The rapid global spread of the English language has serious linguistic, ideological, socio-cultural, political, and pedagogical implications as it creates both positive interactions and negative ...tensions between global and local forces. Accordingly, debate about issues such as the native/non-native divide, the politics of an international language, communication in a Lingua Franca, the choice of a model for ELT, and the link between English and identity(ies) has stimulated scholarly inquiry in an unprecedented way. The chapters in this volume revisit, challenge, and expand upon established arguments and positions regarding the politics, policies, pedagogies, and practices of English as an international language, as well as its sociolinguistic and socio-psychological complexities.
The rapid global spread of the English language has serious linguistic, ideological, socio-cultural, political, and pedagogical implications as it creates both positive interactions and negative ...tensions between global and local forces. Accordingly, debate about issues such as the native/non-native divide, the politics of an international language, communication in a Lingua Franca, the choice of a model for ELT, and the link between English and identity(ies) has stimulated scholarly inquiry in an unprecedented way. The chapters in this volume revisit, challenge, and expand upon established arguments and positions regarding the politics, policies, pedagogies, and practices of English as an international language, as well as its sociolinguistic and socio-psychological complexities.
This ground-breaking book marks a milestone in the history of the newly developed field of Cultural Linguistics, a multidisciplinary area of research that explores the relationship between language ...and cultural conceptualisations.
Honorary editor: René Dirven The series Applications of Cognitive Linguistics (ACL) welcomes book proposals from any domain where the theoretical insights developed in Cognitive Linguistics (CL) have ...been (or could be) fruitfully applied. In the past thirty-five years, the CL movement has articulated a rich and satisfying view of language around a small number of foundational principles. The first one argues that language faculties do not constitute a separate module of cognition, but emerge as specialized uses of more general cognitive abilities. The second principle emphasises the symbolic function of language. The grammar of individual languages (including the lexicon, morphology, and syntax) can be exclusively described as a structured inventory of conventionalized symbolic units. The third principle states that meaning is equated with conceptualization. It is subjective, anthropomorphic, and crucially incorporates humans' experience with their bodies and the world around them. Finally, CL's Usage-Based conception anchors the meaning of linguistic expressions in the rich soil of their social usage. Consequently, usage-related issues such as frequency and entrenchment contribute to their semantic import. Taken together, these principles provide researchers in different academic fields with a powerful theoretical framework for the investigation of linguistic issues in the specific context of their particular disciplines. The primary focus of ACL is to serve as a high level forum for the result of these investigations.
Studies of intercultural communication in applied linguistics initially focused on miscommunication, mainly between native and non-native speakers of English. The advent of the twenty-first century ...has witnessed, however, a revolution in the contexts and contents of intercultural communication; technological advances such as chat rooms, emails, personal weblogs, Facebook, Twitter, mobile text messaging on the one hand, and the accelerated pace of people's international mobility on the other have given a new meaning to the term 'intercultural communication'.
Given the remarkable growth in the prevalence of intercultural communication among people from many cultural backgrounds, and across many contexts and channels, conceptual divides such as 'native/non-native' are now almost irrelevant. This has caused the power attached to English and native speaker-like English to lose much of its automatic domination. Such developments have provided new opportunities, as well as challenges, for the study of intercultural communication and its increasingly complex nature. This book showcases recent studies in the field in a multitude of contexts to enable a collective effort towards advancements in the area.
Culture portrayal in ELT materials has developed as one of the popular realms of research in TEFL. To substantiate this, In the first phase, the present research employed Cultural Linguistics ...investigative framework to analyze Persian Cultural Conceptualisations (CCs) of visuals in EFL textbooks that are locally designed for Iranian high school students of grade 12. In the second stage, through semi-structured interviews with a group of 12 graders aged between 14 to 19, this study attempts to investigate whether CCs of visual artifacts enable students to engage critically with the materials to enhance their communication ability in a multicultural environment. As to the textbook analysis of the study, the results revealed that three themes of Persian cultural schemas of family gathering, hijab, and blood donation emerged from the EFL textbook for grade 12 in Iran. Also, the interview results showed that EFL textbooks in Iran fail to improve students' communication skills and does not fulfill Iranian students' communicative needs. The study concludes by offering practical pedagogical implications for material developers and textbook designers.
This article aims to contribute to scholarly attempts to clarify the claims made by the early proponents of linguistic relativity. It also presents an account of the recently developed area of ...Cultural Linguistics and outlines how the scope of this multidisciplinary area of research differs from that of studies dedicated to linguistic relativity. For example, while linguistic relativity has been viewed as presenting a ‘hypothesis’ or a ‘theory complex’ regarding the relationship between thought and language, Cultural Linguistics offers a theoretical and analytical framework that focuses on examining features of language that encode conceptualisations rooted in the cultural experiences of speakers. The basic premise underlying the approach of Cultural Linguistics is that certain features of human languages are entrenched in such cultural conceptualisations as cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural metaphors.
This study is the first of its kind in applying the emerging field of cultural linguistics to research on poetry. It does so by exploring conceptualizations that underline a number of quatrains from ...Khayyām’s Rubā’iyyāt.1 In particular, it focuses on quatrains that reflect themes regarding the brevity of life, living for the moment, predestination, and mysteries of existence. The analyses presented in this article reveal that conceptualizations that underlie these quatrains reflect both idiosyncratic (individual-specific) and cultural conceptualizations as well as conceptualizations reflecting Khayyām’s milieu. The identified conceptualizations foreground some influences from a number of religious/cultural traditions.
This study is the first of its kind in applying the emerging field of cultural linguistics to research on poetry. It does so by exploring conceptualizations that underline a number of quatrains from ...Khayyām’s Rubā’iyyāt.1 In particular, it focuses on quatrains that reflect themes regarding the brevity of life, living for the moment, predestination, and mysteries of existence. The analyses presented in this article reveal that conceptualizations that underlie these quatrains reflect both idiosyncratic (individual-specific) and cultural conceptualizations as well as conceptualizations reflecting Khayyām’s milieu. The identified conceptualizations foreground some influences from a number of religious/cultural traditions.
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