Andrew Linn - English in Europe: Volume 6 Investigating English in Europe: Contexts and Agendas

Andrew Linn

Investigating English in Europe

Language and Social Life

Editors

David Britain

Crispin Thurlow

Volume 10

ISBN 978-1-61451-890-7

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-61451-895-2

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0056-5

ISSN 2364-4303

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2016 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin

Typesetting: PTP-Berlin, Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin

www.degruyter.com

The biggest language challenge in the world today is English. School children are expected to learn it, and the need to succeed in English is often fired by parental ambition and the requirements for entry into higher education, no matter what the proposed course of study. Once at university or college, students across the globe are increasingly finding that their teaching is being delivered through the medium of English, making the learning process more onerous for many. Universities unquestioningly strive for a greater level of internationalization in teaching and in research, and this is in turn equated with greater use of English by non-native speakers. The need to use English to succeed in business is as much an issue for multinational corporations as it is for small traders in tourist destinations, and meanwhile other languages are used and studied less and less. On the other hand, academic publishers get rich on the monolingual norm of the industry, and private language teaching is itself big business. In the market of English there are winners and there are losers.

The picture, however, is more complicated than one simply of winners and losers. What varieties of English are we talking about here, and who are their native speakers? Is there something distinct we can identify as English, or is it merely part of a repertoire of language forms to be called upon as necessary? Is the looming presence of English an idea or a reality, and in any case is it really such a problem, and is it really killing off other languages as some commentators fear? Is the status and role of English the same in all parts of the world, or does it serve different purposes in different contexts? What forms of practical support do those trying to compete in this marketplace need in order to be amongst the winners?

These are all questions addressed by the English in Europe: Opportunity or Threat? project, which ran from January 2012 to October 2014. This international research network received generous funding from the Leverhulme Trust in the UK and was a partnership between the universities of Sheffield (UK), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Zaragoza (Spain), Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic) and the South-East Europe Research Centre in Thessaloniki (Greece). Each of the partners hosted a conference on a different topic and with a particular focus on English in their own region of Europe. During the course of the project 120 papers were presented, reporting on research projects from across Europe and beyond, providing for the first time a properly informed and nuanced picture of the reality of living with and through the medium of English.

The English in Europe book series takes the research presented in these conferences as its starting point. In each case, however, papers have been rewritten, and many of the papers have been specially commissioned to provide a series of coherent and balanced collections, giving a thorough and authoritative picture of the challenges posed by teaching, studying and using English in Europe today.

Professor Andrew Linn

Director, English in Europe project

As this book was going through its final proof stage, the United Kingdom held a referendum on membership of the European Union and voted by a narrow margin of 52% to 48% to leave the Union. This outcome has dramatically affected the status of Europe and the relationships between its constituent countries, and at the time of writing it is anticipated that further instability will follow. Effective communication, tolerance and awareness of the needs of others across the continent are now needed more than ever, as is a strong body of research to inform them.

Ulrich Ammon

Professor of Linguistics of German with a

Focus on Sociolinguistics

University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Beyza Bjrkman

Associate Professor, Department of English

Stockholm University, Sweden

David Block

ICREA Professor in Sociolinguistics,

Department of English and Linguistics

University of Lleida, Catalonia (Spain)

Alessia Cogo

Lecturer in Sociolinguistics, Department of

English and Comparative Literature

Goldsmiths

University of London, UK

Jeroen Darquennes

Professor of German Linguistics

University of Namur, Belgium

Michele Gazzola

Research Fellow, Department of Education

Studies

Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin, Germany/

Institute for Ethnic Studies, Ljubljana,

Slovenia

Anne-Line Graedler

Professor, Department of Humanities

Hedmark University of Applied Sciences,

Norway

Nigel Holden

Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for

International Business

University of Leeds, UK

Anna Kristina Hultgren

Lecturer in English Language and Applied

Linguistics, Department of Applied Linguistics

and English Language

The Open University, UK

David Lasagabaster

Professor of Applied Linguistics,

Department of English and German Studies,

University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU,

Spain

Andrew Linn

Professor of Language, History & Society,

Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean of the Faculty of

Social Sciences & Humanities

University of Westminster, London, UK

Heiko Motschenbacher

Institute for English and American Studies,

Linguistics Department

Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main,

Germany

Gabriel Ozn

Teaching Fellow in Applied Linguistics, School

of English

University of Sheffield, UK

Carmen Prez-Llantada

Professor of English Linguistics, Department

of English and German Studies

University of Zaragoza, Spain

Ulrikke Rindal

Associate Professor, Department of Teacher

Education and School Research

University of Oslo, Norway

Stephen Ryan

Professor of Applied Linguistics, School of

Culture, Media and Society

Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

Tamah Sherman

Researcher, Czech Language Institute

Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague,

Czech Republic

Dag Finn Simonsen

The Language Council of Norway

Josep Soler-Carbonell

Assistant Professor, Department of English

Stockholm University, Sweden

Andrew Linn

This book is being written at a time when both the challenge of communication across national borders and the notion of Europe as a meaningful economic and socio-political space are hot topics. In fact the role of English in the world has been described by a leading commentator as the hottest possible sociolinguistic issue (Blommaert 2010: 182).