Australia as a White nation has deep roots: the aim of this 1914 board game was literally "to get the Coloured Men out and the White men in" (Image credit:…
Native and non-native teachers at Lord Harris' School, Royapett, Madras, 1865 (Source: British Library) For some time now, a debate has been raging in TESOL about the relative merits of…
One way of looking at the outcome of the British referendum is to understand it as an act of self-sabotage: "...and in the end, Britain, which had colonized the world,…
"How bad is your cultural cringe?" (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed) Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o. Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname? (laughter) Keith:…
In my own research, I have frequently run into difficulty in talking about a ‘native speaker’. What criteria must be met to be ‘native’? How can I, as a researcher,…
In English language teaching ads English seems always fun, easy and accessible to everyone Taiwanese people’s motivation for learning English is a desire to communicate and a major obstacle to…
"美語是通往世界最近的路" (American English, for children, is the royal road to the world): An English educator promises the world Taiwan is enthralled with learning American English. One of the reasons for…
Recently, I watched a TV documentary about the proliferation of Nomura jellyfish in Japanese coastal waters. It was a shocking tale of the devastating environmental, economic, social and human impact…
When I first started teaching in Australia, I had a Korean-Australian student in one of my undergraduate classes who sounded like most of the other students in my class, like…
Lotus Pond (part of Shinobazu Pond) in Ueno Park “There are so many stupid Japanese women around, huh? Many Westerners are coming to our country and the stupid women love…
Some Language-on-the-Movers based here in Sydney had the opportunity to attend Professor Masaki Oda’s lecture about the current state of the English language in Japan yesterday. With major Japanese companies…
Multilingual sign in Namtso (Image Credit: Wikipedia) Italian version of my blog post about Chinglish. Translated by Emanuela Moretto Per un attimo provate a pensare che il New York Times abbia…
Multilingual sign in Namtso (Image Credit: Wikipedia) Persian version of my recent blog post about Chinglish Translated by Tahmineh Tayebi (تهمینه طیبی) & Vahid Parvaresh (وحید پرورش) تصور کنید که…
Multilingual sign in Namtso (Image Credit: Wikipedia) Korean version of my recent blog post about Chinglish Translated by Sun-Young Chung (정선영) 뉴욕타임즈가 독자들로부터 그들의 재미난 금발머리 농담이나 유색인종 사람과 관련된 배꼽…
Some people just can’t win it seems. Second language speakers are in that category. I can’t even begin to count how many people who have read a fraction of the…