There has been a significant increase in the number of English speakers globally, with the majority of them being non-native speakers who rely on diverse varieties of the language. Throughout its history, English has been disseminated through a number of processes, ranging from colonialism to globalisation. This has ultimately resulted in the formation of various relationships between English and target communities. English has also spread to countries where Muslims constitute the majority of the population. As religious teachings are embedded in local or national cultures, and thus result in non-homogeneous Islamic communities across the globe, it is a frequently used oversimplification to conclude that English consistently stands in opposition to Islam in every Islamic society. Given such misperceptions, studies directed towards perceptions of English in Indonesia, the fourth most populated country and the largest Muslim community in the world, are particularly important. This book examines a variety of perceptions of English in this context, focusing on staff and students at universities in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Five research questions were used as the basis for conducting this study, which analyse the themes of English and its acceptance in Indonesia; English at the tertiary level; the roles of English; English in relation to identity; and the perception of World Englishes. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study was carried out at nine public and private universities with differing religious viewpoints - namely, secular, Catholic, and Islamic. There are five different groups of participants for individual interviews and questionnaire surveys: students, English language lecturers, non-English lecturers, and leaders at each of the nine universities. The results reveal that English is viewed as a tool and asset for advancing knowledge, facilitating international communication, gaining global competitiveness, and improving employment opportunities. However, perceived tensions between English and Indonesian constantly occur throughout all facets of the study. Even though Indonesian people's "repository of cultural identity" (Tan and Rubdy, 2008, p. 5) is located within local languages rather than in Indonesian as the national language, the Indonesian language actually unites them as one people and differentiates them from people of other nations. This suggests a demand for a "contemporary global linguistic ecology" (Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas, 1999, p. 20). In such ecology, English would keep developing in a way that does not impact negatively on the national language. Indeed, such demand for a balance between English and Indonesian is politically desirable.

There has been a significant increase in the number of English speakers globally, with the majority of them being non-native speakers who rely on diverse varieties of the language. Throughout its history, English has been disseminated through a number of processes, ranging from colonialism to globalisation. This has ultimately resulted in the formation of various relationships between English and target communities. English has also spread to countries where Muslims constitute the majority of the population. As religious teachings are embedded in local or national cultures, and thus result in non-homogeneous Islamic communities across the globe, it is a frequently used oversimplification to conclude that English consistently stands in opposition to Islam in every Islamic society. Given such misperceptions, studies directed towards perceptions of English in Indonesia, the fourth most populated country and the largest Muslim community in the world, are particularly important. This book examines a variety of perceptions of English in this context, focusing on staff and students at universities in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Five research questions were used as the basis for conducting this study, which analyse the themes of English and its acceptance in Indonesia; English at the tertiary level; the roles of English; English in relation to identity; and the perception of World Englishes. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study was carried out at nine public and private universities with differing religious viewpoints – namely, secular, Catholic, and Islamic. There are five different groups of participants for individual interviews and questionnaire surveys: students, English language lecturers, non-English lecturers, and leaders at each of the nine universities. The results reveal that English is viewed as a tool and asset for advancing knowledge, facilitating international communication, gaining global competitiveness, and improving employment opportunities. However, perceived tensions between English and Indonesian constantly occur throughout all facets of the study. Even though Indonesian people’s “repository of cultural identity” (Tan and Rubdy, 2008, p. 5) is located within local languages rather than in Indonesian as the national language, the Indonesian language actually unites them as one people and differentiates them from people of other nations. This suggests a demand for a “contemporary global linguistic ecology” (Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas, 1999, p. 20). In such ecology, English would keep developing in a way that does not impact negatively on the national language. Indeed, such demand for a balance between English and Indonesian is politically desirable.

Humans involuntarily experience physical items as having meaning-properties. Semantic Perception explores this experience--the phenomenology of the understanding of language--in depth. Jody Azzouni shows the many ways that we experience the meaning-properties of language artifacts as independent of the intentions of their makers.

The phenomenon of foreign accents and their perception have received considerable attention from pronunciation specialists and academic researchers working within different fields of study, such as phonetics, phonology, foreign language teaching, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, social psychology, anthropology, and even law. The reason for this widespread interdisciplinary interest is caused by the fact that, in addition to revealing the speaker’s origin, accent carries significant social connotations and evokes various ethnic, racial, religious and socio-economic stereotypes. This book represents the largest, up-to-date qualitative and quantitative investigation into the accentedness, acceptability, intelligibility and comprehensibility of Polish English of three groups of native speakers, the English, the Irish and the Scottish, comparing the ways in which it is perceived by members of three nations and establishing pronunciation priorities. The book will be of interest not only to phoneticians, pronunciation specialists and sociolinguists, but also to EFL teachers and students.

As non-natives are increasingly found teaching languages, particularly English, both in ESL and EFL contexts, the identification of their specific contributions and their main strengths has become more relevant than ever. This volume provides different approaches to the study of non-native teachers: NNS teachers as seen by students, teachers, graduate supervisors, and by themselves. It contributes seldom-explored perspectives, like classroom discourse analysis, and social-psychological framework to discuss conceptions of NNS teachers.

This book addresses important issues of speech processing and language learning in Chinese. It highlights perception and production of speech in healthy and clinical populations and in children and adults. This book provides diverse perspectives and reviews of cutting-edge research in past decades on how Chinese speech is processed and learned. Along with each chapter, future research directions have been discussed. With these unique features and the broad coverage of topics, this book appeals to not only scholars and students who study speech perception in preverbal infants and in children and adults learning Chinese, but also to teachers with interests in pedagogical applications in teaching Chinese as Second Language.