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This article reviews Children’s English in Singapore: Acquisition, Properties, and Use EUR 132.309781138708877

It is widely accepted nowadays that intelligibility is the essential goal for most learners of English, and it is not necessary for them to mimic all aspects of native-speaker English in order to achieve a high level of intelligibility. However, the features that are needed in order to make oneself easily understood by listeners from elsewhere remain controversial. The current research focuses on thirteen five-minute recordings of conversations between young speakers of English in central China and an interviewer from Britain, in order to determine which features of their speech gave rise to misunderstandings. It was found that, in the 18 tokens of misunderstanding identified, 4 resulted from lexical semantics (22%), 3 from Chinese place names (17%), 3 from grammar (17%) , and 11 from pronunciation (61%) (with some tokens cross-classified). The most common phonological factors giving rise to loss of intelligibility were omission of syllables and simplification of word-initial consonant clusters.

The chapters in this book are based on papers that were presented at the Third Macao International Forum in December 2014, and one of the stated goals of both the conference and the book is to move...

While Malay is the official language of Brunei, a status that is enshrined as the first component of the national Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB, ‘Malay Islamic Monarchy’) philosophy, English is also widely used in the country, both privately and also in official communication (McLellan, Noor Azam, & Deterding in The use and status of language in Brunei Darussalam: A kingdom of unexpected linguistic diversity. Springer, Singapore, pp. 9–16, 2016; Ozog in Language use & language change in Brunei Darussalam. Ohio University Center for International Studies, Athens, OH, pp. 156–172, 1996), so it is of interest to examine how texts in these two languages compare when they are used to express the same ideas, particularly in official documents that aim to represent aspects of Brunei culture to international readers in the modern world. In this chapter, the structure of Malay and English texts are compared by examining parallel texts in Malay and English that have recently been published in Brunei.

Brunei Darussalam (henceforth Brunei) is a small country about 5 degrees north of the equator on the northern coast of Borneo, an island it shares with the East Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah and the Indonesian territory of Kalimantan.

Chinglish may mean different things to different people, but it has often been associated negatively with broken English that arises out of inappropriate direct translations from Chinese into Engli...

Changing English aims to illustrate the diversity of English in the world today and to ask whether, and how, ELT practitioners might accommodate such variation. Focusing on a particular language issue in each article, the series will explore how English varies between places and spaces, over time, and between groups of speakers, and will reflect on the possible implications of this for ELT practitioners. In this article, David Deterding and Nur Raihan Mohamad consider some of the ways pronunciation is changing to reflect spelling in differing contexts around the world, and discuss the implications of ‘spelling pronunciation’ for language teachers and learners.

Misunderstandings are natural occurrences in conversation. Though they are the exception to the norm, and furthermore they do not necessarily result in communication breakdown, they do sometimes occur, and it is important to find out what causes them. Deterding (2013. Misunderstandings in English as a lingua franca: An analysis of ELF interactions in South-East Asia. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.) investigates misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in data from the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and discusses the role of phonological, lexical and grammatical features in causing them to occur. He reports that over 86 % of the tokens of misunderstandings in his corpus involve pronunciation. The current paper analyses this data further, specifically to determine the role of vowels, as Jenkins (2000. The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) has suggested that vowel quality is not important in English as a Lingua Franca, so she excludes vowel quality from the Lingua Franca Core, the set of pronunciation features that she suggests are important for maintaining intelligibility in an international setting. In fact, a total of over half the tokens of misunderstanding listed in Deterding’s Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca involve the quality of vowels, though in many cases this appears to be a minor factor. The current paper analyses these 98 tokens involving vowel quality in detail, to find out if some shifts in vowel quality are more important than others, and to investigate if vowel quality really is unimportant for intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca. It was found that vowel quality rarely causes a problem, and only in one token, in which the speaker was making a joke, is vowel quality the main factor causing the misunderstanding.

Brunei Malay (ISO 639-3: kxd) is spoken in the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam and also in some nearby places in East Malaysia such as Miri and Limbang in Sarawak (Asmah 2008: 65), on the island of Labuan (Jaludin 2003: 35) and around Beaufort in western Sabah (Saidatul 2003). Of the population of about 400,000 in Brunei, about two-thirds are native speakers of Brunei Malay (Clynes 2001), and the language is generally used as a lingua franca between the other ethnic groups (Martin 1996), so even most Chinese Bruneians, numbering about 45,000 (Dunseath 1996), are reasonably proficient in Brunei Malay. Although Standard Malay is promoted as the national language of Brunei (Clynes & Deterding 2011), in fact it is only used in formal situations, such as government speeches and television and radio broadcasts (Martin 1996). The language that is spoken most extensively is Brunei Malay, though English is also widely used by the educated elite (Deterding & Salbrina 2013).

Innovative usage of noun phrases is among the most widely reported features of new varieties of English throughout the world and also in discourse in ELF settings, but its effect on intelligibility has not been extensively investigated. In an attempt to remedy this, ten conversations in English between Bruneians and people from elsewhere were recorded, and a total of 153 tokens were identified in which the non-Bruneians did not understand the Bruneian speakers. In twenty of these tokens, the grammar of a noun phrase may be one factor in giving rise to the misunderstanding, involving added or absent articles, innovative use of plurals, and the unexpected gender of a pronoun. Further analysis suggests that non-standard grammar was probably the main factor in just four of these tokens, two involving an added article before a proper noun, one with a spurious -s on the end of other, and one in which she was used to refer to a male. There were many instances of non-standard grammar in noun phrases throughout the conversations, but this rarely caused a problem, which suggests that the innovative structure of noun phrases seldom impacts on the intelligibility of Brunei English in ELF settings.

Research on Chinese English (CE) synchronizes with studies on World Englishes. Since the late 1970s, Chinese scholars have been studying Chinese English and at the same time introducing World Englishes theories into China. Over the years, Chinese English research has been gaining momentum, particularly since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Previous research on World Englishes has discussed the status of individual varieties of English, particularly whether they constitute independent and stable linguistic systems that have their own features and norms of usage independent from those found in Inner Circle varieties (Kachru 1985). Research on Chinese English encompasses a wide range of issues, including whether it exists, how to name it, how to define it, what its linguistic features are, how people perceive it, and what people’s attitudes are towards it. In this chapter, we report on the current status and major issues concerning research on Chinese English, based on a vigorous review of relevant research literature and the chapters within this volume. We also provide a background to this volume and an overview of all the chapters that it contains, and point out trends for researching Chinese English. The overall aim of this chapter, alongside all the chapters of this volume, is to showcase the current state of research on Chinese English.

Although Malay is the official language of Brunei Darussalam, English is also widely used, especially in formal domains such as education, as it is the medium of instruction for most classes in secondary school and at the main university, Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD). This chapter traces the historical background for adopting English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in Brunei, and it then discusses recent developments at UBD, particularly for the new undergraduate programme, called GenNEXT, adopted in 2009, and the number of students graduating from English-medium and Malay-medium programs is analysed. Finally, the use of code-switching among university undergraduates is discussed, particularly the incidence of misunderstandings arising from the use of Malay that occurred when UBD students were talking in English to people from elsewhere, and it is shown that, out of a total of 152 tokens of misunderstanding that have been identified in three and a half hours of conversation, 12 involved the use of Malay.