How non-native English-speaking staff are evaluated in linguistically diverse organizations: A sociolinguistic perspective

The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of evaluations of non-native speaking staff?s spoken English in international business settings. We adopt a sociolinguistic perspective on power and inequalities in linguistically diverse organizations in an Anglophone environment. The interpretive qualitative study draws on 54 interviews with non-native English-speaking staff in 19 UK business schools. We analyze, along the dimensions of status, solidarity and dynamism, the ways in which non-native speakers, on the basis of their spoken English, are evaluated by themselves and by listeners. We show how such evaluations refer to issues beyond the speaker?s linguistic fluency, and have consequences for her or his actions. The study contributes to the literature on language and power in international business through offering fine-grained insights into and elucidating how the interconnected evaluative processes impact the formation and perpetuation of organizational power relations and inequalities. It also puts forward implications for managing the officially monolingual, yet linguistically diverse organizations

Foreign accent strength and listener familiarity with an accent codetermine speed of perceptual adaptation

Contains fulltext : 116500.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)We investigated how the strength of a foreign accent and varying types of experience with foreign-accented speech influence the recognition of accented words. In Experiment 1, native Dutch listeners with limited or extensive prior experience with German-accented Dutch completed a cross-modal priming experiment with strongly, medium, and weakly accented words. Participants with limited experience were primed by the medium and weakly accented words, but not by the strongly accented words. Participants with extensive experience were primed by all accent types. In Experiments 2 and 3, Dutch listeners with limited experience listened to a short story before doing the cross-modal priming task. In Experiment 2, the story was spoken by the priming task speaker and either contained strongly accented words or did not. Strongly accented exposure led to immediate priming by novel strongly accented words, while exposure to the speaker without strongly accented tokens led to priming only in the experiment’s second half. In Experiment 3, listeners listened to the story with strongly accented words spoken by a different German-accented speaker. Listeners were primed by the strongly accented words, but again only in the experiment’s second half. Together, these results show that adaptation to foreign-accented speech is rapid but depends on accent strength and on listener familiarity with those strongly accented words.20 p

Improving student language learning in adult education through the use of mobile learning: barriers, challenges and ways to move forward

Students learning languages, particularly English in the Australasian and Asia Pacific regions, have many ways to engage with mobile devices to assist with their language learning. This chapter reports on the latest teaching tools and identifies one mobile application (app) that can be used, Dragon Dictation, to assist with improving pronunciation. This chapter also presents the results of one pilot study that used Dragon Dictation to support English pronunciation. Results of this study indicate that Dragon Dictation is a useful tool to have available in the classroom context as results suggest that it assist students to improve their English pronunciation. Barriers for learners include difficulties in learning to use mobile devices as well as teachers and students knowing the best apps that are available to assist with English language learning. For teachers, barriers include learning to teach using these apps as well as teaching students how to use them. Fortunately, there are several ways to move forward in using mobile apps for learning, with research suggesting that good professional development of teachers in how to use apps is the best way to improve their teaching in this area as well as their comfortability in teaching students to use them as this will increase pedagogical affordances in this area

Teacher Language Awareness

Teacher Language Awarenes