englishes ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Teachers Perceptions ◽  
Contextual Understanding ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Native English Speaking ◽  
Native English Speaking Teachers

<p>In the last decade, the development of information technology confirms English as a Lingua Franca used by native English speakers and nonnative English speakers. English in a global context has triggered the emergence of new English variants, resulting from the assimilation of English into a local language known as World Englishes. On the other hand, Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEAFL) in Indonesia is still oriented towards the ideology of nativespeakerism which believes that TEAFL should be done by Native English-Speaking Teachers (NEST) because they are believed to have better linguistic competence and contextual understanding than Nonnative English-Speaking Teachers (NNEST). This article is directed to determine the perceptions of English teachers in Indonesia regarding the world Englishes phenomenon. This research is qualitative research with 20 informants consisting of 10 Nonnative English-Speaking Teachers and 10 Native English-Speaking Teachers. Four Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), each consisting of 5 informants, will be conducted to gather as much information as possible related to teachers’ perceptions. This research is expected to provide an overview of foreign language teaching in Indonesia. The results showed that nativespeakerism has a strong correlation with the world Englishes phenomenon. In the Indonesian context, this is shaped by the stigma that forms in society. This research is expected to enrich teaching studies, specifically in teaching foreign languages.</p>

CONTEMPORARY LINGUODIDACTICS: DEFINING GOALS AND OBJECTIVES OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING

2013 ◽  
pp. 328-331
Author(s):  
T. K. Tsvetkova
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Professional Activity ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Final Goal ◽  
The World ◽  
Bilingual Development ◽  
Goals And Objectives

The author suggests her own interpretation of goals and objectives of foreign language teaching based on the author’s original conception of mastering a foreign language as a process of bilingual development. At present the practical goal of foreign language teaching is formulated by linguodidactics in terms of competences. The communicative competence is treated as a key concept integrating all other competences. It denotes a subject’s ability to carry out cross-cultural interaction and to use a foreign language as an instrument of such interaction. However, this interpretation of the goals of foreign language teaching does not demonstrate specificity of foreign language learning in comparison with other disciplines studied at school or university. While studying those subjects a student interprets them in terms of her own, monolingual, picture of the world. She does not have to develop notions, which are absent in the native culture. The foreign language is totally different: in order to master it, a student has to step outside the boundaries of her own picture of the world and master a number of new notions and concepts. In other words, a student must become bilingual and bicultural. Otherwise her understanding of the foreign language will remain limited by the conceptual system of the mother tongue, she will not be able to see the proper meanings of the other culture. Therefore the goals and objectives of foreign language teaching should be defined according to regularities of bilingual development. The final goal should not be described as a set of competencies, but as a form of bilingualism. In that case the final goal consists in the student’s achieving the stage of balanced mixed bilingualism which is optimal for professional activity with a foreign language. This involves development in a student of an additional complete mechanism of language command responsible for producing and perceiving speech in the foreign language. Intermediate goals and objectives should be defined by the task of forming each block of the mechanism of foreign language command.

scholarly journals Which words do English non-native speakers know? New supernational levels based on yes/no decision

2020 ◽  
pp. 026765832093452
Author(s):  
Marc Brysbaert ◽  
Emmanuel Keuleers ◽  
Paweł Mandera
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Vocabulary Test ◽  
Word Families ◽  
The World

To have more information about the English words known by second language (L2) speakers, we ran a large-scale crowdsourcing vocabulary test, which yielded 17 million useful responses. It provided us with a list of 445 words known to nearly all participants. The list was compared to various existing lists of words advised to include in the first stages of English L2 teaching. The data also provided us with a ranking of 61,000 words in terms of degree and speed of word recognition in English L2 speakers, which correlated r = .85 with a similar ranking based on native English speakers. The L2 speakers in our study were relatively better at academic words (which are often cognates in their mother tongue) and words related to experiences English L2 students are likely to have. They were worse at words related to childhood and family life. Finally, a new list of 20 levels of 1,000 word families is presented, which will be of use to English L2 teachers, as the levels represent the order in which English vocabulary seems to be acquired by L2 learners across the world.

Analysis of Higher Education Students’ Errors in English Writing Tasks

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Ali Özkayran ◽  
Emrullah Yılmaz
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Education Students ◽  
English Writing ◽  
The World ◽  
Omission Errors ◽  
Learning English

The aim of this study is to analyse the errors of higher education students in English writing tasks. In the study, the paragraphs in the exam papers of 57 preparatory class students, studying at a state university in Turkey in 2017-2018 academic year, were analysed. The study was conducted using qualitative research method. Case study was used in the research. Document analysis was used to collect data. The collected data were analysed in line with Surface Strategy Taxonomy and errors were identified and classified. As a result of the error analysis process, it was observed that the students made a total of 381 errors on 57 exam papers; 192 of them were misformation errors, 113 were omission errors, 65 were addition errors and only 11 were misordering errors. Misformation was the most frequent error among the students with a percentage of 50.39. In addition, the percentage of omission errors was 29.66%, that of addition errors was 17.06% and misordering errors was 2.89%. The professionals teaching English as a foreign language should focus more on prepositions, verb “to be”, spelling, articles, singular/plural forms of nouns, word formation, tenses, word choice and subject-verb agreement, which were the most problematic areas of language listed under the four main categories by developing efficient instructional techniques and materials. They should also respect learners’ errors and set up a positive atmosphere where learners can easily express themselves in the target language without the fear of committing errors.INTRODUCTIONThere are lots of languages in the world and some of them have come to the fore due to the fact that they are spoken by millions and even billions of people. People generally learn the language spoken where they are born, however; the developments in the fields such as communication, transportation, tourism and trade forced people to learn the languages that they didn’t need to learn in the past. English is the most popular one of those languages and for some it is the lingua franca (Modiano, 2004; Becker and Kluge, 2014) of our age.Millions of people in the world speak English as their mother tongue while others must learn it as a second (ESL) or foreign language (EFL). Learning English as second or foreign language differs with respect to learners’ attitudes towards English and the people who speak it as their native language, exposure to English, their sources of motivation and so on. The main focus of this study is learning English as a foreign language as English is not the primary language in the country where the study was carried out.A considerable

scholarly journals Models and Targets for the Pronunciation of English in Vietnam and Sweden

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 113-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Una Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
International Communication ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
The World

This paper aims to account for the factors that lie behind the choice of models and targets for the pronunciation of English by learners of English in Vietnam and in Sweden. English is the first foreign language in both Vietnam and in Sweden. English is used as a language of international communication in both settings. Swedish learners have much more exposure to spoken English than do Vietnamese learners and the Swedish language is more similar to English than is Vietnamese. These reasons, among others, explain why Swedish accents of English are typically considerably more intelligible than Vietnamese accents of English. Given that the majority of English speakers in the world are not native speakers, it is argued that the traditional learner target of approaching native speaker pronunciations is not appropriate for either group, but especially not for the Vietnamese learners. Instead maximal international intelligibility is a more useful target. To this end, learners need to be exposed to a variety of native and non-native models.

scholarly journals Which words do English non-native speakers know? New supernational levels based on yes/no decision

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Brysbaert
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Vocabulary Test ◽  
Word Families ◽  
The World

To have more information about the English words known by L2 speakers, we ran a large-scale crowdsourcing vocabulary test, which yielded 17 million useful responses. It provided us with a list of 445 words known to nearly all participants. The list was compared to various existing lists of words advised to include in the first stages of English L2 teaching. The data also provided us with a ranking of 61 thousand words in terms of degree and speed of word recognition in English L2 speakers, which correlated r = .85 with a similar ranking based on native English speakers. The L2 speakers in our study were relatively better at academic words (which are often cognates in their mother tongue) and words related to experiences English L2 students are likely to have. They were worse at words related to childhood and family life. Finally, a new list of 20 levels of 1000 word families is presented, which will be of use to English L2 teachers, as the levels represent the order in which English vocabulary seems to be acquired by L2 learners across the world.

scholarly journals Gamifying Content and Language Integrated Learning with Serious Videogames

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-114
Author(s):  
Ricardo Casañ Pitarch
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Educational Levels ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Teaching Support ◽  
The World

New methods and approaches focusing on foreign language teaching are continuously being developed and applied in the classroom at different educational levels. The interest in raising learners’ competences in foreign languages has been a fact in the last few decades. In this sense, approaches integrating the learning of non-linguistic content through a vehicular language that is not the learners’ mother tongue have been widely used around the world. However, it seems that some benefits of those approaches integrating language and content could be further strengthened if the time of exposure to content and language was higher and if students were highly motivated to learn. To this purpose, this article suggests that serious videogames could be a suitable tool to provide learners with further teaching support and increase their motivation in a playful context and introduces a model that aims at gamifying and integrating content and language learning through serious videogames.

scholarly journals TED Talks as an ICT Tool to Promote Communicative Skills in EFL Students

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martínez Hernández María A ◽  
Vargas Cuevas Junior A ◽  
Ramírez Valencia Astrid
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Online Courses ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
English Learning ◽  
Communicative Skills ◽  
The World ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Ted Talks

In many EFL classrooms in Colombia, it is evident how students struggle trying to use English to communicate; nonetheless, with the revolution of ICTs that has taken place in the last years, there is a variety of tools available to support English learning autonomously with applications, blogs, and online courses; however, many of these tools were not originally designed for teaching but can be adapted for such purpose. TED is a website and a downloadable application where videos are shared in which you can see a wide variety of English speakers born in many parts around the world speaking in a fun and familiar manner with the audience about various topics of interest that besides, come along with cultural content, which extends the range of accents, words, expressions, and ways of referring to the same topic. In this action research, we propose a reflection on the incidence of TED talks on the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language. The instruments used to collect data were interviews, questionnaires, and teacher journals. The use of these videos provided the students with all the communicative elements that allowed them to use English to express their ideas. This offers a glimpse of how useful authentic videos and subtitles are when encouraging students to learn English.

Caught in the cross-fire: Tackling hate speech from the perspective of language and translation pedagogy

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelena Vujić ◽  
Mirjana Daničić ◽  
Tamara Aralica
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Ethical Norms ◽  
Students Attitudes

Abstract Hate speech is a phenomenon which has been in the focus of scholarly interest of linguists, philosophers, sociologists, human-rights advocates, legal and media experts. Much of this interest has been devoted to establishing criteria for identifying what constitutes hate speech across disciplines. In this paper, we argue that hate speech has profiled as a distinct subgenre of the language of politics with typical patterns and ways of addressing which can be recognized in political campaigns across the world. Therefore, we present the findings of the case study of translation exercises of English and Serbian texts containing samples of hateful language during presidential campaigns in the USA and Serbia in 2016 and 2017. Our aim is to identify the linguistico-pragmatic commonalities of hate speech in Serbian and English and examine students’ attitudes towards ethically and morally challenging language contents in their mother tongue (L1) and English as their foreign language (L2). The results indicate that in both English and Serbian the same groups (e.g. members of ethnic minorities or LGBT population, women etc.) are targeted with the hateful language which in both languages uses vulgarisms, taboo words, sexist and chauvinistic declarative expressions to achieve political goals. In addition, L1>L2 and L2>L1 translation data indicate that personal moral and ethical norms in translators are stronger in L1 thus restrictively affecting translational L2>L1 output.

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